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Comment by inigyou | Hacker News Reader

Half the laws people are complaining about are literally this although instead of a checkbox, it asks you for the birth date of a hypothetical child whose protection you want the device to match. And they don't use a government whitelist, but expect sites to self-declare and reserve the right to take action against sites that use misleading classification.

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I.e. they establish the framework for censorship and deanonymization by making everyone else responsible for child-safety, except the person that should be setting up the parental controls - all they get to do is select a "child" or "not child" option. The law doesn't require they be given any control besides that - no default whitelist of apps and websites that they could edit, no blacklist, no screen time limits, nothing. Just an easy way to hand off control to someone else. A way that would be unnecessary if they instead got real parental controls.

As explained in my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49256731

Why would you make John Smith responsible for what Mark Zuckerberg displays to Jimmy Smith?

Stop the disingenuous comments please.

1. John Smith is the parent. Giving them power to control what the child visits allows them to do their parenting job.

2. What proposal makes Facebook responsible for anything? Surely none of these. They will just say they are appropriate for ages 13+ and what will parents do?

Because I would rather parents make the minimal effort [1] to restrict which pages their children visit and how often, than legally require every website and game to deanonymize, surveil, and censor their users. Which includes not just Facebook, but every forum (HN, reddit, small bicycling pages [2]), game, and chatroom. Because the latter would mean anyone hosting public discussions would be doing so only at the government's will. If they don't like the direction those discussions take, they will use the vague laws against "harm" to force a change. Like the UK government admitted [3]:

First, we are told, the relevant secretary of state (Michelle Donelan) expressed “concern” that the legislation might whack sites such as Amazon instead of Pornhub. In response, officials explained that the regulation in question was “not primarily aimed at … the protection of children”, but was about regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse”, a phrase that rather gives away the political thinking behind the act.

[1] It's not minimal now, but that's the point of government funding and requiring better parental controls.

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2024/12/20/death-of-a-forum-how-the...

[3] https://archive.md/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.co...

> Half the laws people are complaining about are literally this although instead of a checkbox, it asks you for the birth date of a hypothetical child whose protection you want the device to match

The huge difference is that these laws make that data flow to the sites, which are then in control of the go/no-go decision. This is another data point of identifying information being leaked to the surveillance industry, and people who opt out and use secure browsers (that don't leak such info) will be denied access, or put in a legally fraught position when programmatically declaring an incorrect age (eg 1970-01-01) to interoperate.

The open society free association version is where information only flows from sites to user agents. Sites declare who they consider themselves suitable for - "appropriate for under 18", "appropriate for under 13", "contains moderated user generated content", "contains unmoderated user generated content", "uses algorithms meant to increase individual engagement (ie addiction)" etc. The browser then makes the choice based on its parental control settings.

(note that unlike GP comment there is no need for a "government list". site self-assertion handles the technical implementation perfectly, browsers with parental controls enabled don't display sites that don't include tags, and legislation requires a good-faith labeling of sites over a certain size so sites don't simply try to push some fiction saying that every user must be over 18)

I genuinely don't know if the people who keep doing this are just stupid, unreasonably contrarian, or intentionally trying to sound unreasonable (and are in favour of the UK style approach) to weaken the apparent position of being against the UK-style approach.

It's incredibly disappointing to see people constantly complain about the actually _reasonable_ implementations (that don't rely on a loss of privacy for adults _or_ children).

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