Worth noting that there's no security in a system that abusively collects your data. That goes for children as well.

We should not ignore it, but firmly dismiss it with reason. The recent Illinois law that applies to all Internet-capable operating systems is blatantly unconstitutional. People should not be forced by law to disclose their age (or anything) in order to engage in digital communication. That forced utterance of your own age is compelled speech, a violation of the First Amendment.

For parents who are genuinely concerned about child safety, you are being used to push an agenda. If we want to solve the digital parenting problem, we have to understand how the problem came to be in the first place and why there isn't a good solution at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578

The worse is - we say it's about child safety - but that same rhetoric is actually defending kids to have a smartphone.

> Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.

This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.

You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.

Comes down to something I have said for a long while. Anyone that wants power, who is saying it, why are they saying it and why do people believe them.

That one can get deep really quick.

> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom

These are NGOs not parents. And "child safety" is often a euphemism. The point is it's hard to argue against child safety. For example, if opaque NGOs demand deanonymization to stop CSAM, I am assuming most people would not want to seem like they are in favor of CSAM. So you need an organized effort to argue in favor of privacy and even then anyone who does it can easily be smeared as a CSAM user. So child safety can backdoor something else.

rhetoric all the way down

“Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you”

Any argument with such blatant oversimplifications is almost certainly lacking in nuance and can be ignored and dismissed.

I get what you’re pointing at: politicians regularly abuse these arguments, but that doesn’t mean it’s 100% of all arguments involving children.

Note how they always ignore parental controls, and skip straight to deanonymize everyone.

Sounds like a good way to cede the argument to the opposition and let those that do believe them make up the rules.

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There's an ongoing debate in Australia to ban gambling advertisements. One of the arguments that is supportive of a ban says that children shouldn't be exposed to gambling advertisements during sports broadcasts, as they should be family friendly.

Should that argument be ignored too?

In the inverse, none of the opposition matters until it can solve the problems the universal surveillance approach doesn't even solve anyways. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.

It's a tradeoff situation and nobody wants to leave it as such to find an answer which serves the best balance. Instead, we are doomed to discuss the absolutes of freedoms vs the absolutes of child safety.

I'd really like to see something like a required parental controls architecture products had to support (but not every device had to force universally). These kind of solutions only goes as far as the problem is a technical one, e.g. a kid on their dad's office computer they weren't supposed to access can still see things they shouldn't, but such is the truth with any pure technical approach to the problem which is not actually fully technically bound.