[saghm]

> If you give your kid WhatsApp access because that's how 95% of their peers text each other, then your kid has access to a hidden chat that can only be revealed by typing a secret code in the search bar.

So the solution to parents deciding to give their kids access to stuff is to make me flash my ID every time I go online on one of my devices that I use in my childless household? And you're confident that there won't be plenty of parents who just put their ID information in for their kids anyhow?

[ars]

That's an argument you made, I was simply responding to this idea that parents don't want to parent. It's not true, they do, they just can't.

A solution is needed, and I think age verification is a good start - divide apps into kid apps, and adult apps. Kid apps will be made such that parents have full access to them, and they are blocked from social networks, only individual messages, and pre-planned groups.

Other solutions might also work - I'm not stuck on any particular one. But they all start by making it impossible for kids to access the adult internet (and I don't mean porn, I mean unrestricted communication).

Do you have a solution? And again, don't say "just parent the kid", because we've established that as impossible with modern devices.

[saghm]

> I was simply responding to this idea that parents don't want to parent. It's not true, they do, they just can't.

I never claimed otherwise.

> A solution is needed, and I think age verification is a good start - divide apps into kid apps, and adult apps.

That's where I disagree. The existence of a problem that a lot of people want to solve doesn't mean that literally anything is better than nothing. We have much larger societal problems with known solutions that don't get implemented because some people argue that they introduce other problems that have gone an awfully long time without implementing (e.g. healthcare costs and universal healthcare, mass shootings and gun control). I've yet to see a plausible explanation for why this is so urgent that it requires addressing immediately by an invasive solution, but there's a pretty plausible explanation for why this one is so much more palatable to the people passing laws: the surveillance is useful to them for other reasons.

> Do you have a solution? And again, don't say "just parent the kid", because we've established that as impossible with modern devices.

Again, by that logic, we should have had medicare for all and enforced strict gun control decades ago. It's hard to believe that this is a consistent argument if you're not as vigorously arguing in favor of stuff like that.