[brushfoot]

> Content Filters: Discord users will need to be age-assured as adults in order to unblur sensitive content or turn off the setting. [1]

That presumably includes selfies?

That means that to exchange racy photos on Discord, each person must first record a facial age estimation video or upload identification documents.

That seems dystopian.

1: https://discord.com/press-releases/discord-launches-teen-by-...

[gjsman-1000]

How do you know one party isn’t 15 when the other is 25?

You’re never going to convince a parent or a lawmaker or even me that this is dystopian. Seems like a perfectly reasonable safeguard.

[brushfoot]

> How do you know one party isn’t 15 when the other is 25?

You don't. That's why parents need to be involved in their children's lives.

CSAM is the easy excuse, anyway. That's the one lawmakers use, and most people are against CSAM, myself included, so the excuse goes down easy. But the impetus they don't talk about is monitoring and control.

The answer isn't to destroy privacy for everyone. The government and these corporations don't need to know what you're doing every second of the day.

[gjsman-1000]

> That's why parents need to be involved in their children's lives.

Can't, aren't, look at iPad kids, won't. This is about as logical as saying people should just drive safely, so we don't need guardrails and seat belts. Or saying parents should always watch their children, so we don't need age verification at the alcohol store. Besides, it's not like the school library or the friends of friends don't have devices themselves you as a parent can't see.

Parents should not need to be tech experts or helicopters to feel their kids are safe online. That's fundamentally unreasonable. In which case, privacy and child safety need to come to an unhappy compromise, just like any other conflicting interest.

For that matter, I'm surprised that HN automatically always accepts the "slippery slope" fallacy while lambasting it everywhere else.

[tavavex]

> This is about as logical as saying people should just drive safely, so we don't need guardrails and seat belts.

This is a terrible analogy. Regulations related to driving only apply to drivers, if you're a pedestrian then you're not subject to basically any regulations that licensed drivers have to abide by. On the other hand, internet regulation like this punishes absolutely everyone to safeguard a small group, that being parents. It's like legally forcing pedestrians to wrap themselves in bubble wrap while outside so the careless drivers who couldn't behave don't dent their cars and get hurt when a pedestrian flies in their windshield, when they inevitably collide with one of them. Why is any of this their responsibility?

The fact that there is absolutely zero effort in pursuing any non-punitive options (like forcing ISPs to put networks of clients with kids in child-friendly mode, where the adult has to enter a password to temporarily view the unrestricted internet on their network, which should cover 90%+ of cases; or doing any of the proposed non-identifying proofs of age, like a generic "I'm an adult" card you can buy at the convenience store) should tell you that this has very little to do with actual concern for children. They went out of their way to enact the least private, most invasive, most disruptive option, which will not even work better than any privacy-friendly options, unless you expect literally every website on the internet to be compliant. Teens are smart, they'll be able to find any holes in that system, just like the generations before them.

> For that matter, I'm surprised that HN automatically always accepts the "slippery slope" fallacy while lambasting it everywhere else.

Slippery slope arguments are not automatically a fallacy. They can be if the causative relationship is weak or if the slope is massively exaggerated. But if neither of these things are true, "slippery slopes" is just looking at the trends and expecting them to continue. You can't look at a linear graph and say "well, I think there's no most likely option from now on, it could go any way really" without an argument for why the trend would suddenly deviate. The internet had been tightening up and the walls have been closing in for a long time, why would that change?

[gjsman-1000]

> safeguard a small group, that being parents

69% of US Adults have children. That's not a typo. There is no group that benefits from this larger than parents.

[tavavex]

In 2020, about 63 million Americans were parents to children under 18 [1]. That's about one in four adults. It's a small minority. Maybe 69% of all people have children in general, but most of those children are above the age of 18.

Not that it matters anyway. You picked out a single word out of my multi-paragraph comment with many arguments and ignored the rest. Even if parents of young children were the minority, does that mean they should dictate what the rest do for the sake of their safety? Like 85% of Americans are drivers, should the non-driving pedestrians start stocking up on bubble wrap? It's for the common good, after all.

[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/estimate...

[Kim_Bruning]

They'll now have kompromat associated with a name, address, and id number (be it social security, BSN, or whatever your country calls it)