alt Hacker NewsDo Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's always been internet access control, there is no child protection.
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.
Unfortunately they won't be stopped, so we have to look for the solution ourselves:
- Linux distros without age verification (which excludes distros with systemd)
- decentralized/distributed microblogging: Nostr, Bluesky, Mastodon
- decentralized social news sites: Lemmy
- GrapheneOS
That's the trick, it's always been about control. No-one in such positions actually cares about the children.
The entire purpose of this exercise is control. "Child protection" is just a ruse to get the stupids onboard.
IMO instead of age gating everything, it should've been the other way around, which is making unrestricted smartphones or similar an 18 or 16+ device, much like cars.
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
AI;DR
It'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.
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.
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.
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.
Anyone else open for internet v2? Like a completely new system, with everything that we enjoyed with the first one around the millenia: buggy webpages, slow downloads, crappy browsers, having to download plugins…
Lets do it again!
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.
Gullible to believe its about kids - especially when there's a million options to limit the internet on devices already.
IMAGINE A WAR.
Now - wouldn't a government LOVE to know who's saying what? Rather than shutting down the entire $$$$$ corporate internet.
Money concerns as usual.
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.
You must be crazy, who could possibly object to governments "protecting the children"?
Like the evergreen comic, "How would you like this wrapped?" by John Janik
For decades policymakers have been trying to sell us the same surveillance state they accuse their adversaries of having, wrapped as either security or protecting children.
You can’t determine age from a face scan. And it’s trivial to hold up a photo of an older person. Seriously if a website wants an image of your government ID or facial image, maybe ask yourself if you really need to access that site.
There WILL be breaches and those drivers license scans will get loose in the world sooner or later. Fully agree that this is all about access control. No thank you.
Devices with child locks turned on really shouldn't have access to everything on the Internet. A simple protocol could let cooperating websites know when child locks are on, so they don't show inappropriate content. Whitelisting or blacklisting could handle the rest.
This doesn't mean every device needs to implement child locks. It also shouldn't affect anyone using unlocked devices at all.
For almost three decades authorities have been wondering how to put this 'free communications' genie back into the bottle without taking the GFW approach. It looks like this time they just might get it.
If you really believe that this is about child protection then you are much too gullible, that was never the main reason. If the authorities really wanted to do something about child protection online they'd spend a fraction of what they are going to spend on this on building out the departments in the various countries that actually work on that problem exclusively. As it is they have more work they can handle, which leaves a lot of cases lying and far more of these perps active than what would otherwise be the case.
So as long as you don't see that you know for a fact that this child protection is not the real reason.
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.
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.
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
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.
I fail to see why the "protections" that child data deserves, isn't also the same kind of protection that everyone deserve. In what way are children special, in a digital world, that adults shouldn't be protected the same way?
It was never about children...
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.
I'd be ok with this if both ends of the spectrum were covered. Sorry, you're too old to access this computer. Go ask a younger adult if you want to read the news or see photos of your grandkids.
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.
You all saw the Epstein scandal, right? If you saw one cockroach this randomly, then you know there are thousand hiding. Maybe that's why Epstein is un-lived.
So I found it very ionic that, to quote on quote "protect" child from online harms, they asks you to upload the photo ID of you and your child to, guess what, real potential pedophiles.
Of course they're going to claim your information is totally safe... just like Bill Gates told his wife it's safe to have sex with him after his STD infestation.
Sure, I don't really know how the companies will actually handle your personal photos, but there's a history where a tech CEO made an attractiveness comparison website using photo obtained from their user uploads without user agreeing. So go figure.
The best way to protect your child is to tech them how to use Internet for their own benefit, and only allow them to create accounts after they've learned how to use Internet correctly. The companies and governments will NEVER do that for you, they'll only steal and steal even more.
Well age verification works so well to keep alcohol, tobacco and weed beyond the reach of minors so....
> They come from recommendation systems, dark patterns, addictive metrics, and business models that reward amplification without responsibility.
That rings extremely true to me, the issue you run into is that liberals and conservatives don't believe the government has any role in the commercial relationship between adults. This means any limits you want to impose on the "free market" has to be directed at protecting children, since those are the only people you're allowed to protect.
We already have many laws to safeguard children, the problems being that children have been taught to self declare as adults, and parents can't stop that without some help from the technology.
We had a good run when the internet was a disruptive force. But mass adoption of anything always leads to where we are. The internet is an established institution. The wild west days are over. If you're looking for that vibe, p2p technology in small corners will be where you can find it.
This happening and it can’t be stopped. There is bipartisan consensus, so hard to come by otherwise, because both parties share the same corporate interests. Deal with it.
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?
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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.
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.
ban porn altogether
Am I the only one that simply disregards everything that follows an AI slop image?
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
Just ban children from using the internet.
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?
Too late
- Australia
parents need to do their job and raise their children, and moderate their content.
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