The companies pushing age verification make their money monetizing access to children. They are exactly the sorts of groups I’d like to keep my kids away from. Forcing the kids to label themselves as minors just makes them more vulnerable to online exploitation.
They can only do so much, within the boundaries of their home. It takes a village to raise a child. The policies, thus, should be made village-wide.
No school zone speed limits, or protected crossings on streets near schools.
No requirements for railings on public balconies, fencing around public pools, protective covers over drains or other holes in the ground.
Parents/guardians can just supervise.
Sounds great!
You want to marry someone? Make sure the government approves for your safety.
Want to make dinner? First you have to send the recipe to your local overseer with proof of your safe cooking credentials or you will have to pay heafty fines for noncompliance.
Want to make love, read a book, speak your mind, make a contract with someone, work the job you want? Sorry, you can't decide that yourself, first the politburo must approve it.
Sounds great!
Today OS developers implement inferior option 2 and refuse to implement superior option 1. How do you solve the problem without government involvement?
Those are mostly there because of alcoholic drinks being served and the venue wants to create a certain atmosphere. There are plenty of parents that would take their kids there if they could.
The rest is not just there for kids but also for adults (or elderly).
There is a bunch of adults who would step in a hole in the ground or fall off a balcony.
Maybe that's why metabase was hacked - to conceal sale of data. "It's just a hack, it happens, we fixed the hole, nothing to see here until we find the next buyer".
So your argument is that ID checks are necessary simply because they are possible, and not a privacy invasion?
The question was why they are necessary.
That is where this become more than just gate keeping and becomes full on tracking.
> The right people to protect children are those responsible for them - their parents and guardians.
My position is that there is a social responsibility to protect children which extends to the community at large, not just their immediate guardians.
It's really on us to figure out how we can have things like the internet without harming children. Now, this is quite annoying, because I have never, and would never, give a child access to the internet in the first place. The internet was never driving around on public streets. I never wanted to force it on anyone.
We all dropped the ball here. We've all accepted and even celebrated more and more of our lives being online. But, more importantly, nobody noticed when children started to get smartphones with internet access. In my mind this is no different than giving children cigarettes or other adult materials. But nobody batted an eye. I'm also not surprised, though. Loads of people here have made tons of money from children having access to the internet.
Unfortunately it's so hard to go back from something like this. So we end up in this stupid situation where people will accept more surveillance because we can't just take phones away from children.
Those are extreme positions.
There are things where you want the government to intervene.
There are things where you don’t want the government to intervene.
What I do in my bedroom should not be monitored by the government.
Me speeding on the road should be monitored by the government.
Conversations I am having online should not be monitored by the government.
It’s my job to teach my kid how to behave when he is bullied at school. The government does not help with that. It is my job to make sure my kid does not become the bully. The government does not help with that.
It is also my job to teach my kid what the internet is, that there are wackos out there, and how to recognize dangerous patterns. That’s life.
If you think this is to save the children…
>No requirements for railings on public balconies, fencing around public pools, protective covers over drains or other holes in the ground.
>Parents/guardians can just supervise.
>Sounds great!
I know you're commenting in bad faith, but at the margin essentially nothing would change except the amount of whining from people of your bent when someone doesn't get punished enough.
The primary determinant of whether society engages in all those activities is not the government but the level of wealth to pay for it all.
The problem is, agreement on those tools is hard to find.
"I want to be able to pen my kid into a digital walled garden, so that they cannot see $bad stuff until the right age"
that seems normal right? nothing contraversial.
The issue is, implementing that is really fucking hard. For mobile phones, largely thats already been done in the UK. You need to opt out of the nanny proxy before you can get porn and reddit.
The issue is, as soon as you get on the wifi, all of those controls disappear. So how do you stop that? if you're an idiot (and the person leading the OSA was an idiot) you do what the UK did. You put in legal tools to "age gate" the internet _at source_ rather than at delivery (like mobile phones)
so yes give people the tool, but if you're not giving techincal guidance, and just saying NO NO NO NO, OSA is what you get.
Even if perfect age verification is implemented, kids will be harmed. Because they are vulnerable while above the arbitrary age limit. So -arguing for age verification is harming children. Won't somebody think of the children?
And the answer comes back to the same point. Parents should mediate this. Online content should advertise its maturity level, and parents should be able to configure devices at setup time for the maturity level they are appropriate for. Then apps should respect that and everyone can be better off without robbing everybody of anonymity or freedom.
Other still need protection at 30, or in fact in my opinion also a lot of people above 50 (that didn't grow up with the internet around) are not prepared for what is out there. Also there are parents that are "underage". Those are not considered either.
I agree it is a very arbitrary limit indeed, but it seems there is no other good proxy so for a lot of people it will be choosing the best worst option, at least that is how the argument in favor is brought forward.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205469
> you know, i feel like the "it's the parents' responsibility" comments that turn up on submissions like this often tend towards phrasing like "the parents" rather than "with my children i ..."
if you’ve had kids maybe you’d like to share with the class exactly how you go about doing exactly what you’re describing?
if not, maybe let parents figure out how to parent rather than expecting them to be perfect for everyone else’s benefit.
Only if you can figure it out without building a dystopia for everyone else.
That can only work if parents as an interest group stop bothering the rest of us with the very 'think of the children' nonsense that spawned this thread. If you are inventing laws that affect us, we should also have a say.
I need to remember this one, thanks!
The only way parents can try to protect their kids from the world is to keep them isolated, homeschooled, or in some kind of commune or cult. Which unfortunately is not uncommon in the US.
> let parents figure out how to parent
While I agree, I also think there's a role in society to help parents on how to parent, via e.g. education and awareness. Every generation brings new unknowns, like what kids can do in Roblox or how they can browse the internet on their smart fridge, and it's unreasonable to assume every parent knows all of that.
Parents should have the tools to protect their children, the providers should have those tools in place. But those that are dealing the goods as also heavily invested in trying to maximize engagement and so they do not really work to hard on providing those tools.
I frequently see this rhetoric (parents should look after their kids) from naive people on the internet that clearly don't have kids of their own (or don't have teenagers, or don't live or let their kids live free, etc)
Parents shouldn't buy smart phone to kids, period. There are 0 reasons kid of say 15 or lower should have one instead of dumb phone (or new commodore one with google maps and whatsapp but no browser or apps), in same way we don't allow cigarettes or alcohol to be given or sold to them. Helicopter control freak parents can go to hell, their mental issues shouldn't be messing their kid's lives. But to claim parents have 100% responsibility could work only if kids spend 100% of the time with them.
At some point your kid is going to move out or you will die and then you will have even less influence. School is a test for that.