Comment by TryingToBeNice | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TryingToBeNice | Hacker News Reader

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Even for a "Citizens' Initiative", this stuff is remarkably tone-deaf. "No Digital ID" ignores the very-real need for people to prove their identity to government(-ish) entities online, and to do so in a reliable, cheap and convenient way. Sure, you do not want that ID to become mandatory for publishing or existing on the Internet in general, but that's a separate discussion: demand sufficient protection for anonymous/pseudonymous posts instead, which is absolutely something that needs to be codified as part of basic human rights.

"No age verification" is even deader-on-arrival. Parents are literally screaming at politicians to protect "the children" (as always), but pretty much everything that has been tried so far to silence those screams has failed (remember PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection: that was the last serious contender, and it has been dead for, like, 20 years). Again: demand a way to implement this securely and anonymously, don't take an untenable abolitionist stance or resort to hand-waving in the vague general direction of "parental responsibility": that has been tried, and it's not working anymore.

And, please, stop vilifying the EU in these matters. The UK left the EU, ostensibly so they could make "more sensible laws" in, specifically, respects like these, and they're now leading the assault on basic freedoms with even more fervor. And no, that's not just big-bad-Starmer's fault: it's a preview of what you have to argue against and propose a compromise for instead.

I'm a parent and would rather ban age verification. So it's certainly not everyone...

Right. Care for your children includes the responsibility to keep the society they're eventually going to participate in, free and open.

Loving your children means fighting censorship, not promoting it.

not all parents are screaming this. Only the parents who refuse to parent their children, and conveniently scapegoat society for their parental failings

We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.

You could make same exact argument regarding kids health, alcohol abuse, nicotine abuse, all types of addictions, age of consent, and so on.

You can't just have all the safeguards dropped because you think you're doing a good job. Or, even worse, you have no kids and it's your virtues merely projecting.

> We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.

From both someone involved in raising kids as well as someone who knows a lot of teachers: none of the involved parties want that. Schools are at best for teaching, but never for raising.

I feel like you must have a very restrictive definition of what constitutes “raising” kids if we’re omitting the place where they spend the majority of their waking hours and the people most of their social universe is based in.

We’ve had a live experiment with this during COVID and it’s pretty clear that kids raised solely at home by their parents fared way worse. Not just on academic metrics, but basic conflict resolution or social skills.

This is one of those comments where I get your point, but have a couple of big "uhm actually"s :point-up: :nerd-face:

I wouldn't think that COVID is a good indicator as this was in no way typical home-schooling. The vast majority of kids were going to school "online," and not schooled by their parents. They were also largely confined indoors with their families all day and all evening.

I'm having trouble making my other point without slipping deep into trying to define "raising," so I'm just going to hit "reply" here.

I didn’t mean home schooling specifically but the assertion, and the general sentiment, that parental input is the only determinant that matters when it comes to the development of children into healthy and well-socialized adults. The family isn’t an island it’s something that exists within its society. The people in it also have communities outside the family—including complicated social groups, people coming from different cultural and subcultural norms, and complicated bureaucratic systems and institutions—that they have to learn to interact with an thrive under. School is a critical part of teaching and socializing them to navigate that even beyond the specific curricular stuff. And beyond school lots of other stuff kids interact with is having a hand in teaching them what to expect of society and what society expects of them.

Raising almost all children in these government socialist barracks is so dystopian. What you call "worse" conflict resolution and social skills I call superior confidence and autonomy. People today are oversocialized.

Yes, Finn's and Swedes are the modern day clusterfu*ks of societies /s

I respectfully disagree. Yes, parents should raise their children as in be present in their lives and help them grow and shape themselves. However, schools with the rules, social engagements, and learning is also a form of raising. Teachers, especially in elementary school, are extremely influential for young kids. How teachers behave when somebody is bullied, how they handle questions, basically how they handle anything, forms the minds of young children.

Is it the sole responsibility of a school to ensure well raised (for whichever specific definition of “well”) children? No. However, they are a large factor in the raising of children.

School was an escape from my home life, but it could never fix my home life. As a child who had no ability to determine what constituted "normal" in order to escape my situation, the only real solution for my home life was for me to be born to different parents. I doubt any amount of legislation would have accomplished that.

That's why I think it was a huge mistake to make teachers mandatory reporters. The idea was that they'd report people neglecting or abusing their children, but what happened is the more egregious cases usually learned to just do a half-ass "home schooling" instead so the child never sees a mandatory reporter and then situation is even worse because now the kid has no escape, no access to doctors, etc.

It is a parenting issue.

Don't let kids have an internet-connected phone, the same way they can't have a bottle of wine.

If they really need such device make sure that device is locked to a small list of app/contacts possible.

There's no need to lock down the rest of the internet because the responsible person of such kid can't tolerate their complaints. It is a parenting issue.

You totally ignored the point OP was making! Even if it is a parenting issue, simply declaring that will not make parents parent better. It's the same reason why we ban children from drinking wine, because parents cannot be relied upon here.

Unless your point was that we should legally ban kids from handling phones, which I think is too extreme.

But that is my point.

Chase the responsible adult if you see a kid with an overpowered phone, much like you would if you found the same kid with a bottle of wine.

And granted, we don't have locked-enough phone in market yet, but that's a solvable problem if we were to create that market.

There is also the influence of the church.

I have seen religious parents been vocally opposed to their children seeing or even discussing anything related to sexuality.

An example from the past:

"The National Legion of Decency, also known as the Catholic Legion of Decency, was an American Catholic group founded in 1934 by the Archbishop of Cincinnati, John T. McNicholas, as an organization dedicated to identifying objectionable content in motion pictures on behalf of Catholic audiences."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_of_Decency

https://www.archbalt.org/catholicism-influenced-moviemaking-...

You have to appreciate the level of audacity required for a catholic organization to claim they are protecting children from harms regarding sexuality.

Just put your kids in a bubble so not a single adult is the slightest bit inconvenienced by having to exercise any social responsibility for their well being. Easy.

We also cannot to make sure that literally every kid is properly supervised. That's neither possible nor is the cost to coming anywhere close to that compatible with a free society.

Public schooling is also hardly a glowing example of how letting the government take over parenting is always good for kids.

So they should be raised by the state just in case? I feel like Ive read this story somewhere...

Parents should be imprisoned if they give children access to the internet. We have to make parents criminally liable. Without a change in incentives, we cannot expect behavior to change. Until then 'parents need to parent' is a slogan and not a solution.

> We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.

"It takes a village to raise a child." Except these same parents who won't take care of their kids are also the very first who go all "How dare you speak to my child like that! I'm going to have you fired!"

If your way of talking to kids gets you fired, it was atrocious in the first place. "It takes a village to raise a child." is not about carte blanche to abuse any kid that you encounter.

The saying is about kids watching and learning from their environment - from how adults act. If you set up to be jerk or take advantage of random kids that happen to be around, you are teaching them to take advantage of people. And no amount of yelling "their parents are responsible because they did not stopped me" is going to change that.

"If your way of talking to kids gets you fired, it was atrocious in the first place."

I'm guessing you don't have kids.

>securely and anonymously

Not possible. Why do advocates of age verification bring this argument up again and again? It is not possible.

There are also fascists screaming at the government to do other wildly illegal stuff. The lousy parents begging the government to "tread on me" would get wildly better results by spending less time trying to create an authoritarian state and more time with their kids they claim to care so much about.

They're children. They have the internet access you give them. This isn't some unsolveable problem that needs government intervention, my parents were setting up filters so long ago that they're grandparents now.

I suggest that you don't make the filters to hard to bypass (I would do DNS in both a DNS server and /etc/hosts, along with a browser extension), to encourage them to learn about technology. (although that might stop working due to Ai chatbots)

They don’t seem to oppose any of that if you read the intro

> We call on the European Commission to propose legislation ensuring that digital identity and age-assurance systems used to access online services in the Union remain voluntary, privacy-preserving and non-discriminatory. Citizens must not be forced to identify themselves to access lawful online content or services unless strictly necessary, proportionate and provided by law. The legislation should require anonymous or pseudonymous proof-of-age, data minimisation, selective disclosure, open-source implementation, independent security audits, prohibition of cross-service tracking by relying parties, and equivalent alternatives for citizens who do not use a digital wallet.

It has been quite a slippery slope. Services that used to allow password auth have retired them in favour of bank detail login. I can kind of get it, since it's offloading support to the banks, but it's also annoying since the bank logins themselves are a pain to setup, maintain and use (mobile app only).

It would be nice to have some good standard that is less invasive.

At least in Sweden it is because it is a pain to have both bank id and passwords because by contract it is forbidden to allow a user that previous used bankid to ever use password again.

Right before that, they explicitly demand that age verification be 100% optional. But I wish they used stronger anti age verification language rather than trying to pay lip service to the assholes attempting to violate privacy.

The intro indeed doesn't sound too bad, but if you read into the underlying demands, the title is actually quite representative of what's going on here.

Specifically, the requirement to provide non-digital alternatives as well as control over relying parties (i.e. consumers of the 'digital ID' and/or 'age verification' APIs) makes all of this a non-starter.

I mean: non-digital alternatives to digital IDs? I guess that means that nobody should be forced to get a digital ID for access to essential government(-ish) services (like banking), and that's a valid point, but in the context of "stop killing the Internet" just obfuscates things.

And control over RPs beyond GDPR is just pushing it, again, quite on purpose.

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