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by Yeul 326 days ago
The Netherlands has this system but it is ripe for abuse. We still have a few Christ clowns and there's a big fascist party at the moment.

How about we don't make lists of people visiting porn sites? How about we accept that children are part of society and not try to put them in little cages like songbirds?

4 comments

>How about we accept that children are part of society and not try to put them in little cages like songbirds?

It's the correct idea but the way it should be done is by coming to a democratic consensus that helicopter parenting is bad, not by attempting to hobble the infrastructure of government. If only for the practical reason that it'll simply be outsourced and privatized. In US states where the police can't scan license plates, there's a private industry doing that and then selling the data back to the police. The same result but now you pay a premium.

Lee Kuan Yew was fond of making this point. Weak "horizontal" administrations will creep in ways that are more opaque and without checks than strong "vertical" ones.

One reason that's better is that private companies aren't backed by the force of law the same way police are. I don't think it's a felony to prevent some random company's spy camera from seeing your license plate but it is illegal to prevent the police from seeing it. (Of course it's illegal to generally obscure it so there's some implementation details to be worked out there)
Children are part of society, but adults need to have their space to do their adult things, some of which are actually hurting children. The "little cages" are actually supposed to aid a healthy mental development.

But whatever age-verification solution I have seen so far sucked, really badly. And I can't believe people promote something like a government based age check. People need their privacy.

Tangential discussion, one thing I like a lot about the Netherlands is that it's not common to flaunt wealth, at least not as much as in some other countries. For all their other flaws, isn't this something that comes from the protestants? Or is there a different historical background here?
I am fairly certain it can be done in a zero-knowledge way, but regardless, parents should be taking care of this.