| HN Mirror

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.