[tzs]

Internet is sufficiently pervasive nowadays that is it probably no longer practical for parents to directly supervise children all the time they are using it.

Strong parental controls on the devices the kids use might work but there are some major holes in that approach. The big one is that nearly everyone has one or more internet access devices. It is not hard for a kid to find someone else's device to use.

Sites are probably going to need to bite the bullet and at a minimum not allow interaction between anonymous users and children. That probably will require some sort of age verification.

Age verification can be done in a way that doesn't reveal anything to the site other than that the person is not a child and doesn't reveal to anyone other than the site that the person visited the site. But it can also be done in a way that gives the site much more information and reveals to third parties that you visited the site.

It might be a good idea for people concerned about privacy to get ahead on this one, recognize that age verification is probably going to become a requirement, and instead of just lobbying against all age verification also work to ensure that when that fails and we do get mandated age verification we get the kind that only reveals age to the site and doesn't reveal to anyone else what site age was verified for.

[archerx]

I rather ban children of the internet and have the parents be liable for what ever happens to their children if they still go online. Children didn’t have access to the internet for thousands of years and they survived.

[tzs]

What happens if a child uses a computer at a friend's house to go online and something bad happens? Is it still the child's parents who are liable, or would it be the parents of the friend who are liable? What about a public computer like at a library?

Banning children from the internet would probably require any computer that a child might obtain access to to be locked down and verify that an adult is using it before going online.

That's going to be way more obtrusive than a well designed way to do anonymous age verification. It would affect nearly everyone who wants to go online, instead of only people who want to go online at sites that aren't safe for children.

> Children didn’t have access to the internet for thousands of years and they survived.

Adults also didn't have access to the internet for thousands of years and they survived, so what's your point?

[doublerabbit]

> What happens if a child uses a computer at a friend's house to go online and something bad happens?

The guardians of the child should be held responsible. When a child goes to a friends house their friends parents become the guardians. You as a parent decide trust that their friends parents are suitable for looking after your child.

It's the same as if you go in to the shop. Your relying on the shop keeper to keep the store responsible ensuring its not dangerous to yourself. As with the library, the library is responsible.

You walk in to my house, trip up on some turned up carpet who's fault is it? Your's technically because you should of seen the risk. However it is mine for having an potential hazard.

I should of informed yourself, btw the carpet is unsafe. The parents should of educated the child that the internet is unsafe and that such acts of this can occur online. This isn't 2005 when the internet was new, this was 2014 when internet was fully blown.

It could be more education that parents require however the parents are or at least should take blame. It was a website on the internet, their daughter was 11.

Parents should of known that on the internet malicious content exists: as do noodie magazines exist on the top shelf of the news agents.

This case plays out like the one of the parents of Maddie. They went out for a drink, left their three year old alone in a vila in another country but it's not our fault for going for drinks.

[c22]

My children visit their friend's houses where I am sure there is beer in the fridge, guns (hopefully) in the gun safe, dangerous cleaning solvents in the garage, and perhaps other things I'm not even aware of. It is not insane to expect adults to manage the things in their houses and secure them appropriately when kids are present. And while there is certainly a possibility that some people may screw some of these things up from time to time even to deleterious result I'd still rather leave this responsibility in the hands of local adults than have to present ID to open my fridge.