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• abc123abc123 4mo ago
  This is the way! It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone, in return for not having to care about their offspring and the illusion of 100% safety. I think the authoritarian trend accelerated during corona. Our western political nobility got a real taste for power, and they have not been able to free themselves from that afrodisiac ever since. Therefore chat control, 1, 2, 3, and when that didn't go as planned... lo and behold... age verification, and that of course needs control over vpn, and encryption, and there we go... chat control slipped in through the back door. Soon we can no longer criticize china if this keeps up.
  • jermaustin1 4mo ago
    > It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up ... every aspect of parenting.
  • jMyles 4mo ago
    > how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone ...is there evidence that it's parents who are the constituency you describe?
  • mschuster91 4mo ago
    > It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone, It's not like parents have much of a choice. When you gotta work 2 jobs to barely make rent and groceries, you need some sort of "safe space" to pawn your children off to.
    • therealpygon 4mo ago
      Just my opinion but… I’m all for helping people in the situations that aren’t of their own creation, so using the excuse “what are they supposed to do” doesn’t really fit for me? The first option is to use a condom if they are in a bad financial situation. It’s been amazing how every time I’ve used one, I haven’t had a child. When did we stop making people responsible for their choices? I’m not against assistance, I’m against the idea that it is my responsibility to give up rights and freedoms because <insert person> made poor personal choices and now society is once again a surrogate to yet another child of irresponsible parents. If you aren’t able to parent, don’t have children. Don’t care what your situation is that rule stays the same. And of course, someone will jump in with “but maybe” and “what if the situation changed”. Again…I’m not against helping parents who fall on hard times to get back on their feet — society SHOULD be there to help with assistance and programs, even help with getting your kids watched. And all of that exists. I’m against expecting every individual of society to not only help bear the costs, fund and administrate these programs, provide countless charities, etc… But now the suggestions is also somehow that we are required to be the surrogate parent to every one of their offspring by giving up our rights to create an entire society of a padded playground? No, I think that’s the line for me. Parents can give up all their own rights they want and live in their padded kingdoms, but that ends at your doorstep when you walk out to the space you share with every other person…including digitally. You can build the physical and virtual walls around your padded kingdom as high and thick as you want to keep your children shielded from the world.
      • coldtea 4mo ago
        >The first option is to use a condom if they are in a bad financial situation. It’s been amazing how every time I’ve used one, I haven’t had a child. That's what they've been doing in unprecedented numbers. Which via demographic collapse is going to cause an even worse crisis, economic, social, political, and more, further down the line.
        • pocksuppet 4mo ago
          It's also why some political factions are trying to ban condoms. Often the same factions that are trying to ban VPNs.
          • coldtea 4mo ago
            Yeah, I'm sure Kier Starmer is pro-natalist...
        • therealpygon 4mo ago
          Good. If people can’t afford their own livelihood, then they probably shouldn’t have them. If they can and choose not to, arguments could be made about why someone would rather they make a different decision. But if “we need poor children in a welfare system or I can’t live my comfortable life” is what someone would think is the answer, there is something desperately wrong with the people who would think it.
          • coldtea 4mo ago
            >If people can’t afford their own livelihood, then they probably shouldn’t have them. "Poor people shoulnd't breed" - Follow me for more ivory tower advice
            • therealpygon 4mo ago
              What a stupid take. Being poor and not being able to afford your OWN responsibilities at your income are two different things. I grew up poor, so yea, you can f off with your own ivory tower inventions while you go read what I actually said about how we SHOULD provide safety nets. It’s incredible how idiots think living beyond your means at any income and then adding children is a good thing. If you can’t care for yourself then you can’t care for others. Not being able to afford your own needs is not caring for yourself, so no, shocker, you shouldn’t add an additional person BY CHOICE to that situation. People who would advocate that they SHOULD are seriously messed up in the head.
  • tlogan 4mo ago
    I do not think parents are the one pushing these controls. They are busy raising the kids.
    • gorgoiler 4mo ago
      There’s an alternate view that parents are very much in support of centralized policy. When policy is left up to individual families — little Johnny X has an iPhone but little Timmy Y doesn’t — the creep towards everyone having a phone begins. When, instead, the school board bans phones it’s much easier for the conservative majority of parents to hold the line.
      • mjevans 4mo ago
        I'm more fine with schools banning frivolous use of tech devices on school grounds during school hours.
      • Saline9515 4mo ago
        Banning phones at school has nothing to do with freedom to use phones. You are not restrained in your freedom because using you smartphone while driving is forbidden. Kids go to school to learn, not to watch modern cable shopping network (aka Tiktok/Instagram).
    • fc417fc802 4mo ago
      I think parents are raising the alarm about nefarious social media practices (ie recommendation algorithms that actively do harm) and those services are in turn pushing these controls in order to deflect responsibility away from themselves.
  • Saline9515 4mo ago
    Did you ever heard a parent asking for this in the real world? Parents who care either don't give smartphones, or dumbed-down ones that they can control. Asking for less tech at school is not an authoritarian move, but rather a point of view about how schools should work. If you asked me, I think that parents should throw away their TVs and minimize screen time at home, both for them and the kids. However I won't ask this to be enforced by the State - if anything, it will make my kids more competitive against the cartoons-infused ones of the other parents.
• braiamp 4mo ago
  How about this: nobody shall be unsafe online or offline, and the state shall guarantee it. That's a foundation you can build law on, instead of hoping every child got lucky with their parents.
  • functionmouse 4mo ago
    you're describing a cage
  • graceful6800 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • Izmaki 4mo ago
    I think North Korea is attempting to do this, for example by punishing not only the criminal but also their immediate family to a life-sentence in working camps, if the person commits severe enough crime. I don't think it's as successful as it sounds on paper, from the comfort of our western society homes.
    • braiamp 4mo ago
      [dead]
• miki123211 4mo ago
  I'm against any kind of age verification legislation, but this is a really bad argument. It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly." In theory, one could implement age verification by negligent parent imprisonment, in practice, I don't think that would work, and definitely not in all cases. If we accept the premise that children having unfettered access to the internet is a bad thing (which, again, I don't think we should), there have to be multiple layers to it. Punishment is one, increasing friction and "making honest people honest" is another.
  • throwthrowuknow 4mo ago
    These systems won’t work any better than identification requirements for alcohol and tobacco or anything else. Maybe you didn’t know anyone who drank or smoked when you were a teenager but they are pretty widespread even when parents aren’t negligent. Systems like the proposed ones will be even easier for kids to find a way around. I’m somewhat in favour of these foolish attempts at control because they always drive innovation in technology to circumvent them and adoption of that technology creating a thriving underground scene. Content piracy and alternative platforms could use a resurgence and this is just the thing to get it jumpstarted.
    • fc417fc802 4mo ago
      I agree that the recent craze about internet ID checks are foolish but your example falls on its face. ID checks to purchase goods at a physical location are actually quite effective. They don't achieve perfect compliance but that's not a fatal flaw (or even necessarily any flaw at all despite what people might say).
      • throwthrowuknow 4mo ago
        Disagree completely, they were easily bypassed and I think they’re probably more easily bypassed today.
  • pretzel5297 4mo ago
    We don't hold parents responsible for most neglect. Why is this special?
• cynicalsecurity 4mo ago
  It's not about children. It's about re-introducing Stasi.
• notrealyme123 4mo ago
  Not to be to overly reductive, but you could use the same argument for drugs and weapons.
  • phatfish 4mo ago
    It's not being reductive at all. I'm certain parent commentor doesn't have kids so they don't care. If someone was using the street outside their house to deal drugs and causing problems they would be happy for the police to "regulate" that activity. It's just selfishness. "I want some privacy utopia on the internet (which can no longer exist, the internet isn't the place of the 90s and early 00s), so your kids can be exploited by social media and porn".
    • maccard 4mo ago
      How does banning VPNs equate to policing drug dealing? The drug dealing is already illegal.
      • fc417fc802 4mo ago
        It doesn't equate; it's being employed as an analogy to address the justifiability of broad enforcement efforts targeting something.
    • kavok 4mo ago
      The example you give doesn’t really track. If a drug dealer is outside the entrance of your home it’s completely unavoidable. A kid looking at adult material online? Entirely within the control of the parents. We already have filtering and monitoring software. I know several parents that limit screen time, require screen usage be restricted to public areas of the home, have parental controls and filtering operating etc.. some of the parents I know won’t even let their kids watch a movie unless they screen it first.
      • pocksuppet 4mo ago
        If a drug dealer is outside the entrance of your home you can avoid it by not leaving your home. What if every time you turn on the computer it shows objectionable content? It's easily avoidable by not turning on the computer. Same argument. Is it a reasonable one?
• b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Insimwytim 4mo ago
    This wikipedia article is a great example of degenerate propaganda, that permeates anything historical/political on wikipedia. It doesn't even worth trying to correct, since correcting would imply that it has some worthy material, which it doesn't.
    • b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
      while I certainly agree that wikipedia is full of propaganda written by volunteer degenerates and paid shills, I'm not quite sure how is that relevant to this particular article. the amount of tangible evidence of that particular Soviet propaganda campaign is overwhelming. that name is still notorious there.
• rightbyte 4mo ago
  You argue against "individualist societies" but then blame "their parents" for not coping with the kinda impossible task of protecting their kids from big tech or the surveillance state. It is a collective problem with collective solutions.
  • malfist 4mo ago
    So your solution to preventing "surveillance state" is to unmask everyone on the internet? Now who has the inconsistent argument
    • i80and 4mo ago
      I don't know the parent's policy position, but it seems like they didn't express one, and you've just assumed they support deanonymization?
      • rightbyte 4mo ago
        Ye this modern view that more and more assumes polarisation of stands on matters is kinda annoying. I don't support deanonymization.
        • Forgeties79 4mo ago
          It’s become bog standard to just throw up extremely binary strawmen these days or otherwise bait people into arguments demanding sources that you can then point at and whine about. Zero attempt to understand or ask questions that clarify. Anything that avoids having to listen or express your own opinion in a substantive way.
    • Forgeties79 4mo ago
      where did they say anything like that?
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • 4mo ago
• Forgeties79 4mo ago
  Parents are expected to do more than you can imagine and everyone has an opinion on how they’re supposed to do it, especially in the US. You’re a terrible parent if you can’t keep a 5 year old from ever alerting somebody to their presence, but you’re also a terrible parent if you give them an iPad for a few minutes so they don’t bother people. This whole thing where parents are expected to do it all themselves is actually a new phenomenon. Historically, across basically every culture, it was up to the community to raise all the kids together. To sacrifice and make compromises together. Your parents likely didn’t have to deal with YouTube. There were basic laws in place that guarantee the content on broadcast TV fell within certain limits. Was that unacceptable to you as well? It strikes me that you take for granted the fact that you could never have been exposed to Alex Jones as a child. Let’s not pretend your parents knew everything you watched and saw, they just knew it could only be so bad most of the time. Yet you now expect parents to know everything on every screen in front of their kids with no assistance ever as the “attention economy” machine attacks all of us. It’s not a fair fight at all and your response is “parents just solve it yourselves” without a second thought. I do not agree with all these age verification and surveillance state initiatives we are seeing. I am categorically against them. But your philosophy is harmful and frankly selfish. You live in a community. You have to make compromises.
  • none2585 4mo ago
    Why should I be responsible for raising someone else's children or give a shit if they see porn? Who cares. Sounds like you made a decision you regret and expect everyone else to bend their life around you. It is selfish to assume others will take care of your shitty kids.
    • palmotea 4mo ago
      > It is selfish to assume others will take care of your shitty kids. FYI: your seeming inability to muster even a tiny bit of empathy is pretty strong evidence you're in no position to call anyone selfish.
    • Forgeties79 4mo ago
      Wow
• tlogan 4mo ago
  Sadly, this is how societies eventually tend to become. They need the younger generation to be “properly” raised (definition of “proper” really depends on the society). If the side effect is that you also end up controlling adults and making them behave “properly,” then that is considered a plus.
• freedomben 4mo ago
  While I agree with your comment at a high level, simply saying it's the parents job k thx bai is not going to cut it. Parents have to have the tools we need to do our jobs. I don't want the government touching it with a 10 foot pole, and no adults should have to give up their freedoms (these kids will be adults some day after all, so even if we're doing it "for the kids" we need to consider the world we're building for them), but the tools available to parents right now are way too inadequate, unless mom and dad are rich enough to buy enterprise-level tooling. If we don't want to lose our freedoms, we need to offer constructive and realistic solutions that don't involve the government. Simply saying "not my problem" may feel good, but it's going to end up with a government-enforced tech dystopia.
  • ihsw 4mo ago
    [dead]
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  • maccard 4mo ago
    Parents have the tools already here in the UK. ISPs come with adult content disabled by default and someone has to opt in to it. Every major OS (Windows, Mac, iOS, android) ships with device level parental controls. Games consoles enforce these based on birth date. ISPs here also provide free network level filtering on top of that. All of this only matters if the parents don’t bypass them when asked. If a kid is determined enough to get past Apple family controls and the network level filtering on their home network, they’ll have a VPN from a dodgy source in 15 minutes. The solution is to use the tools that are there right now, or accept that age verification is coming for everything.
    • Avamander 4mo ago
      > Every major OS (Windows, Mac, iOS, android) ships with device level parental controls. Games consoles enforce these based on birth date. These are unfortunately rather half-baked and should be improved. Which is exactly what could be mandated instead of invading everyone's privacy.
• coffeefirst 4mo ago
  Okay. How? I have a little boy. He does not use computers yet. One day he will. His friends will have YouTube or it’s spiritual successor and everyone in his school will be on TikTok where they’re hammered with whatever brainrot gets the most engagement. What do you propose, exactly?
  • akho 4mo ago
    What age are you worried about?
• phatfish 4mo ago
  I will do everything in my power to keep the tech bros out of my children's life. Yes, that includes being a responsible parent. It also includes societal norms being established. Just as was done for alcohol, nicotine, movies, porn mags ect. I guarantee you are not as dedicated as me trying to protect my kids, so there will be age gates, and that includes VPNs. Everyone knows VPNs are only used for getting shit for free, so there is also a pretty powerful corporate interest to lock them down. In the case of the "corporate content provides" vs the "tech bros", the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I'll take a win however it comes. Mozilla have picked a battle that will kill off Firefox, I am now not longer interested in recommending or using it. I'd bet their user base skews to older people, more likely to be parents.
  • Ylpertnodi 4mo ago
    >Everyone knows VPNs are only used for getting shit for free, I don't use my vpn for 'shit for free'.
  • maccard 4mo ago
    > Mozilla have picked a battle that will kill off Firefox, I am now not longer interested in recommending or using it Presumably your support is for a browser developed by Google instead, as they are clearly not interested in surveillance or being in your children’s life?
    • pocksuppet 4mo ago
      Firefox forks are available, and will probably last long than Mozilla.
      • maccard 4mo ago
        And exist because of the amount of work Mozilla does in keeping the browser up to date.
        • pocksuppet 4mo ago
          How many Firefox developers are actual Mozilla employees?
• pocksuppet 4mo ago
  That is a thought-terminating cliche. Everyone has some responsibility to everyone else. That's what living in a society means. If Facebook decided to start showing hardcore porn to people it identifies as being under 14, would you blame the parents for letting the kids use Facebook, and not blame Facebook? If you would blame Facebook, that means you believe Facebook has (at least some) responsibility.
• QuadmasterXLII 4mo ago
  A complementary policy is to not give six year olds publicly funded mandatory chromebooks their parents don’t control. This can reduce the pressure coming from these parents to warp and twist the web till it is safe for a six year old to have free access to an uncontrolled chromebook.
• cmurf 4mo ago
  Elderly undue influence costs victims billions. I shouldn't have to consider getting a parent an under 18 account to protect them better.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7 4mo ago
  "Do you know who's responsible to make sure children are safe online? Their parents." Parents have the responsibility to do what is necessary to protect their kids In the case of parents v. so-called "tech" companies, who should win What happens when the companies are protected from parents by Section 230
• SwtCyber 4mo ago
  Yet platforms should be accountable for the harms they create (in some way it has to be regulated)
  • ferfumarma 4mo ago
    Harms to adults. No children should be on the platforms, and it's up to the parents to regulate it.
• trollbridge 4mo ago
  As a parent, then, what do you do when a public school district hands every 7 year old a Chromebook and has completely inadequate filtering on it?
  • bcraven 4mo ago
    Take it off them when they're not in school.
• vedaba 4mo ago
  I do criticize where individualism and those kinds of societies have gone wrong, but I also think it's going to be very hard for a parent to control that.
  • fn-mote 4mo ago
    A single parent, definitely. A group of parents? I’m more hoepeful. (In my country,) There are many levels of government between the individual and the nation. Sometimes that is a curse. But sometimes change needs to start locally. This is an excellent example.
• kelseyfrog 4mo ago
  Expect more of the same then? I've gotten exactly one response on what that looks like. The parent suggested writing custom moderation rules for his router. He was serious that this was feasible general solution.
• tomhow 4mo ago
  Please don't post ideological flamebait on HN. We're here for curious conversation. There may be a substantive point in your comment, but it's wrapped in inflammatory rhetoric, which is what we're trying to avoid here. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future. Particularly note these lines: Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html