[bluegatty]

It's absolutely a slippery slope - but most parents know how this is a very real thing as well. There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter' - the intellectual debate over freedom of information is clouded by ideology.

Definitely the 'slippery slope' debate is worth having, but that's way more relevant than the 'should 10-year-olds be able to do whatever' (aka all or nothing internet) which I think, if we took a vote, most people would be fine with nominal age restrictions, on that basis and on that basis alone aka outside the 'scary government' issue, which is again, real and material but nevertheless a separate concept however pragmatically engulfed these things are.

[txrx0000]

> There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter' - the intellectual debate over freedom of information is clouded by ideology.

The first three are physical things, not information. Porn can be debated, but the current age verification push is trying to impose blanket control on the entire information ecosystem. It's the digital equivalent of requiring ID to go anywhere or do anything, rather than just a few well-defined things.

Even if we view it as a good faith attempt (which it is not, remember what Edward Snowden exposed), the parental authority over a child's information diet is being transferred away from parents to tech companies. They're legally mandating you to give away your child's personal info (just age for now, but they'll demand more if we give them this) and make the decisions on what is suitable, instead of you making those decisions for your child.

[benoau]

> the parental authority over a child's information diet is being transferred away from parents to tech companies

These companies not only wanted that but they exploited the shit out of it for obscene profit! In many ways it was their unabated greed that has caused this situation: from addicting design of video feeds, grooming obscene spending habits, collectively doing as little as possible to keep predators and inappropriate content out of games for children.

And how could parents police effectively "the whole internet", it's like expecting them to police what their kids see and hear at school on lunch break x 1000 you cannot control all the things that can influence a child for better or worse. Maximum security prisons can't stop people from accessing the internet and making phone calls so what hope did parents ever have?

We could have avoided this if Google and Apple had enough decency to keep the bad stuff from becoming effortlessly, trivially accessible to children, but they made a fortune off Roblox instead of applying their policies and noticing the abundance of pornography and predators, they ignored Grok churning out CSAM as fast as people could request it, no response to court revelations that Zuckerburg's apps are teeming with sex traffickers, prostitutes and scammers, no response to apps excessively exploiting addiction other than making sure they get their cut.

So now we're caught between a rock and a hard place, a completely unsustainable system where everybody who should be accountable claims to have immunity, and parents are incapable of enforcing a healthy upbringing for their children in this mess.

[tardedmeme]

> It's the digital equivalent of requiring ID to go anywhere or do anything, rather than just a few well-defined things.

No, it's social media, specifically. That's why it says social media. It's not everything, it's social media.

[ishouldstayaway]

For now.

[tardedmeme]

Banning selling alcohol to children is a slippery slope to banning candy and then banning food and then banning giving water to children. Right?

[techblueberry]

> They're legally mandating you to give away your child's personal info

If you don’t want to use social media you don’t have to give away the info right?

[ishouldstayaway]

If you don't want to use ~~social media~~ any website that could contain content deemed as "adult".

And what's "adult"? Hardcore pornography? Sex ed material? Otherwise-G-rated content that happens to have a gay person in it?

[bluegatty]

Information is a material concern

Relationships are a concern (random people interacting with your child? Good Gosh!)

Privacy is a huge concern for children, way more so than is afforded we regular netizens.

"They're legally mandating you to give away your child's personal info " - no they are not, they're mandating age requirements, which is a separate thing.

Snowden did not bring up age restrictions.

"instead of you making those decisions for your child."

I'm sorry but today the choice is not by parents, the point of the age restrictions is so that parents ultimately can have a choice (they and provide access by their own accounts).

The 'all or nothing' issue of the internet is a big deal - parents don't really have a choice.

These are mostly ideological and rhetorical arguments, not grounded in pragmatism.

The pragmatic concern is 'abuse of control' (aka the 'general' Snowden argument), which is real, but can also be avoided if they do it right.

Granted, I don't have a lot of faith that they will do it well.

[movedx]

> It's the digital equivalent of requiring ID to go anywhere or do anything, rather than just a few well-defined things.

Are you aware that most library systems across most of the world require someone to be 16+ to open an account and/or take out books and materials? That's not restricting anything, that's preventing abuse by those not intellectually or emotionally capable of regulating their behaviour. The parent of the under 16 takes responsibility for their actions, essentially.

If you have to be 16+ to take materials out of a library, why should a minor be able to access _anything_ on the Internet without also having an adult check what it is you're doing? Why should a 12 year old be able to freely visit "innocent-website.tld" without it first being confirm the website actually is innocent? What if it's innocent today, but adopts a new doctrine tomorrow? There's a reason YouTube doesn't let you change a video upload after you've published it: you could upload nearly anything to replace your previously innocent and successful video.

Nothing changes between the physical world and the virtual one. The same problems exist, except the virtual one makes it easier to access much darker information.

[txrx0000]

The library is one place out of the many places you could go, and the closest digital equivalent is a library website or an app. The Internet is not just a library, but a whole world of its own. We don't have blanket control laws that restrict all movement and speech in the real world based on verified age. The restrictions for minors are implemented at much more local levels.

We do need parental guidance like in the physical world, but such guidance should be issued by the parents, not the tech companies. Age verification is about giving your age and some other identifying metadata to the tech companies, and they hold the authority to decide what to filter. It should be other way around. The companies should expose metadata about their service and the content in their feeds via public APIs, and let people filter stuff locally on the device per the device owners' aka the parents' preferences. Oh wait. Such features will never reach mass adoption in the current software ecosystem. Software antitrust is a joke. These companies and the feds have the opposite incentives and do everything to sabotage local solutions. They've locked down what OS you can run on the hardware you bought, what apps are approved on their walled garden OS, and only the official apps can access their APIs. You don't have root on your own phone and it's a brick without remote authentication. Now they can sell you parenting plus many other things as their exclusive cloud service because "the market failed to deliver" and you can't really control what software runs on your own phone, much less your child's phone. This is the upstream problem and we ought to see it clearly and assign the blame correctly rather than trust those who deliberately created the problem to solve it.

[movedx]

> We do need parental guidance like in the physical world, but such guidance should be issued by the parents, not the tech companies.

By putting up ID roadblocks, that forces the parents to intervene. That's the point :)

[jonplackett]

The point is there are much better ways to enforce this - like just setting up proper parental controls on a device.

Kids can’t buy their own phone. So parents can always enforce stuff at a hardware level if they set it up properly. It would be much better to just mandate that phones set up with a kid profile cannot access social media.

[tifik]

The problem isn't an individual kids phone. It's their peers devices, or other ways they can explore the internet that isn't under their guardians control. This is a systemic issue that requires systemic approach. I am not making any claims about the qualities of currently discussed systemic solutions, but I do want to point out that the 'parents can just' argument is missing the mark.

[jonplackett]

This assumes that it will actually solve the problem anyway. Kids just get a fake account or a VPN anyway.

Addiction is the worst part and that is only going to happen on your own device.

[tifik]

All of the kids will get a fake account and a VPN? Putting barriers in place will likely have some effect in the intended direction.

> This assumes that it will actually solve the problem anyway

I wouldn't expect any policy to _solve_ a problem in such a way that the problem completely disappears from the world, much like theft being illegal doesn't eliminate theft, but it sure distinctiveness it for a lot of people.

[supertroop]

You do know that many sites don’t work with a vpn. Like this one. You can’t create an account on HN with a vpn. Also, countries are starting to ban vpn ip blocks entirely. In fact, turkey was monitoring tor entry nodes and disappearing whomever provided them. Banned tor pretty damn fast. Vpns can be turned off in a snap.

[baby_souffle]

I promise you that a hacker news does not have all known public VPN egress IPS blocked.

Even the big commercial providers that are advertising all over YouTube are constantly changing IP space so they can keep their customers able to pop into another Geo region and still get Netflix.

[jonplackett]

Yeah I’m sure the kids are going to be devastated they can’t read HN

[Joe_Cool]

They will just rediscover Bluetooth. Kids have always passed around stuff they weren't supposed to have.

Source: I was a kid once, we had no cell phones. Porn on 5.25" floppies was a thing.

[perilunar]

I was a kid once, we had no floppy drives. 'Borrowing' your Dad's Playboy or Penthouse mags was the thing.

[Epa095]

Cool, definitely better than endless scrolling on the 'you are not good enough'-machine ticktok.

[bradford]

I've been battling with locking down my kid's devices for much of my life.

I haven't found a parental control feature that works: we've tried several, but, generally, nothing survives the 'Hey, I'll just factory reset the device and start with a clean out-of-box-experience' bypass. Kids can figure this stuff out.

Even when we thought that things were under control, kids can easily procure new devices. Many families don't dispose of their old phones; it's not too hard for kids to find an older model that's been sitting around collecting dust, bring it to the schoolyard, and trade it like a baseball card.

I wish I had a good answer, and, distasteful as the age-verification might be, I'm open to such draconian measures at this point. If you say there are better ways to enforce this, I'd honestly love to hear the specifics.

[grahamburger]

I'm fairly sure that Android requires parent permission to reset a device if it's a managed child device. Overall, the parental controls on Android have been sufficient for what my family has needed.

[derektank]

It seems like it should be relatively easy to create a dead man’s switch that sends you a message after a factory reset, and then you just take away the phone for however long is appropriate. Do most parental control tools just not include that for some reason?

[fragmede]

Get an iPhone and don't give your kid the password to the iCloud account. That password is required after factory reset to make use of the device.

[mx7zysuj4xew]

wish I had a good reply, and, distasteful as this comment might be. I'm open to giving a draconian response:

Fuck you and and fuck your unwillingness to parent your god-damned kids

[anthonypasq]

children should not be 1 or 2 clicks away from graphic internet porn at all times and your unwillingness to make any compromises in order to stop this is frankly embarrassing.

[mx7zysuj4xew]

Your kids shouldn't be on the fucking internet, period

And you are an irresponsible parent for allowing them to be

[anthonypasq]

please explain in exacting detail how you can prevent a child from accessing the internet without living in the woods, homeschooling them, and not allowing them to have friends or interact with another human being that has access to the internet.

[hogwasher]

That is definitely a difficult battle to fight, but why do you think kids can't bypass these government-level restrictions just as easily as they can your own? Especially since governments are usually slow to respond to whatever method of bypassing it is used, if they respond at all (especially once it's no longer the topic of the minute).

People can bypass these restrictions with video game character creation tools, with generative AI, with a VPN (something that's very hard to ban in practice because corporations rely on them, and of which some are free), with copy-pasting random ID photos from the internet, with borrowing a parent's or teacher's or other adult's ID, with using a website scraping alternative (some of which can be self-hosted, or hosted by one child for many others) instead of the website itself, and so on. Heck, they can use websites hosted in Russia (or other countries), like a lot of pirates do.

And whatever the easy bypass method ends up being, they'll all end up knowing it, because they go to school and talk to each other, and because they'll always have at least some access to some parts of the internet no matter what.

Meanwhile, these age verifications laws are labeling all the children (who don't bypass it) as children, and that information WILL be leaked, inevitably, as it already has been (from Discord, for example - a service that shamelessly retains and processes every message it hosts, even after the user 'deletes' it).

When ID info is leaked, it leaks the child's age, their real name, and (often) their real address, their phone number, and their appearance. A surprising amount of information might be deducible from any selfie or video that was required. And in combination with an app's other data (or other data about them that has been included in databases and/or leaked and/or shared on the internet previously and which can be matched to them based on email or phone number or username or browser cookies or IP address or etc), it can leak their interests, hobbies, hopes and fears (discussed with friends), favorite hangout spots, the name and location of the school they go to, their regular routines or travel schedules, etc - anything at all that they might have discussed via the app, or whatever might be concluded just by their proximity to their friends (e.g. maybe they don't directly know that a kid lives in X location or plays Y video game, but if every day they talk to a bunch of other kids who definitely live in X location and play Y video game, then they probably live in X location and play Y video game too).

When all that data is leaked, all that data is now available to predators. And it's very, very hard to remove it from the internet after it's out there.

That data, even just from a single leak, could make it so easy for someone to target a specific child, contact them, tailor their lies to seem as trustworthy and likable to the child as possible, anonymously harass them online, threaten them, stalk them, or attempt to persuade them that yes, he does know their parents, and they definitely sent him to pick them up from school.

To me, all these laws seem realistically likely to do is unintentionally but significantly endanger the children they claim to protect. I don't see how it can be anything but a devil's bargain, even if we only "think of the children" and disregard other concerns.

At the least, it should have been proven to be more effective than regular parental controls before even being considered as an option, but so far, it doesn't seem to be so at all. And if there's little to no additional benefit, or we're not sure if there's a benefit or not, or if it's shown to be less effective, then why ever choose it over the regular parental controls that don't carry this huge additional risk?

As to enforcing age limits otherwise, well. I confess I don't think there is any way children won't just find a way around. I think the best defense is just educating children about how to navigate the internet and its potential threats, making sure the children don't see their parents as distrusting of them or oppositional (so that they feel comfortable enough to go to their parents for help or reassurance if there's a problem, instead of hiding the problem because they don't want to be yelled at for being on the internet or such-and-such website at all), and - an element I think a lot of parents miss - making sure they have a lot of appealing options for things to do or ways to socialize outside of the internet. If you occupy their time by indulging their non-internet-focused hobbies and interests (and maybe engaging in them with them, to spend time with them), or letting them visit friends in person, then that's time they're not on the internet and likely don't even want to be. I think that this is the option that best sets up the kid to continue having a healthy relationship with the internet after they turn 18 and are even more out of your control.

That said, as far as device parental controls go: instead of focusing on phone-level controls, I recommend using your router's network-level parental controls, as well as the phone line controls for whatever company you get your data form (if they have a regular smartphone, as opposed to a more limited one, which do exist as an option). For your own wifi network, you can even set it up to use a whitelist of devices so that your kid can't even connect to it from a non-approved device. That doesn't stop them from potentially still sometimes accessing the internet using a friend's phone, but it'd cut down on how the amount time they have that access, and do so more effectively than government age restrictions. And in any case, you also can't always stop them from looking at a dirty magazine that they find at a friend's house, or from reading a hateful tract that someone hands them on the sidewalk, or from watching a terrible channel broadcast on a TV in a diner. But you can potentially influence how they handle it when they encounter these kinds of things.

[anthonypasq]

This is not how any other thing that is banned for children is enforced. It makes no sense.

The person selling the age gated item needs to take lawful measures to ensure they arent selling it to a minor. Their parents have nothing to do with it.

Your solution would be that if a 14 year old walks into a liquor store and doesnt have a note from their parents saying that they arent allowed to drink alcohol, then the store should be able to sell it to them.

[jonplackett]

The proposed solution though is that all adults going into the store have to provide their full name and address and have it recorded by the store to buy alcohol - or any other +18 product they want to buy. These things are not equal.

[tifik]

And that is where details matter. You can implement age verification in such a way that no data gets transmitted anywhere. Ofc I wouldn't expect Meta to not take a chance of collecting even more user data and blame a law for doing it, but if the law is written well enough, it won't mandate a specific method. If it does, definitely oppose it imo.

[txrx0000]

Age verification implies that some authority, usually the tech company, checks your age. It's mandatory personal data harvesting. A method that doesn't require data to be transmitted anywhere is just local permissions and filtering. The tech company should broadcast the metadata of the content they're serving, then the decision to filter it should be made on the client-side according to the device owner's preferences. But big tech is constantly trying to sabotage this permission model by removing root from phones, mandating cloud accounts to use your computer, etc.

[jonplackett]

You can - but currently it’s all just done with random private companies that I would not trust with my email address never mind my passport or adult preferences.

Again - apple’s on device verification is a good idea for this. Apple just sends a ‘yes this is an adult’ message to reddit for example and now I can again participate in chrome up discussions.

[knome]

mandating devices provide a `NoAdult` setting, so so browsers could check it and then send something like a `x-NoAdult` header would give websites a reasonable method for distinguishing minors (or people that just don't want adult content).

it's the old 80s/90s bead curtain separating the adult movies area from the rest of the video store. it keeps kids reasonably separated, and leans on parents making their kids mind. I think that's a reasonable target.

it would work without forcing every internet user that wants to use a given service from having to submit government identification, go through interviews, or sign up to massive centralized identification systems that will inevitably track every movement people make online.

if history is any indicator, those things will lead to breaches and abuse, and people's privacy will be violated.

if there's a legally mandated way for parents to stop their kids from peeking through the internet's bead curtain, that should be sufficient for most purposes.

if the argument is that bad or foreign websites might not implement it, it's not wrong, but that same problem exists with the mass-surveillance methods as well.

if you keep going down the path of forcing everything, eventually you end up with a national firewall, vpns are illegal, anything that can provide anonymity or pseudo-anonymity online is illegal, no one has privacy, and busybodies will spend all their time hunting folks for liking things they don't want them to like when the inevitable breaches come.

to your last point, sure, a 14 year old shouldn't be able to just wonder into a liquor store, but a 40 year old should.

[pocksuppet]

that's literally what the california law, that we keep calling an "age verification law" even though it has nothing to do with age verification, does

[Aunche]

> like just setting up proper parental controls on a device

This is literally what is being written into California law. The OS will have an "age flag" that is configured at device setup that passed to other apps. The law explicitly was written such that it wouldn't need identity verification, but that isn't stopping scaremongers claiming it as such.

[ike2792]

Many parents don’t have the technical aptitude to set the controls up properly. I am a software engineer and I find it challenging to keep up with the nuances of parental control setup and how to adjust it as kids get older. Content is also imperfectly tagged and smart kids can easily find loopholes in most controls. Having a centralized ID validation system wouldn’t be an ideal solution but having something baked into the Internet itself to help parents shield their kids from inappropriate would be a good thing.

[jonplackett]

That’s what I mean by adding legislation to make it automatic.

If it’s a kids device, then it should just block social media as required by the law. I agree that right now it’s difficult to set up - but this is a choice from Apple and Google. Just mandate sensible defaults.

A hardware block is much more effective than anything else that can be faked.

Just have the phone ask ‘is this a phone for a child’ and if you select ‘yes’ then it’s done.

[Joe_Cool]

Wasn't there a (proposed) "standard" in 90s (eMediaMark, I remembered) that just added a Header to HTTP in order to have ancient browsers automatically filter adult content.

That would easily be enforceable by making a "kid mode" enabled and locked down by a parent with a password mandatory on devices. Then you could have something like this:

    Adult-Content: true
    Age-Threshold: 18

suggested here: https://digitalbiztalk.com/article/a-better-way-the-adult-co...

eMediaMark is now Internet Content Rating the stuff I was remembering can be seen here: https://icr.chit.eu/

You can just take that, it's been there for decades.

[pocksuppet]

Yes that's basically what the California law does. It says all devices shall have parental controls and they shall actually work. But I thought you hated it.

[lugu]

I am curious if you know how to enforce this on a general purpose computer.

[jonplackett]

This isn’t that hard to solve.

Kids have their own account on the computer.

Make it the law that if a computer account is set up as a kids account it must send some kind of not-adult header with all requests. Enforce that in the OS so it can’t be messed with.

Leave non-kid accounts alone.

Make it the default thing that happens if you set it up as a kids account so anyone can do it.

[bluebarbet]

Thinking aloud here, but perhaps the answer is in the question: general-purpose computers get a free pass. Point being that kids generally don't use such things. Because otherwise I have exactly the same question as you. It's an existential question for software freedom.

[ozim]

Problem now is bunches of parents don’t give a damn. So if your kid gets phone locked up others will make fun of him at school and kid might be outsider.

Other parents are the problem, not technical setups.

[protocolture]

Ok but everyone suffering because some parents are bad seems like a shitty policy.

[ozim]

It is not „some parents”, problem is really big.

[mx7zysuj4xew]

Okay, so we need to have stronger and more strict CPS enforcement

If parents can't take care of their kids they clearly should be taken away

[rustcleaner]

>There's no controversy in having drugs, guns, alcohol, porn and other things 'behind the counter'

There is controversy! My grandfather and his schoolmates all regularly brought hunting rifles on their trips to the schoolhouse and home (1930s), to hunt opportune meals. There was never any problem with school shootings, which IMO are likely the fault of the prison-authoritarian style that schools morphed into during the latter-half of the 20th century. He had me drink shots with him when I was under 10 years old, because he wanted to make sure I knew drinking was ultimately a boring, uninteresting, stupid activity. Alcohol was always available and I was even welcome to partake anytime (as long as I did it at home)... I hardly ever touched the stuff, and still don't even now. He was a police officer and firearms instructor in a big midwest town, he even taught me how to shoot around that age. He taught me that government is neither god nor good, it is just raw power that has to steal from someone to give to another.

I miss my grandfather so much!

Also, thank goodness my folks were computer illiterate; I never had issues with blocking software (though I would probably have defeated any... easily). I grew up looking at porn and gore occasionally from my very early teens. Maybe try teaching your children about the world instead of hiding them away from it?

[hammock]

> It's absolutely a slippery slope

The slope has already slipped.

This is IDENTITY verification, not “age verification.”

You cannot verify your age without uploading your ID.

[nly]

In theory you could do this with 3rd party verification and zero knowledge proofs orchestrated by the users browser.

Mozilla Persona comes to mind.

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

This will never happen of course because the objective is to track your every move. The government want to know every pseudonym you use on every website.

[knollimar]

I think you'll find some parents feel that way about digital porn, too. There's a difference in supporting these laws from a privacy standpoint, esp that router and cell provider based controls are effective

[prolly97]

At least half of the people in this thread survived growing up with access to social without age verification.

And I'm pretty sure we've all had an encounter with some creep in some random chat room too.

We talked about these things at school and at home. Don't share things with people you don't know etc. Idk if it's illegal to tell kids what to do these days. But when I grew up, we were occasionally also told to get off the computers and touch grass.

I hope I'll get to raise my future kids myself. I think I can do a better job than the government :)

[lugu]

Soon enough you will realize that kids spend more time with their friends than with their parents. Most parents want their kids to be curious, build autonomy, and feel free. For this to work, they need a safe space. There are to place to enforce a policy: client side (parental control) or server side (age verification). Personally I don't want to transform my kids general purpose computer into a locked down infotainment machine. I think it would be a worst society if the norm becomes "this is not your device".

[201984]

How are kids supposed to have a safe space "to be curious, build autonomy, and feel free" if they can't get out from the authoritarian hands of their parents or their government?

[pocksuppet]

Good question. Maybe we can find the answer by getting them drunk at the strip club - two things that we'd be authoritarians if we prevented children from accessing.

[201984]

As if there's no difference between harmful substances combined with lewd activity, and talking with people on a video game.

https://metro.co.uk/2026/06/01/uk-considering-banning-kids-s...

[bluegatty]

"we've all had an encounter with some creep in some random chat room to"

My parents generation survived lead in gasoline and they never wore seatbelts or helmets.

"I think I can do a better job than the government :)"

Is exactly what their parents said about the government telling them they have to get their kids to wear seat belts and helmets.

I don't think this argument works for two reasons:

1) It don't address the materiality of the concern.

If 'creeps in chat rooms' are causing material harm, it's an issue, then youre making the 'anti vaxxer' / 'anti seatbelt' / 'anti helmet' argument.

I'm not saying you are - if 'creeps in chatrooms' really is a 'lesser issue' - then you're not making a bad argument at all.

The real issue is the 'materiality' of these things.

'Creeps in chatrooms' is a harder thing to assess, but it's real, if it is real, we can't just dismiss it.

2) "I think I can do a better job than the government "

If someone wants to protest the governments current age restrictions cigarettes - and also not vaccinate their kids - that's a choice.

But this argument is usually made by people who don't have kids in their life and haven't yet realized that 'the all or nothing internet' is not really a choice, it's chaos.

Lack of very basic regulations means people aren't afforded the opportunity, in a way the government is dictating that 'kids will get guns and porn and that's it'.

The alternative argument - is that we can have age restrictions and parents can then be in a position to actually be parents, and make a choice.

'Slippery slope notwithstanding' ... because it's a complciated issue

[mx7zysuj4xew]

Yes and that chaos is called freedom

   haven't yet realized that 'the all or nothing internet' is not really a choice, it's chaos.

[protocolture]

>At least half of the people in this thread survived growing up with access to social without age verification.

I was like 8 - 10 years old, I wandered into the "Adults Only" chat room on Microsoft Networks (Oh sweet, I thought, they have a small pen to keep the boring adults in, better check on them) and said "Hi everyone my name is X and I am Y years old" and everyone was nice to me and said hello. I got bored and left.