| The only way to force sites to exclude children is to have them ID everyone. This is why forcing each site to restrict access is a terrible idea. It’s a backdoor to destroying everyone’s privacy. What we really need is for each of these sites to advertise its category or age targets, similar to how TV shows have a rating. Then end user devices like phones and browsers should have the option of setting parental controls to lock out those sites. Countries could mandate that parents set age controls on their kids devices if they way. No privacy violations needed. The problem is we seem to be entering an era where politicians (and many individuals, evidenced by the comments on Hacker News) want much more extreme control over other people’s and parent’s activity. They don’t care if this requires we all surrender our rights to privacy and turn over identification to megacorps to talk to each other on the internet. They’re hell bent on controlling what other people can do or see on the internet and they think these laws will surgically do that in their favor, often with the assumption that their own websites and services will be kindly exempted. Yet we’re already seeing these laws or individual companies trying to get ahead of laws extend beyond what people thought the targets were going to be (TikTok, Facebook, Instagram) and into services most people use like YouTube, Reddit, and Discord. Everyone hates when this starts happening to them. It’s really scary that so many people are welcoming these heavy laws without stopping to think that they might be a bad solution because they never imagine it applying to themself, only to other people they want to control. |