The immediate reply is the accusational: "why are you trying to trying to prevent safety for kids".

It's a simple next step to accuse you of hiding your own child abuse ring.

This sounds like hype, but it's the normal path here in Australian.

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.

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

That one can get deep really quick.

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.

"The government says all children need to be vaccinated in order to be safe"

I'm not saying these arguments are equivalent, but they seem equivalent because they induce the same feeling of loss of agency. And one cannot simply ignore and dismiss something like this.

Not just for the war on anonymity. NGOs, often funded by government money (so missing two third of their name), have unified on other topics.

One example that comes to mind is teaming up to organize the biggest influx of migrants into the EU following the arab spring movements: there have been hidden camera recording NGO employees explaining how to dodge controls, how to answer questions (by lying), and they've been actively helping sneaking people illegally in the EU.

A good question one could ask itself before downvoting me is this: if it's a fact that NGOs are teaming up, worldwide, to lie using the rethoric of "child safety" [1]... On which other topics did NGOs lie?

Or are we to believe all NGOs are good and well-meaning, except those working to end anonymity?

And before I forget: in Africa for example it's fully well known that NGO typical means "DGSE":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directorate_General_for_Extern...

There are french "doctors" in some of those NGOs who know less about medicine than what I know about medicine by having ex-girlfriends that were doctors.

By squinting one's eye just a little it look like NGO is not that far from a synonym of "shady undercover gov op".

And btw why should any of my taxpayers dollars go to even a single NGO if it's non-governmental?

And another big one: while some of those NGOs have been hard at work passing legislation which as a a result gets people arrested for "hate speech" (or even just for saying "christian prayers in their heads") in the UK, other NGOs are even harder at work making sure that the absolute most horrible of all hate speech cannot ever be criticized "because it's religious".

The double standards are literally insane.

If I was in the UK, I'd GTFO. And not to the EU.

[1] speaking of which, btw, there are serious allegations about NGOs participating in child trafficking, for example in the Haiti SNAFU

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.

Should that argument be ignored too?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Believe it or not, sometimes the best answer is to do nothing until the crowd moves on to the next panic, as with the “Satanic Panic” in the 1980s. Turns out D&D was not actually a gateway to Satan worship.

That said, I’m a father of 3. I’m a millennial and tech worker. I have the digital literacy to teach my kids about the internet and its horrors in a safe way. Not every parent does, so passing this off as a “parent better” issue doesn’t solve anything either.

I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”, but I’m open to similar ideas so parents can get some support without compromising on privacy.

There is a really good way to do this that solves most concerns: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

The only real downside to this is that a 0kp cannot be reliably tied to an identity of the person using the device and thus tickets could be proxied/shared around with semi technical tools (and/or an ai agent tasked with creating a proxy). This really isn't solvable without device-level attestation[0], as if a website needs to reliably say "this person is actually this person" then it needs all pieces of data itself.

This could be solved by adding in a still privacy-preserving step like "The device is doing periodic face id scans and matching them to an identity, and constantly renews/re-presents to the age assurance consumer", but that has its own drawbacks[0].

0: Namely, lock in to devices that can do this, and that includes basically guaranteeing a double digit percentage of adult humans would not have access due to their device being old, unsupported, missing the hardware, etc. And with so many humans excluded, you would not have mass adoption. Probably also excludes rooted devices if we bring in attestation of unmodified software.

edit: sp

In letting things flow to easily the opposition is to have heavy lock down on information. A lot of the time, the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea.

Is there, though? The push is coming from lobbyists who seem to be largely funded by wealthy elites, corporations, and other opaque organizations. One of them seems to be Meta. It doesn’t look like a grassroots effort.

And here's like ~120 of us who showed up to oppose AB 2023 (the 3D printer spyware bill). It was incredible. https://calmatters.digitaldemocracy.org/hearings/279741#t=19...

I think the easiest way to get involved is to become an EFF member. They'll keep you up to date on all the censorship and surveillance bills. Then you can contact your legislator, sent letters to the CA legislature committees, or show up to the hearings in Sacramento.

I have never wanted to move out of Europe more than now tbf. Complete f* morons - I get spammed by the wanna be child protectors who are giving a smartphone to their kids.

I don't know how to deal with this anymore - what we are not realizing is that *we* are under engagement - this *is* state surveillance.

Cheaper computer technology has been great for the average persons uses but it cuts both ways. It also means much cheaper surveillance. I suspect that governmental/corporate surveillance now costs less than 1% of their spending, something that simple couldn't have been done even a few decades back.

I do wonder what the world would have been like is say computer technology peaked at 486 level performance/memory. Much of what we have today simply could not have happened in terms of surveillance and social media damages. Alas, this is the world we didn't get.

The one thing he always said is, they have always been watching and know who is who, what these things do is allow it to be entered into the court of law. Now they can act on these things.

Can also just lie about your age, "I am as old as the fjords, as young as a newborn lamb" - Thor - GTA Vice City radio ;)

You’ll also notice that Anduril is quickly being accepted now that we’re expending munitions faster than our replacement rate.

"We need the plebs to want to mock people who work from home, to reduce the reticence in coming back to work in the office"

"We need our commercial property values to go back up"

Edited to add:

"Our managers need to _feel_ as if they're actually managing people"

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/prot...

They can keep floating this stuff and we have to put in a thousand times as much energy to shoot it down. We get worn down quicker than they can. It only has to work once for them, we have to keep pushing back.

My very pessimistic take is one out of Taoism. If you wish for them to fail, let them grow. Eventually the weight of the whole system collapses itself, the question is just on what time frame.

The way out is to go through. I don't like this framing but it seems to be the most accurate.

Worse, these laws will actually create new harms to children who will be forced to give their identity to websites and identity services that will exploit them and fail to protect that data.

Other countries have already implemented this or are making strenuous efforts towards it. In Pakistan right now you need to submit a copy of your national ID card and scan your fingerprints to get a live LTE data service SIM card. This is not hyperbole but is real practice in some places that is soon going to be imported to jurisdictions that traditionally have more "freedom".

https://www.pta.gov.pk/category/biometric-verification-77103...

https://www.biometricupdate.com/202607/pakistan-fast-tracks-...

Statements like this are inflammatory—basically a personal attack—and ironically are much more likely to violate HN guidelines.

Governments want control, Companies want money. Control typically comes from a reduction in rights, freedoms, money. When you fail to give those up "naturally" violence, worsened living conditions and abuse are the tools used.

Privacy doomerism is a form of complicity.

Larry Ellison on surveillance: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

This is not new and it’s not about kids. This is the culmination of years of planning that began after the Arab Spring, when elites began to get concerned about how the Internet could be leveraged for domestic regime change.

Because of the goal of advertising revenue as the ultimate driver as to build an addictive permanent scroll of slop on tiktok or instagram, and the desire of social media companies to build walled gardens where someone's entire online experience stays in their "app.". As you say, this affects young and old alike.