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Comments (169)

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  txrx0000
  We have to separate child protection from Internet control so that the "protect the kids" narrative loses its potency. So here's a counter-narrative: we can implement digital child protection without Internet-wide access control, and it requires just 3 simple features that can be implemented in less than a week. There's no need to introduce new laws at all. This could just be done tomorrow if there is genuine will to protect the kids.1) If you're a platform like Discord or Gmail, give users the option to create an extra password lock for modifying their profile information (which includes age). This could also be implemented at the app level rather than at the account level. Parents can take their child's phone, set the age, and set these passwords for each of their child's apps/accounts.2) If you're an OS developer, add a password-protected toggle in the OS settings that gates app installation/updates, like sudo on Linux. Parents can take their child's phone and set this password, so they can control what software runs on their child's phone. If we have this, then 1) isn't even strictly needed because parents can simply choose to only install apps that are suitable for their child.3) If you're a device manufacturer, you should open-source your drivers and firmware and give device owners the ability to lock/unlock the bootloader at will with a custom password. Parents should be able to develop and install an open-source child-friendly OS. Companies like Apple and Samsung have worked against this for years by introducing all kinds of artificial roadblocks to developing an alternative OS for their hardware.
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  jjk166
  The people pushing for "child protection" went to the island. It's not even about control, it's about shifting liability away from platforms so they can further gut moderation, reducing their expenses and getting away with doing nothing to stop the actual bad actors.
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  yalogin
  The big issue isn’t even age verification. The end goal is verified user identification. They want every transaction on the internet to be associated with the exact identity of the user. No more anonymity.In the short term the way it will be implemented is this — age verification will not be a binary, it will also want to push your DoB, name, location etc and they say “the choice is with the user” but the default will be to send everything. Very soon there will be services that require DoB or name or something else to gate new or existing functionality. That is the slippery slope it will be built as and that is how they win the game
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  hei-lima
  I was a kid with unrestricted, unsupervised internet access, and it definitely affected many things in my life. If I happen to have a child in the future, they won't go through that.The Brazilian government passed a law requiring age verification for every site categorized as 16+. It can't be self-declared, so companies usually resort to facial scans and ID verification. I DO NOT want photos of our Brazilian children going to foreign agents who are PROVEN to profit from and do God-knows-what with our biometric data. And the funniest part? The same law says 'regulation shall not, under any circumstances, authorize or result in the implementation of mass surveillance mechanisms,' but also mandates that these measures must be 'AUDITABLE.' In other words, someone needs access to that data. It’s all so stupid and incoherent.People who are less tech-literate FIERCELY support the measure, and whenever someone opposes it, they claim that person supports digital child abuse...Anyway... the responsibility of protection should come from the parents, not from companies that profit off your biometric data.
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  bilekas
  It's too late and never about children, simply deeper forms of data harvesting and surveillance.What makes me extremely sad and concerned is that more recent generations simply have no idea or expectation of privacy online anymore. There will never be more of a fight against all this Orwellian behavior.
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  Keeeeeeeks
  A theory that’s floating around is that since frontier models are so good at sounding like humans, companies paying for ads are arguing that Dead Internet Theory -> ad costs should go down.Therefore, the push to ID everyone using the internet (even down to the hardware) is a way to prove that ads are being served to real humans in their target demographic.
• cdrnsf
  The people pushing these bills are the same that are looking to ban library books. They’re either bad or ineffective parents (or both). Instead of having a healthy relationship and discussion with their kids they’d rather impose their own regressive ideas by way of legislation on everyone.
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  jmcgough
  What's sad is how effective this is. Religious groups figured out a few years ago that anti-porn groups accomplish nothing, but if you start an anti-trafficking group you can restrict porn access.
• sfRattan
  It's irksome that these laws and bills in multiple countries are trying to put limits on the general purpose computer. It's the wrong solution and arguably put forward in bad faith.If you want access control, the appropriate point for regulation is with ISPs and cellular providers, and the appropriate mode of regulation is requiring these companies to provide choice and education for families, and awareness of liability.Require ISPs and cellular network providers to offer a standard set of controls to their customers informing the common person (in common language) who is using those connections and what they are doing with them. For ISPs, this looks like an option for a router with robust access controls, designating some devices (based on MAC address) as belonging to children and filtering those devices' network requests at the network gateway, or filtering one hop up onto the provider's infrastructure (e.g. the ONT for fiber connections). For cellular providers, it looks like an app available to parents' devices and similar filtering for devices designated as belonging to children (based on IMEI).When a family signs up for Internet service, either at-home access or cellular data, the provider must give both parents a presentation about these tools, and about the liability the parents face for allowing their children unsupervised, latchkey access to adult content, no different than allowing children to drink alcohol.It may even make sense to require ISPs and cellular providers to track MAC addresses and IMEIs of devices their own customers designate as "for children" and make those providers liable for not filtering Internet for those devices, and also liable for allowing targeted advertising against those devices.I don't think achieving that setup is likely, but it's fundamentally the right way to solve this problem, and parents are pushing for a solution one way or another. I don't love it, but if it's coming almost inevitably we should at least push to do it right. It's a dead-end, losing strategy to blanket oppose one solution to legislators and provide no alternative. I write all of that as someone who values privacy and liberty, both in meatspace and cyberspace.
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  a-dub
  how about if i do nothing the internet assumes i'm a child and therefore does not track me, show me ads or permit doom scroll feeds. then if i want i can jump through some hoops and pay some money or something to get a digital id that lets me attach a zkp to all my http requests that then unlock the magic of ads, tracking and doom scroll feeds.seems like a good plan to me.
• dlcarrier
  For the US, the worst of it started in 2019, when the held YouTube liable for all content that a child might access. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_and_privacy#COPPA_sett...) That's what pushed all of the content networks to lobby for the liability to go somewhere else.
• plasticeagle
  AI;DRIt's too late in any case, the Internet as we know it will eat itself. It will be destroyed by AI, and AI agents from without. And it will be destroyed from within by stupid laws such as the ones under "discussion" in this AI-edited and AI-illustrated nothingpiece.By which I not mean the infrastructure. I mean the current crop of social media websites. The infrastructure will remain, and perhaps something better will come along to use that infrastructure.
• cs02rm0
  It's always been internet access control, there is no child protection.
• 1vuio0pswjnm7
  Controlling access to certain websites, i.e., so-called "social media", is not "internet access control". The web is not the internet. Nor are these laws limiting access to _all_ websites. Third, not all operating systems are controlled by corporations like Apple, Google, etc. and used to protect and promote corporate interests
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  jameskilton
  That's the trick, it's always been about control. No-one in such positions actually cares about the children.
• HardwareLust
  The entire purpose of this exercise is control. "Child protection" is just a ruse to get the stupids onboard.
• cluckindan
  It’s not even a debate if these controls are problematic. The litmus test is to mentally substitute the age field for an ancestry field and place the system in 1930’s Germany.Coincidently, that system was provided by IBM.
• vsgherzi
  Y E S. I’m tired of hearing about child proofing the internet. We need a solution that’s not enforcing age or id verification on the os or internet itself like meta is pushing. We need better solutions and we should fight draconian enforcement with extreme prejudice
• rustyhancock
  Quite mind boggling to me that a nanny state can exhurt such a large amount of global control.It's darkly comedic that the single most toxic experience since the pop up ad - the cookie consent popup was similarly imposed.The solution is simple. Websites and services (including ISPs) become governed by the country in which they operate not the whims of foreign entities.
• wewewedxfgdf
  You must be crazy, who could possibly object to governments "protecting the children"?
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  kepeko
  Maybe the positive is that access control might break the illusion of privacy.Okay it's quite private in the sense that we don't know our friends browsing history but we know somebody, somewhere is collecting data and selling it to their 100 partners.Do you think there might ever be a moment when someone decides, legally or not, dump enormous amount of info, in a way that allows people to see what google searches other people did or browsing history etc? A moment when people's embarrassing secrets come into light.
• abcde666777
  The more people that use something the more it inevitably trends toward average mediocrity.A lot of these trajectories aren't really for us - the techy folk.
• squarefoot
  Access control and pervasive surveillance has been the plan since day one; child protection is the leverage. Also, I don't expect people who repeatedly hide the contents of certain files to care about children.
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  Diffusion3166
  Given that it seems Meta is commissioning these laws, I wonder if a viral open source license that explicitly fails to grant Meta a license to use or modify the software would effectively deter future lobbying for regulations which are especially difficult for the open source community to comply with.
• Beestie
  Well age verification works so well to keep alcohol, tobacco and weed beyond the reach of minors so....
• baal80spam
  It was never about children...
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  cat-turner
  parents need to do their job and raise their children, and moderate their content.
• ginko
  Just ban children from using the internet.
• einpoklum
  But the whole point of bringing up child protection was to restrict Internet access, to police Internet content and to legitimize mass surveillance.Or do we really believe that states which condone support, fund and sometimes engage in the mass killings children are motivated by genuine moral concern for the young?-----Still, there is somewhat of a silver lining: Perhaps this will encourage young people, and people who value their privacy, to avoid those "social networks" in favor of places where there is no age verification, 2FA with a physical phone number, etc. etc.
• varispeed
  The people who want to control internet access use children to achieve their means. Why these creeps get to power? Normally people thinking too much about children would be casted out of society at best.
• mamami
  You don't understand, the children need to be exposed to Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, and algorithmically generated suicidal ideation from Facebook. It's crucial for their development, actually
• kgwxd
  The only people on the planet that care about this, and understand it enough to maybe do something about it, are reading this thread right now. I got nothing. Anyone else got any ideas?
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  dzogchen
  Am I the only one that simply disregards everything that follows an AI slop image?
• bfivyvysj
  Too late- Australia
• TomGarden
  For many it's not about the children. For many it is.I haven't made my mind up on this topic, but Jesus, the comments here strawmanning everyone who supports this kind of thing as disingenuous or worse... Wow.I'm not sure how we make any corner of the internet usable within the next few years without verification given all the misinfo, bots & AI slop anyway.
• windowliker
  Arguments about erosion of privacy miss the point: that is exactly what they want.
• anon
  undefined
• pstuart
  The moment "think of the children!" enters the chat is when suspicions should be heightened.
• psyclobe
  If you think u can control a kids imagination to circumvent these controls then you are part of the problem
• borissk
  The big tech is going to be one of the big winners from Internet Access Control. This will give them a more reliable way to link a user account to an actual human being - a link that can be monetized in a variety of ways. All kind of political regimes can use such regulations to enhance their control of the population. And the loosers are going to be the Internet users and small companies.The unfortunate true is IAC is coming to most countries in the world, no matter how much the Hacker News audience hates it...
• donpark
  [dead]
• SilverElfin
  I read in some other discussions that this is about social media companies being able to increase their profits and nothing else. But the social media companies lobbying for these laws are shamelessly making it look like some kind of protect the children thing. It is all pushing more ads annd getting more users.The way it works: today, social media companies cannot advertise to children under 13 under COPPA. So these companies have to do their best to guess the user’s age, and if it is possibly a child, they can’t advertise and have to lose those profits even though MAYBE the user is an adult. Now they can shift the legal compliance costs and liability to the operating system provider or phone manufacturer and not be responsible for the user’s identity. And then they can advertise much more at that point, without being conservative. This also lets them have a different experience for minors that doesn’t advertise to them, but targets them carefully to keep them as users until they are older, so they start to become a source of advertising profits later.It’s well known that Meta is behind a lot of funding for nonprofits pushing these laws under a “protect the children” thing. But now even Pinterest’s CEO is shamelessly saying parents don’t have a responsibility to manage their own kids, and is supporting all of this. See https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh... and https://time.com/article/2026/03/19/pinterest-ceo-government...Evangelist/theocratic conservatives welcome these laws because they view it as enabling and validating age-based restrictions for other things. For example, Project 2025 called for a ban on porn. And separately, the Heritage Foundation pushed age-verification for porn websites, and has openly admitted it is a defacto porn ban. That should have been ruled unconstitutional on free speech grounds, but the current SCOTUS upheld it unfortunately. They’ll next use age-based verification for all sorts of content - maybe for LGBTQ stuff, maybe for something else.In the end, everyone else will lose. If you have to prove your identity to anyone, there is a high chance this information can be accessed and surveilled by the government. There is a high chance at some point, no matter what they claim, your identity data will be hacked and sold. And of course if you can be identified online, then anything you say or do can be traced back to you, and that can be used against you by the government. Suddenly, being a protester in these chaotic times will become a lot more risky.
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  holyhnhell
  I’m okay with internet access control if it means less AI slop like this shit. Bring it on. I’ll be there when it happens.