[somelamer567]

(This comment is addressed to peer comments, not the parent post.)

It's silly to say "Get better at parenting", when parents who have no specialist training, are literally facing off against trillion-dollar companies with thousands of industrial psychologists and data scientists hell-bent on making their products as addictive and profitable as possible.

There are huge information- and power asymmetries at play here. Just shouting: "Parent your kids" better is simplistic, stupid and wrong IMHO.

[noirscape]

It's also worth noting that some of those trillion dollar companies have had staggeringly bad responses when confronted with the fact child predators are running amok on their platform.

The CEO of Roblox is probably the single easiest example to point at; when confronted about his platforms issues when it comes to enabling child abuse, the first response he had was to claim that child predators were an untapped market and then claim to be interested in adding a dating site feature to Roblox.

That's the kind of rethoric these bad laws are a response to, and is the elephant in the room that a lot of the tech industry fails to recognize. (Including the privacy advocates, for whom every nail looks like it has a hammer shaped solution.) Age verification isn't a good solution to this problem, but it at least forces the hands of these companies to address it if they don't want to face jailtime for knowingly abetting predators - they can't pretend to have clean hands anymore if they're mandated to verify user ages.

There's almost certainly better solutions, but that's also why attestation (where the source device transmits the user's age, rather than storing a ton of PII of them elsewhere) misses the mark. Attestation doesn't fix that problem.

[inigyou]

Attestation won't solve the problem of a predator also claiming to be a child, but what if attested children could only talk to friends added by the linked parent account? There are in between solutions that don't involve total surveillance.

[soco]

I also assume the "get better at parenting" folks have zero kids themselves, and likely (because HN) work directly with those technologies targeted by the governmental measures. But answering to their point, getting better at healthcare only worked when the society stepped in, also getting better at pensions, at work-life balance or gender equality. So yes, I WILL get better at parenting, namely by supporting all other parents as well and putting the technology under our control - not the other way around.

[somelamer567]

I'd go further (as a parent of kids of school age):

It takes a village to raise a child. It's all well and good for childless techbros to say "Raise your kids" properly, and be subject to the tender mercies of the tech giants, but we stand a fighting chance if parents, schools, child development specialists etc, rally to get some common-sense controls in place.

The internet is a free fire zone today. This needs to change, and techbros just saying "Be a better parent" is a lazy, cynical cop-out.

[netsharc]

Parenting in the pre-online days was probably a lot easier: in general you know who's talking to your kids: they're probably playing in the {street,park,diner,mall} with their friends, or they're in their room listening to music or playing on {game console,PC} which are offline.

Now, kids have phones and Internet-connected devices and the whole world can reach them 24/7, and that includes a lot of creeps.