Well, we might as well be realistic - none of us have had any privacy for a very, very long time. It's just that our governments can't quite yet use it against us the way they'd like to without revealing the scope. The goal here is really just to add some additional plausibility when our privacy _is_ violated.
Remember, the panopticon observed people who were in a prison.
A shift change of the prison guards more than a material change to the prison.
Regulatory capture is real.
This is not being pushed by private companies. There is no money in it. It is being pushed by governments, and those governments use those private companies as (willing) vehicles to do things that it is illegal for them to do directly. And it is not being pushed by the democratic portions of governments, which have been minimized and weakened to the point of invisibility. None of this makes it to the ballot, "both" sides support it.
Since the turn of the millennium, all powers have been pushed to the Executive, in every Western country. And the Executive wouldn't be the Executive if he/she weren't completely compromised. Governing with 20% of the support of the public is the norm now in Western governments and institutions. If more than 20% of people support you, you're a "populist dictator."
Sam Altman owns an identity verification company for example.
If we have to live in a panopticon I think access to the data should be available to everyone. That eliminates the power imbalance and/or makes the idea of the thing distasteful to powerful people who might actually try to restore privacy and eliminate the panopticon.
So that's where we are now? "If we have to live in the torture nexus, let's at least make it equitable"
But I think the latter factor wins out, so we should just oppose obviously bad things in a non-clever fashion.
I have no power to stop what's happening. I might as well make the best of it for myself and my family, and hope it becomes so bad that people who actually do have the power to stop it do something about it. Maybe it'll rise to the level that enough individual citizens will call out for change, but I continue to be amazed at what people will put up with in the name of convenience, continuation of their lifestyle, and, as it relates specifically to surveillance capitalism, shiny digital doodads and baubles that bring them temporary joy.
Capital being speech in the US, since I'm not a billionaire I have very little influence.
I have optimism and hope for people doing good things locally, but absolutely no hope large-scale problems will ever be fixed. I feel like the US political system experienced some phase change in the last 50 years, has "solidified", and is now completely unable to do anything meaningful at scale. The New Deal couldn't happen today. The interstate highway system couldn't happen today. The Affordable Care Act started off as a watered-down, weakened version of what it could have been (because anything more radical would never have passed), and the private interests have had 20 years to chip away at it, sculpting it into a driver of revenue. Heck, we can't even build mass public transit at the level of cities.
Private capital, meanwhile, soldiers on accomplishing its goals in spite of (or because of) our political gridlock.
I'd love to feel differently.
Being able to accurately articulate a position one doesn't possess themselves is necessary to effectively countering it.
To execute your plan of buying out politicians, you would be following a blueprint already perfected by extraordinarily wealthy individuals and corporate interests. Through a system of dark money and untraceable nonprofit front groups, billionaires have successfully created what amounts to a permanent, private political machine that rivals official political parties. Following the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the ultra-wealthy were given more or less free rein to spend as much as they want in support of their favored candidates. This ruling enabled a tiny elite to funnel limitless cash into outside organizations, essentially allowing them to buy elections and steer government policy without public accountability. As one major political donor noted, this massive spending is treated as an investment designed to yield a specific governing philosophy and tangible returns.
Your fascination with the panopticon actually echoes the early days of industrial capitalism. The original concept for the Panopticon was conceived by Samuel Bentham as a way to turn the Deptford docks into a "regular police state" to enforce strict wage labor. He envisioned building a giant central tower to guarantee the constant surveillance of workers, an idea that his brother Jeremy later famously adapted into the prison model you are familiar with today.
The infrastructure for your desired panopticon is already highly advanced through both corporate and state apparatuses. Privacy in the workplace is already profoundly insecure. Employers have wide legal latitude to monitor their workers, with surveys showing that up to two-thirds of companies actively record employee phone calls, voicemails, emails, review computer files, and use video surveillance.
The modern digital economy operates on a model of "surveillance capitalism," where companies offer seemingly "free" services in exchange for mining user engagement. This business model relies entirely on harvesting personal data from every click, post, and search to craft detailed profiles, a practice that fundamentally deemphasizes and eliminates user privacy for profit.
Government agencies have developed a staggering capacity to spy on everyday life. Police and intelligence fusion centers utilize facial recognition, "Stingray" cell phone surveillance equipment, and massive data-mining software to monitor citizens. This includes actively spying on telephone and electronic communications in direct collusion with major communications corporations. Furthermore, government contractors like Palantir provide federal agencies with software capable of tracking billions of data points, explicitly collecting information from Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, SMS texts, web surfing activity, and live telephone calls. Authorities can also readily deploy electronic devices, telephone tapping, and intercepted mail to completely bypass secrecy.
In short, the mechanisms to eliminate privacy—from the financial blueprints required to buy political compliance to the technological tools necessary for constant, panoptic observation—are already deeply embedded in modern political and economic systems.
You're welcome!
Even on Hacker News, threads about children and social media or short form video will draw a lot of comments supporting harsh age restrictions, including an alarming number of extremist comments in favor banning under-18s from using the internet or phones.
It’s not until the discussion turns to implantation details that the sentiment swings firm negative. The average comment in favor of age restrictions hasn’t thought through what it would mean, they only assume that some mechanism will exist that only impacts children and/or sites they don’t care about.
As soon as the implantation details come out and everyone realizes that you can’t restrict children without first verifying everyone’s age or that “social media” includes Discord and other services they use, the outrage starts.
We’re now entering the phases where everyone realizes that these calls to action have consequences for everyone because there is no easy solution that automatically only impacts children.
I think there should be age restrictions. I prefer to do it in a privacy-preserving way. But I’m also not happy about conditioning the former on the existence of the latter.
Totally, no. Better than having users upload IDs with no use restrictions on the social-media companies? Yes. The harms justify, in my opinion and the opinion of lots of Americans (and importantly, those able and willing to call their electeds), a little bit of privacy encroachment for using a totally-voluntary product.
The call to ban children from social media seemed like it was coming loudest from tech people - like HN users.
How did they think this was going to work?
Do not try and derail this thread with facts about vaccines!
They need to pay a service provider to have the capability to do bad things (or be exposed to bad things)
Why can't we just ask/compel the service provider to identify these people (or block the bad things).
For any politician the line of thinking will be something like that. It comes off as incredibly long hanging fruit that would have broad positive impact for the whole of society. Like the apple in the garden of eden, just walk over, take a bite, and you'll be a political hero without having to do much work at all.
Isn't that basically what's happening? Service providers, such as Discord recently for example, are asking for identification to prove users are of a certain age. If you punish service providers for providing services to minors then they will need to do age verification.
The suicide rate in Palo Alto, for instance, was so high that the CDC investigated it (around 2016). The situation hasn't improved much since then. https://elestoque.org/2025/12/07/opinion/community-members-t...
Another example: in the California Assembly hearings for AB 1043 (their age verification bill), one mom offered testimony in support by saying it was social media that enticed her daughter into developing anorexia.
In addition there are more services, such as social media, becoming age-gated.
The enforcement hurts the sensibilities of people like us on hackernews but it's common sense to a lot of people. We live in very polarizing times, but as you've noted, it has bipartisan support. The easiest explanation is the hackernews-friendly take of lack of enforcement mechanisms is the more radical one.
Personally I think it's a bit sad but inevitable. The laws are just catching up. And there will absolutely be some good coming from it, such as holding companies liable for breaking the law.
There is popular fury against the big tech companies for harming our children. That makes it politically advantageous to put forward solutions. Electeds are responding to that incentive.
Tech privacy “advocates” are notoriously useless at civic engagement, so most of the time I assume the electeds had nobody to talk to other than parents’ groups, who are going to pick the simplest solution to put to pen: the companies have liability to age gate.
This is the general approach that privacy advocates have said should be taken. It is just what I'd expect from a liberal state that has a record of trying to protect privacy but wants to address the issue of how to keep children from sites that are not suitable.