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.
Sounds very similar to the California bill that passed a few months ago - the one HN absolutely hated. The person who does device initial setup says whether the account is a child or adult, and transmits this to websites so they can block the content appropriately. (The site transmitting a rating doesn't work because most sites that aren't porn sites have mixed content )https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181208
Not the same. I’m suggesting the site is required to transmit a category or rating and then end user devices have the option of filtering.
The word “option” is a key difference. I don’t think we should be forcing everyone to go through these age checks or thinking we can actual ban under-16s or other age groups from sites. There’s no way to do this without forcing everyone through an ID process, which is where a lot of these laws are heading.
Make it a parental controls thing and spread information about how parental controls work.
GP's proposal does content filtering on the user's machine. Your age info never leaves your own device. The Californian proposal requires telling the service your age. I can see why HN absolutely hates the later given the HN crowd's general attitude towards data collection.
In Australia, back in 2021, we had a senior politician run out of politics because a relatively small-time YouTuber just wouldn't shut up about his connections to organised crime. And friendlyjordies house was eventually firebombed by the organised criminals too, so that was interesting.
Now obviously one bad apple doesn't spoil the whole bunch [0] but it always struck me as the sort of thing that would ruffle feathers in parliament. I'm not surprised to see our regulations described as among the world's toughest and I doubt it is going to stop here, there is a very motivated faction who want to be able to shut troublemakers up.
[0] Barilaro was only the deputy premier of New South Wales at the time, not anything important. Ow my sarcasm gland is strained now.
One bad apple does spoil the bunch. Apples release a gas when rotting which accelerates the rotting of nearby ones. And in politics corruption spreads.
Why is it not possible to require websites that wish to market to children to be certified as "child safe". Such sites would be audited by an independent entity that would grant them some form of encrypted key. These could be in age bands, e.g. <6yr, <12 yrs, <16 yrs, etc. also also possibly geographically.
We do this for many other things, from toys to public venues.
Parents could then set their child's device to only allow access to sites with the appropriate certification.
This way the children are as safe as their parents allow them to be, without sharing their child's identity, and the rest of the population also doesn't have to share their identity with dubious authentication service or the government.
There's probably something wrong with this idea, if so I'd be glad to hear it!
The economic reality is that none of the social media websites would pass the test without a significant hit to their profits. If you want to see the long-term economic projections of a social media website without the younger market see Facebook.
It's like asking tobacco companies to reduce the toxicity and addiction of their products, inevitable collapse.
The reality is that the business model itself is inherently toxic.
Even when cigarettes were smoked by ~50% of the adult population, there were restrictions on sales to children. Why can we not accept the same for websites?
1. A tech solution like this is unlikely to work since kids will be highly motivated to circumvent it and will likely be more tech savvy than their parents.
2. Leaving whether or not to allow social media use up to parental discretion creates a situation where some kids get permission to use social media and the rest use it anyways because of peer pressure.
3. If tackling the problem from the side of children and parents doesn't work, you can try to address it by acting on the social media companies themselves. Unfortunately, these companies will resist any effort to make their products less addictive. Social media companies are mostly American and lobby (bribe) the U.S. government into taking punitive action against anyone who tries to tax or regulate them in a way that actually impacts their bottom line. Since you can't tax/regulate them without facing reprisals, one alternative is to ban them as ineffectually as possible. e.g. Australian kids are still using social media, so the social media companies don't really care. They may actually benefit from the cool/rebel factor their services have been granted.
It doesn't have to work 100%, just add enough friction. We bypassed game site blocks in IT class but we felt dodgy about it and did our work most of the time.
The same problem exists for almost any product that might be a risk to children, from cleaning products to "adult" literature.
Parents would be much more able to restrict the devices a child has access to (or its controls) than the websites they visit (absent website certification).
Mixed content isn't a problem for broadcast TV or newspapers. They simply avoid publishing material not appropriate for children, e.g. broadcast news programs don't show gore, even when a place has been bombed and is littered with body parts.
It would be a ban only to children. "Addictive" sites without certification could still be accessed by those who are no longer their parent's responsibility.
Example I'm running my personal academic website and I research something like human sexuality or transgender people how will this be enforced since the website is just one person? Remember people in high school have been credited authors on research papers.
Protecting children is a real problem, the internet right now is doing massive damage to everyone (not only children but for some reason we don't protect adults). Opportunists are seeing the opportunity to paperclip mass surveillance onto actual child protection efforts.
We can fight this by supporting child protection mechanisms that don't act as mass surveillance, such as the one in California that merely reports whether root said the user is a child, and fighting ones that do, such as the one in New York that checks your ID.
I’m really not liking the prospective combination of a bunch of independently managed collections of driver’s license scans with no especial guarantee of security across the disparate spread of vendors struggling to remain compliant with layered sets of state and country based laws + the increasing ease of identity theft or of at least “grandma, please send me bail money, I’ll even call you over Facetime and prove it’s really me” types of deepfake scams that can be performed with the assistance of AI.
We really need to start discussing these laws by what they’re requiring. Too many people see “law bans kids from social media” and get excited because they think kids shouldn’t use social media, but they don’t read far enough into the details to see that the law actually requires sites to ID check all users to accomplish the stated goal.
Even the phrase “social media site” is a problem for these conversations because a lot of people don’t consider themselves as using social media. Yet we’re seeing laws start to cover YouTube and Reddit and companies like Discord are self-imposing age checks for features through an ID gating process. Once people start realizing that these laws are going to have broad impacts to internet sites they use, they will become much less popular.
That's why we need to push for solutions that preserve privacy while also reducing child predation. I've always thought the California solution was quite good, but HN disagrees. Here's what you need for a complete compliant implementation of the California law (plus the provision that only root can change account birth dates): https://monolith-project.org/blog/age-verification/
A ban is a good idea, but not by eroding the privacy of every adult, for all of the reasons stated elsewhere.
I think most people agree that social media is toxic, not just for children, but adults too.
What I don't understand is why parents don't take responsibility for reducing the contact with such harmful products.
Even growing up in the 70's, most children didn't smoke or drink alcohol, not because they didn't have access to it, but because of the wrath of their parents.
> most children didn't smoke or drink alcohol, not because they didn't have access to it, but because of the wrath of their parents.
I think you have answered your own question. The children who need this ban most are the children of parents who don't pay attention/care what their children are doing. So the state has to do it for them.
Have a look at what's going on in the foster care system and tell me with a serious face that taking children away from parents, outside the absolutely worst cases, is actually helping the children.
> What I don't understand is why parents don't take responsibility for reducing the contact with such harmful products.
It's critical mass. I didn't want my 13-year-old daughter on social media, because even 7 years ago we knew the harms. We were firm, and we kept her off it. The problem was that we were attempting to help her with her mental health, but when you're literally the only kid who didn't read the group chat from your friend group the night before, that does remarkable damage to your mental health. It cuts off an enormous part of their social life.
If the majority of kids weren't using it then it'd be easy, but because it's their primary form of communication, it's incredibly difficult.
Do you think there could be explicitly child-friendly social media? I don't know how you'd get past the network effect, but could it work? Maybe adults would have to set up groups, and connections could only be established with Bluetooth or something to ensure physical proximity (yes you could cheat but you'd need weird hardware or software to do so).
Adults setting up groups would be so that you could have a group for "year 11 maths class" but not for "people who hate susan"
> Even growing up in the 70's, most children didn't smoke or drink alcohol
The smoking rates and underage alcohol consumption went down since 1970ties. And afaik, most people start drinking alcohol as teenagers or sooner. What is stopping them is access or lack of it, not fear of parents.
Grapheneos has stated that they won't be adding any identity verification or scanning, ever.
It's highly usable and has very similar UX to Pixels. I switched from iOS and have found the UI to be better although it's largely the same on stock Pixel.
There's over 99% app compatibility and the only failing apps are additional restrictions added by a small subset (less than 10%) of banking and government apps. There are also occasional crashes in apps when GrapheneOS blocks bugged code with their exploit protections, but these can be disabled.
iOS users can continue to use iMessage with OpenBubbles, but switching contacts to Signal is becoming easier with its growing popularity.
Not all do, but it's positioning itself as a legitimate secure OS and not some weird shady crap, so I heard some people had success petitioning their banks to allow it. Sometimes they have an OS whitelist to avoid shady or insecure devices (thanks government regulation!), but since GOS is not shady or insecure it just has to be added to the whitelist. Good luck reaching the right people, but if the alternative is closing your account... sometimes they listen. They might also have an account flag to bypass OS whitelist for you.
Why not bind it to the phone itself? The phone (or a phone app) would verify you're an adult, and beyond that the website would know nothing but that 1 bit of information.
There's still the issue of how to verify the user to give them that 1 bit. The current tools do not trust the user or the user's device, because the user could lie or modify the software on their device. But once my ID leaves the device, it becomes a privacy issue. You also have the problem that every pre-2026 device no longer functions with any site that requires the 1 bit.
Isn't this already a solved issue in crypto? You just need 1 trusted website to verify your identity and sign your bit. Instead of having to trust every website.
It's troubling this is occurring in all these countries at the same time despite the politicians not running on it and knowing that in many of these countries the "opposition" feigns opposition and would be pushing the exact same policy if in power. What are people in Western democracies actually allowed to vote for?
Where's the regulation of addictive dark patterns that hook kids and adults alike? Most jurisdictions regulate gambling to reduce societal harm. Social media is little different; it just has an advertising middle man.
> Most jurisdictions regulate gambling to reduce societal harm.
The UK tried to ban gambling advertising during football matches but... "There were over 5,000 visible gambling advertisements during a recent Premier League match despite a ban that was expected to result in a reduction, researchers found."[0] That's one (1) televised match (you'd expect 3-4 at least per weekend to be televised.)
Not to mention that the Sky Sports coverage is sponsored by Bet365 (a gambling company, obvs.)
I expect any regulation of social media dark patterns to be equally successful...
The "whistle-to-whistle ban" was always poor legislation. By its own terms it only suppresses TV betting adverts in a defined window and lapses at 9pm, and it never touched the categories that actually make up most of the advertising we see; shirts, hoardings, and structural branding, etc. It was an utterly pointless measure that serves to achieve not a single one of it's initial goals.
Not much. They just have a very comfortable level of wealth that insulates them from much of society's pressures. They probably don't even really understand that 10 year olds are using their platforms and the effect of that - they're half-insane paperclip maximizers.
I'm back in the UK for a bit and one of the first things I notice besides the infuriating and pointless "Accept Cookies" popups on every webpage is that I can't view half the new about Palestine on Twitter/X without handing over a government ID to prove I'm an adult. No thanks. Please let's find a way to protect children without giving up the right to anonymity on the internet.
Outrage against what? That age restrictions haven't been enforced sooner?
I read an article where some children were asked about their social media use. A few made the point that they just felt crap after a scrolling session. I think everyone here knows what it's like to realise you just lost an hour to two of potential productive time to HN. And this is just a text site.
Social media is engineered to steal your attention and feed you junk, divisive information. Why on earth would we allow kids to become addicted to that?
I agree with that. Platforms have continuously added more and more things to create accounts, and the history shows that people submit and give up pretty easily.
I think it's a jump to take that historic metric and expect the same results with ID verification...but we shall see.
I certainly don't know anyone in my peer group who would submit ID for account access. By the time the kids can finally sign up for there great shiny social media account with valid ID, hopefully something better has taken its place with roots pointing towards the old ways of the internet.
People stopped trusting tech industry and stopped seeing it as something that helps or good or better then politicians. Majority of its complains about freedom and what not are not really about freedom are self serving bullshit and its actively trying to cause harm. Tech industry is really good at blaming the user while spending millions on making the user do what they are blaming them for.
So, result is that people at best don't care. They see the whole fight as basically assholes vs assholes ... and tech is perceived as bigger assholes.
They move towards having every adult "show their id" when doing stuff online.
This could have easily been solved by parental controls and banning advertising towards children (or ban advertising all together for underage accounts, everywhere... by a new phone, set that it's a phone for an underage person, add a guardian who can unlock stuff if needed, and no ads anywhere are allowed).
But nope, instead we get face scans and digital IDs.
this is how power politics works? There is a massive, population wide complaint.. something that annoys or damages many, many people. Politics waits, studies, private meetings .. of course there are business who are making money actively, perhaps making money very actively.. they meet with the politicians.. activated individuals form some kind of complaining platform but lack funding and force.. the problems' damage increase.. Then, there are the enforcement groups. The courts, their financial interests, and the worldview. "Everyone must show ID (insert preferred ID)" We must have records for the enforcement. We require the ability to verify.
There are some people, many in uniform, who have already accepted the covenant that their actions are recorded and monitored each day. What do you have to hide? they ask rhetorically
Then the politics. Use the mass aggreavement, and accomplish the goals of the enforcement groups. Use the need to fix, to implement the rule, despite the protest and despite the civil liberties views. The politics needs the damage to push the unwanted changes. See also big business for a window into this.
Many parties have already heard (for thirty+ years?) that "freedom" builds a vigorous communications network. But now, this is different. These will be the rules (insert Law) and We will Enforce them (insert paid by taxes bureaucracies, and paid by penalties enforcements).
Techno-libertarianism was always a con. I'm convinced it was an information operation organised by enemies of the West to "prep the battlefield" to enable revisionist state aggression against the West in the cognitive domain.
We mustn't forget that the Russians claimed that the internet was created by the CIA to attack Russia and steal its resources -- after a Russian clairvoyant told Vladimir Putin she read Madeleine Albright's mind and said that the US is plotting to weaken Russia and "steal its resources". We also must not forget that Russia is corrupt from top to bottom, and that Russian intelligence and organised crime have effectively merged into a lawless juggernaut that threatens the entire civilised world.
Today, Russian information-warfare specialists and gangsters have turned the Western information space into a free-fire zone. And there is literally NOTHING we can do about it, because weak minds and fifth-columnists on our side demand we unilaterally disarm and NOT enforce mandatory strong ID for activity on the internet.
The most important question here is not whether social media access should be banned to children. The question is whether everyone's rights should be stripped in an effort to enforce such a ban. I find this whole globally coordinated endeavor to be outrageous in its illiberality, and manipulative in its appeal to protecting children to justify these encroachments on people's rights.
Quite right. Around 2 million UK adults don't have photo ID, mostly concentrated among poorer and less educated people, and many of those have difficulty getting credit card for the same reason. The UK is violating their basic ECHR rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assocation, and the peaceful enjoyment of their property, and it's unnecessary because we already have parental controls.
I think it's the other way around. Only by raising children without access to social media —and ideally without access to online mobile-phone games, subscriptions and other pay as you go schemes—, can we make sure that the next generation of young adults will care for their freedom and privacy.
Today's rights will not matter tomorrow if the next generation is raised without any notion of privacy and ownership.
Give your ID and full name and address to every site you access so that people care about freedom and privacy. Yeah. Genius idea. Strip away everyone's rights so they think "gee, I wish I had freedom", then never let them have freedom again.
I never wrote something like this, I didn't discuss the implementation mechanism. The parent said the most important thing is not the children but some rights that in a few years are not gonna mean anything the way we go. I think it's the other way around.
I also think your idea of rights may be skewed. It is your right to not give a name and address to a website. If a website requires it, then just skip it. If you cannot skip a website, then you've already lost your freedom.
Someone in another post was claiming there was a "right" to anonymity on the internet. That was news to me.
The "rights" of my children to not be exploited by Zuckerberg and the rest of them are far more important as far as I'm concerned.
To counter the privacy nuts, no age gates and social media bans won't lead to a North Korean style government. If anything it is the antidote as children will have a chance to grow without being radicalised by the attention stealing algorithms. The Stasi in East Germany did rather well without internet age gates.
You mean the people's rights to lure and attack my children? It's not a rhetorical question, it is exactly what is currently happening (and not only with children but okay).
> You mean the people's rights to lure and attack my children?
Most child abductions and abuse[0] are from within the family or by people known to the child. Internet strangers are the absolute least of your worries.
If you're letting your kids be lured and attacked, that's a parenting issue. Responsible parents aren't letting their kids slip out alone. The better solution to this would be some sort of penalty for irresponsible parenting.
> Responsible parents aren't letting their kids slip out alone.
Frankly, this is nonsense. European countries like Germany or Switzerland of France find it completely normal for their kids to walk to school without parents (at 6 or even 5 years old) or to play outside without parents. That is responsible parenting and good for kids themselves.
The American idea that parents must not let kids out of their sight until they are 18 is absurd. And then again, even Americans complain about it, because it is nonsense to Americans too - it is just that rhetorical device to blame the victim rather then the perpetrator.
Protecting children is hard. Generations of parents have been put under loads of pointless stress so that they leave lots of education to "the system" and it's clerks, most of which were only good enough at their jobs. Things developed, and mistakes of deliberately mislead parents were conventionally framed as life and life's lessons.
We are talking about thousands of kids/adolescents raped every party weekend in US and Europe ( rape is jut one extreme example ).
The role of social media in the mere exposure effect to character types and behavioral patterns is obvious--and probably well studied--but "it's just social media - raise your kids well and stop blaming others" works about as well as outlining how certain pop segments were sabotaged for decades and couldn't even exert the free will to do things better/differently--even though they noticed the premises and conclusions of certain problems--because it went against the advice of figures who were perceived as authoritative.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are ways to implement this without affecting anyone's privacy. For example here in Poland everyone has an ID and everyone that wants to use egov services, file taxes, or check their prescriptions online has a cryptographic identity.
It would be trivial to implement a challenge that would work like this:
- the site requests you to sign a challenge
- you sign the challenge and provide it to third party verifier. (can be a gov site or a private company)
- service verifies your signature and gives you the copy of the challenge signed by itself only so your gov ID is never revealed.
- you supply the signed challenge to the original site. You prove you're an adult.
Being Polish and knowing our politics let me tell you how this will go down. The current gov is the one that will swallow everything that comes from the EU (because they are led by a guy that was the deputy leader of the biggest EU parliament party). Same guys that wasted billions trying to implement the e-prescription service that was implemented by the next gov in a fraction of time and cost.
In short they are horribly incompetent on tech so I expect the first version of this will be as bad as the crypto laws they proposed.
But thankfully the president is not from their camp and he will not sign any BS (if it starts looking like he might there will be mass protests - just look up the scale of protests last time they tried to censor the internet)
And then they will be forced to change it.
There is no technical reason why you should disclose your identity to proove you have one. That is the entire point of having those crypto identities. That you can manage how much information you provide.
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.
Sounds very similar to the California bill that passed a few months ago - the one HN absolutely hated. The person who does device initial setup says whether the account is a child or adult, and transmits this to websites so they can block the content appropriately. (The site transmitting a rating doesn't work because most sites that aren't porn sites have mixed content )https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47181208
Not the same. I’m suggesting the site is required to transmit a category or rating and then end user devices have the option of filtering.
The word “option” is a key difference. I don’t think we should be forcing everyone to go through these age checks or thinking we can actual ban under-16s or other age groups from sites. There’s no way to do this without forcing everyone through an ID process, which is where a lot of these laws are heading.
Make it a parental controls thing and spread information about how parental controls work.
GP's proposal does content filtering on the user's machine. Your age info never leaves your own device. The Californian proposal requires telling the service your age. I can see why HN absolutely hates the later given the HN crowd's general attitude towards data collection.
In Australia, back in 2021, we had a senior politician run out of politics because a relatively small-time YouTuber just wouldn't shut up about his connections to organised crime. And friendlyjordies house was eventually firebombed by the organised criminals too, so that was interesting.
Now obviously one bad apple doesn't spoil the whole bunch [0] but it always struck me as the sort of thing that would ruffle feathers in parliament. I'm not surprised to see our regulations described as among the world's toughest and I doubt it is going to stop here, there is a very motivated faction who want to be able to shut troublemakers up.
[0] Barilaro was only the deputy premier of New South Wales at the time, not anything important. Ow my sarcasm gland is strained now.
To be fair, barilaro called himself 'pork barilaro'. I don't think anyone shed a tear for him being run out of politics.
I certainly don't think it has anything to do with this.
One bad apple does spoil the bunch. Apples release a gas when rotting which accelerates the rotting of nearby ones. And in politics corruption spreads.
Would someone be able to comment on this:
Why is it not possible to require websites that wish to market to children to be certified as "child safe". Such sites would be audited by an independent entity that would grant them some form of encrypted key. These could be in age bands, e.g. <6yr, <12 yrs, <16 yrs, etc. also also possibly geographically.
We do this for many other things, from toys to public venues.
Parents could then set their child's device to only allow access to sites with the appropriate certification.
This way the children are as safe as their parents allow them to be, without sharing their child's identity, and the rest of the population also doesn't have to share their identity with dubious authentication service or the government.
There's probably something wrong with this idea, if so I'd be glad to hear it!
The economic reality is that none of the social media websites would pass the test without a significant hit to their profits. If you want to see the long-term economic projections of a social media website without the younger market see Facebook.
It's like asking tobacco companies to reduce the toxicity and addiction of their products, inevitable collapse.
The reality is that the business model itself is inherently toxic.
Even when cigarettes were smoked by ~50% of the adult population, there were restrictions on sales to children. Why can we not accept the same for websites?
1. A tech solution like this is unlikely to work since kids will be highly motivated to circumvent it and will likely be more tech savvy than their parents.
2. Leaving whether or not to allow social media use up to parental discretion creates a situation where some kids get permission to use social media and the rest use it anyways because of peer pressure.
3. If tackling the problem from the side of children and parents doesn't work, you can try to address it by acting on the social media companies themselves. Unfortunately, these companies will resist any effort to make their products less addictive. Social media companies are mostly American and lobby (bribe) the U.S. government into taking punitive action against anyone who tries to tax or regulate them in a way that actually impacts their bottom line. Since you can't tax/regulate them without facing reprisals, one alternative is to ban them as ineffectually as possible. e.g. Australian kids are still using social media, so the social media companies don't really care. They may actually benefit from the cool/rebel factor their services have been granted.
It doesn't have to work 100%, just add enough friction. We bypassed game site blocks in IT class but we felt dodgy about it and did our work most of the time.
The same problem exists for almost any product that might be a risk to children, from cleaning products to "adult" literature.
Parents would be much more able to restrict the devices a child has access to (or its controls) than the websites they visit (absent website certification).
1. You can't forge a cryptographic signature
2. Fine the parents
https://monolith-project.org/blog/age-verification/
The California law might interest you (but with reverse data flow - the way you proposed doesn't work because most websites have mixed content)
Mixed content would have to be tagged as such.
Mixed content isn't a problem for broadcast TV or newspapers. They simply avoid publishing material not appropriate for children, e.g. broadcast news programs don't show gore, even when a place has been bombed and is littered with body parts.
That sounds somewhat like what Canada is trying to do. Its bill makes certain types of content unavailable to people under the age of 16.
Canadian kids will be able to access social media, as long as that site has effective means to prevent bullying and similar restrictions.
https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/safe-soc...
I doubt any sites are actually going to comply, so it'll be ban in practice.
It would be a ban only to children. "Addictive" sites without certification could still be accessed by those who are no longer their parent's responsibility.
Example I'm running my personal academic website and I research something like human sexuality or transgender people how will this be enforced since the website is just one person? Remember people in high school have been credited authors on research papers.
How many 10 yr olds are going to read a academic article on transgender studies?
And if they are curious about the question, it would be better if they found sources that frame the issue appropriately for their age.
This seems to be a situation where the stated problem (protect children) is different to the actual problem (surveillance).
Your proposal doesn't solve the actual problem.
Protecting children is a real problem, the internet right now is doing massive damage to everyone (not only children but for some reason we don't protect adults). Opportunists are seeing the opportunity to paperclip mass surveillance onto actual child protection efforts.
We can fight this by supporting child protection mechanisms that don't act as mass surveillance, such as the one in California that merely reports whether root said the user is a child, and fighting ones that do, such as the one in New York that checks your ID.
Surveillance of who by whom? Requiring identity disclosure guarantees surveillance.
I’m really not liking the prospective combination of a bunch of independently managed collections of driver’s license scans with no especial guarantee of security across the disparate spread of vendors struggling to remain compliant with layered sets of state and country based laws + the increasing ease of identity theft or of at least “grandma, please send me bail money, I’ll even call you over Facetime and prove it’s really me” types of deepfake scams that can be performed with the assistance of AI.
We really need to start discussing these laws by what they’re requiring. Too many people see “law bans kids from social media” and get excited because they think kids shouldn’t use social media, but they don’t read far enough into the details to see that the law actually requires sites to ID check all users to accomplish the stated goal.
Even the phrase “social media site” is a problem for these conversations because a lot of people don’t consider themselves as using social media. Yet we’re seeing laws start to cover YouTube and Reddit and companies like Discord are self-imposing age checks for features through an ID gating process. Once people start realizing that these laws are going to have broad impacts to internet sites they use, they will become much less popular.
That's why we need to push for solutions that preserve privacy while also reducing child predation. I've always thought the California solution was quite good, but HN disagrees. Here's what you need for a complete compliant implementation of the California law (plus the provision that only root can change account birth dates): https://monolith-project.org/blog/age-verification/
A ban is a good idea, but not by eroding the privacy of every adult, for all of the reasons stated elsewhere.
I think most people agree that social media is toxic, not just for children, but adults too.
What I don't understand is why parents don't take responsibility for reducing the contact with such harmful products.
Even growing up in the 70's, most children didn't smoke or drink alcohol, not because they didn't have access to it, but because of the wrath of their parents.
> most children didn't smoke or drink alcohol, not because they didn't have access to it, but because of the wrath of their parents.
I think you have answered your own question. The children who need this ban most are the children of parents who don't pay attention/care what their children are doing. So the state has to do it for them.
The state should take the children from them instead of destroying the rights of adults
Have a look at what's going on in the foster care system and tell me with a serious face that taking children away from parents, outside the absolutely worst cases, is actually helping the children.
> What I don't understand is why parents don't take responsibility for reducing the contact with such harmful products.
It's critical mass. I didn't want my 13-year-old daughter on social media, because even 7 years ago we knew the harms. We were firm, and we kept her off it. The problem was that we were attempting to help her with her mental health, but when you're literally the only kid who didn't read the group chat from your friend group the night before, that does remarkable damage to your mental health. It cuts off an enormous part of their social life.
If the majority of kids weren't using it then it'd be easy, but because it's their primary form of communication, it's incredibly difficult.
Do you think there could be explicitly child-friendly social media? I don't know how you'd get past the network effect, but could it work? Maybe adults would have to set up groups, and connections could only be established with Bluetooth or something to ensure physical proximity (yes you could cheat but you'd need weird hardware or software to do so).
Adults setting up groups would be so that you could have a group for "year 11 maths class" but not for "people who hate susan"
> Even growing up in the 70's, most children didn't smoke or drink alcohol
The smoking rates and underage alcohol consumption went down since 1970ties. And afaik, most people start drinking alcohol as teenagers or sooner. What is stopping them is access or lack of it, not fear of parents.
GrapheneOS has released their Android 17 update.
Grapheneos has stated that they won't be adding any identity verification or scanning, ever.
It's highly usable and has very similar UX to Pixels. I switched from iOS and have found the UI to be better although it's largely the same on stock Pixel.
There's over 99% app compatibility and the only failing apps are additional restrictions added by a small subset (less than 10%) of banking and government apps. There are also occasional crashes in apps when GrapheneOS blocks bugged code with their exploit protections, but these can be disabled.
iOS users can continue to use iMessage with OpenBubbles, but switching contacts to Signal is becoming easier with its growing popularity.
My bank app works on GrapheneOS FWIW.
Not all do, but it's positioning itself as a legitimate secure OS and not some weird shady crap, so I heard some people had success petitioning their banks to allow it. Sometimes they have an OS whitelist to avoid shady or insecure devices (thanks government regulation!), but since GOS is not shady or insecure it just has to be added to the whitelist. Good luck reaching the right people, but if the alternative is closing your account... sometimes they listen. They might also have an account flag to bypass OS whitelist for you.
But mine just worked.
Why not bind it to the phone itself? The phone (or a phone app) would verify you're an adult, and beyond that the website would know nothing but that 1 bit of information.
That's how the California law works
There's still the issue of how to verify the user to give them that 1 bit. The current tools do not trust the user or the user's device, because the user could lie or modify the software on their device. But once my ID leaves the device, it becomes a privacy issue. You also have the problem that every pre-2026 device no longer functions with any site that requires the 1 bit.
In the California law the verification is just assuming the person who bought the device is an adult.
This creates a grey zone where a 16yo could buy their own device and set themselves as an adult but grey zones like this aren't really a bad thing.
There's also no penalty for lying. If an adult wants a child to have an adult account, they can.
Isn't this already a solved issue in crypto? You just need 1 trusted website to verify your identity and sign your bit. Instead of having to trust every website.
It's troubling this is occurring in all these countries at the same time despite the politicians not running on it and knowing that in many of these countries the "opposition" feigns opposition and would be pushing the exact same policy if in power. What are people in Western democracies actually allowed to vote for?
Where's the regulation of addictive dark patterns that hook kids and adults alike? Most jurisdictions regulate gambling to reduce societal harm. Social media is little different; it just has an advertising middle man.
> Most jurisdictions regulate gambling to reduce societal harm.
The UK tried to ban gambling advertising during football matches but... "There were over 5,000 visible gambling advertisements during a recent Premier League match despite a ban that was expected to result in a reduction, researchers found."[0] That's one (1) televised match (you'd expect 3-4 at least per weekend to be televised.)
Not to mention that the Sky Sports coverage is sponsored by Bet365 (a gambling company, obvs.)
I expect any regulation of social media dark patterns to be equally successful...
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/articles/ce9ree15yd0o
The "whistle-to-whistle ban" was always poor legislation. By its own terms it only suppresses TV betting adverts in a defined window and lapses at 9pm, and it never touched the categories that actually make up most of the advertising we see; shirts, hoardings, and structural branding, etc. It was an utterly pointless measure that serves to achieve not a single one of it's initial goals.
> It was an utterly pointless measure that serves to achieve not a single one of it's initial goals.
Such is the way with UKGOV, sadly.
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_Social media company execs_ also want to curb their children's social media access.
I did think it was interesting to read that Steve Jobs banned his kids from having screen in their rooms on day 1.
Zuckerberg apparently does the same.
What do the billionaires know that we don't?
Not much. They just have a very comfortable level of wealth that insulates them from much of society's pressures. They probably don't even really understand that 10 year olds are using their platforms and the effect of that - they're half-insane paperclip maximizers.
I'm back in the UK for a bit and one of the first things I notice besides the infuriating and pointless "Accept Cookies" popups on every webpage is that I can't view half the new about Palestine on Twitter/X without handing over a government ID to prove I'm an adult. No thanks. Please let's find a way to protect children without giving up the right to anonymity on the internet.
I'm not aware of any "right" to anonymity on the internet.
I would expect more outrage but it seems people are burned out/don’t care?
Outrage against what? That age restrictions haven't been enforced sooner?
I read an article where some children were asked about their social media use. A few made the point that they just felt crap after a scrolling session. I think everyone here knows what it's like to realise you just lost an hour to two of potential productive time to HN. And this is just a text site.
Social media is engineered to steal your attention and feed you junk, divisive information. Why on earth would we allow kids to become addicted to that?
Here in Poland people will start caring when this verification will be anything other that charge your (debit) card some amount.
No one will accept using their official electronic ID with Facebook etc
If that is how they implement it I expect a massive exodus from these platforms.
I agree with that. Platforms have continuously added more and more things to create accounts, and the history shows that people submit and give up pretty easily.
I think it's a jump to take that historic metric and expect the same results with ID verification...but we shall see.
I certainly don't know anyone in my peer group who would submit ID for account access. By the time the kids can finally sign up for there great shiny social media account with valid ID, hopefully something better has taken its place with roots pointing towards the old ways of the internet.
People stopped trusting tech industry and stopped seeing it as something that helps or good or better then politicians. Majority of its complains about freedom and what not are not really about freedom are self serving bullshit and its actively trying to cause harm. Tech industry is really good at blaming the user while spending millions on making the user do what they are blaming them for.
So, result is that people at best don't care. They see the whole fight as basically assholes vs assholes ... and tech is perceived as bigger assholes.
Did they really? Everyone I know trusts the tech industry.
Can we just separate Adult internet already? Some kind of VPN access or something where you id once and do whatever I want?
Why is this Reuters article the same one as 4 days ago but different date? Doesn't even include additional developments like Canada.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/australia-europe-co... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48539393)
They move towards having every adult "show their id" when doing stuff online.
This could have easily been solved by parental controls and banning advertising towards children (or ban advertising all together for underage accounts, everywhere... by a new phone, set that it's a phone for an underage person, add a guardian who can unlock stuff if needed, and no ads anywhere are allowed).
But nope, instead we get face scans and digital IDs.
Parental controls are what the California age attestation law does
this is how power politics works? There is a massive, population wide complaint.. something that annoys or damages many, many people. Politics waits, studies, private meetings .. of course there are business who are making money actively, perhaps making money very actively.. they meet with the politicians.. activated individuals form some kind of complaining platform but lack funding and force.. the problems' damage increase.. Then, there are the enforcement groups. The courts, their financial interests, and the worldview. "Everyone must show ID (insert preferred ID)" We must have records for the enforcement. We require the ability to verify.
There are some people, many in uniform, who have already accepted the covenant that their actions are recorded and monitored each day. What do you have to hide? they ask rhetorically
Then the politics. Use the mass aggreavement, and accomplish the goals of the enforcement groups. Use the need to fix, to implement the rule, despite the protest and despite the civil liberties views. The politics needs the damage to push the unwanted changes. See also big business for a window into this.
Many parties have already heard (for thirty+ years?) that "freedom" builds a vigorous communications network. But now, this is different. These will be the rules (insert Law) and We will Enforce them (insert paid by taxes bureaucracies, and paid by penalties enforcements).
All of that in a very organic, and not at all coordinated way.
yeah, definitely an organic think-tank behind this and other initiatives.
Techno-libertarianism was always a con. I'm convinced it was an information operation organised by enemies of the West to "prep the battlefield" to enable revisionist state aggression against the West in the cognitive domain.
We mustn't forget that the Russians claimed that the internet was created by the CIA to attack Russia and steal its resources -- after a Russian clairvoyant told Vladimir Putin she read Madeleine Albright's mind and said that the US is plotting to weaken Russia and "steal its resources". We also must not forget that Russia is corrupt from top to bottom, and that Russian intelligence and organised crime have effectively merged into a lawless juggernaut that threatens the entire civilised world.
Today, Russian information-warfare specialists and gangsters have turned the Western information space into a free-fire zone. And there is literally NOTHING we can do about it, because weak minds and fifth-columnists on our side demand we unilaterally disarm and NOT enforce mandatory strong ID for activity on the internet.
It's time to see this aggression for what it is.
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The most important question here is not whether social media access should be banned to children. The question is whether everyone's rights should be stripped in an effort to enforce such a ban. I find this whole globally coordinated endeavor to be outrageous in its illiberality, and manipulative in its appeal to protecting children to justify these encroachments on people's rights.
Quite right. Around 2 million UK adults don't have photo ID, mostly concentrated among poorer and less educated people, and many of those have difficulty getting credit card for the same reason. The UK is violating their basic ECHR rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assocation, and the peaceful enjoyment of their property, and it's unnecessary because we already have parental controls.
I have some really bad news about the freedom of offline speech in the UK.
Sounds exactly like the population worth monitoring the most
Most continential Europeans, like in Spain and France, have mandatory strong ID. I have never seen "paper please" there.
This argument simply doesn't work.
I think it's the other way around. Only by raising children without access to social media —and ideally without access to online mobile-phone games, subscriptions and other pay as you go schemes—, can we make sure that the next generation of young adults will care for their freedom and privacy.
Today's rights will not matter tomorrow if the next generation is raised without any notion of privacy and ownership.
Give your ID and full name and address to every site you access so that people care about freedom and privacy. Yeah. Genius idea. Strip away everyone's rights so they think "gee, I wish I had freedom", then never let them have freedom again.
I never wrote something like this, I didn't discuss the implementation mechanism. The parent said the most important thing is not the children but some rights that in a few years are not gonna mean anything the way we go. I think it's the other way around.
I also think your idea of rights may be skewed. It is your right to not give a name and address to a website. If a website requires it, then just skip it. If you cannot skip a website, then you've already lost your freedom.
Which rights, exactly?
Someone in another post was claiming there was a "right" to anonymity on the internet. That was news to me.
The "rights" of my children to not be exploited by Zuckerberg and the rest of them are far more important as far as I'm concerned.
To counter the privacy nuts, no age gates and social media bans won't lead to a North Korean style government. If anything it is the antidote as children will have a chance to grow without being radicalised by the attention stealing algorithms. The Stasi in East Germany did rather well without internet age gates.
You mean the people's rights to lure and attack my children? It's not a rhetorical question, it is exactly what is currently happening (and not only with children but okay).
> You mean the people's rights to lure and attack my children?
Most child abductions and abuse[0] are from within the family or by people known to the child. Internet strangers are the absolute least of your worries.
[0] At least in the UK
Then enable parental controls on your children's devices. But don't enable it on my device, because I'm an adult.
If you're letting your kids be lured and attacked, that's a parenting issue. Responsible parents aren't letting their kids slip out alone. The better solution to this would be some sort of penalty for irresponsible parenting.
I know this is a personal question, but i see this type of comment here so often, and it is hilariously naive. Do you have children?
> Responsible parents aren't letting their kids slip out alone.
Frankly, this is nonsense. European countries like Germany or Switzerland of France find it completely normal for their kids to walk to school without parents (at 6 or even 5 years old) or to play outside without parents. That is responsible parenting and good for kids themselves.
The American idea that parents must not let kids out of their sight until they are 18 is absurd. And then again, even Americans complain about it, because it is nonsense to Americans too - it is just that rhetorical device to blame the victim rather then the perpetrator.
> but okay
Serious topic, don't do that.
Protecting children is hard. Generations of parents have been put under loads of pointless stress so that they leave lots of education to "the system" and it's clerks, most of which were only good enough at their jobs. Things developed, and mistakes of deliberately mislead parents were conventionally framed as life and life's lessons.
We are talking about thousands of kids/adolescents raped every party weekend in US and Europe ( rape is jut one extreme example ).
The role of social media in the mere exposure effect to character types and behavioral patterns is obvious--and probably well studied--but "it's just social media - raise your kids well and stop blaming others" works about as well as outlining how certain pop segments were sabotaged for decades and couldn't even exert the free will to do things better/differently--even though they noticed the premises and conclusions of certain problems--because it went against the advice of figures who were perceived as authoritative.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe get good at parenting?
There are ways to implement this without affecting anyone's privacy. For example here in Poland everyone has an ID and everyone that wants to use egov services, file taxes, or check their prescriptions online has a cryptographic identity.
It would be trivial to implement a challenge that would work like this: - the site requests you to sign a challenge
- you sign the challenge and provide it to third party verifier. (can be a gov site or a private company)
- service verifies your signature and gives you the copy of the challenge signed by itself only so your gov ID is never revealed.
- you supply the signed challenge to the original site. You prove you're an adult.
Being Polish and knowing our politics let me tell you how this will go down. The current gov is the one that will swallow everything that comes from the EU (because they are led by a guy that was the deputy leader of the biggest EU parliament party). Same guys that wasted billions trying to implement the e-prescription service that was implemented by the next gov in a fraction of time and cost.
In short they are horribly incompetent on tech so I expect the first version of this will be as bad as the crypto laws they proposed.
But thankfully the president is not from their camp and he will not sign any BS (if it starts looking like he might there will be mass protests - just look up the scale of protests last time they tried to censor the internet)
And then they will be forced to change it.
There is no technical reason why you should disclose your identity to proove you have one. That is the entire point of having those crypto identities. That you can manage how much information you provide.