Discussion

Do Not Turn Child Protection Into Internet Access Control

jmcgough: What's sad is how effective this is. Religious groups figured out a few years ago that anti-porn groups accomplish nothing, but if you start an anti-trafficking group you can restrict porn access.

jameskilton: That's the trick, it's always been about control. No-one in such positions actually cares about the children.

cluckindan: It’s not even a debate if these controls are problematic. The litmus test is to mentally substitute the age field for an ancestry field and place the system in 1930’s Germany.Coincidently, that system was provided by IBM.

bilekas: It's too late and never about children, simply deeper forms of data harvesting and surveillance.What makes me extremely sad and concerned is that more recent generations simply have no idea or expectation of privacy online anymore. There will never be more of a fight against all this Orwellian behavior.

tqi: I think it would be helpful to engage with the possibility that they are neither stupid nor ignorant, rather that they simply have different values and priorities than the early internet users.

taurath: Too many people making too much money - to be honest, people really should blame tech for it, all it takes is RSUs to look the other way. Morally most of the US is running far away from tech and the surveillance state but here it’s still okay to work for monsters and self justify building population control systems and ad networks (often one and the same)

arcanemachiner: By RSU, I'm assuming you mean this:> Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) are a form of equity compensation where employers promise company shares, typically vesting over time, offering a way to align employee interests with company performance

dmix: The solution is always to constrain every level of government with more aggressive privacy laws. As long as they are allowed to do it then some private contractors will take the money to help make it ... or government will make their own in house tech teams. Relying on the morals of the general public to limit state surveillance is not a good strategy, but it is of course good when companies take a stand and the tech community creates tools to push back.

borissk: The big tech is going to be one of the big winners from Internet Access Control. This will give them a more reliable way to link a user account to an actual human being - a link that can be monetized in a variety of ways. All kind of political regimes can use such regulations to enhance their control of the population. And the loosers are going to be the Internet users and small companies.The unfortunate true is IAC is coming to most countries in the world, no matter how much the Hacker News audience hates it...

SilverElfin: I read online that this is about social media companies being able to do increase their profits. But they are shamelessly making it look like some kind of protect the children thing. It is all about increasing their advertising and their users.Today, social media companies cannot advertise to children under 13 under COPPA. So these companies have to do their best to guess the user’s age, and if it is possibly a child, they need to not advertise, and lose those profits. Now they can shift the legal compliance costs and liability to the operating system provider or phone manufacturer and wash their hands clean. And then they can advertise as much as they want. This also lets them have a different experience for minors that doesn’t advertise to them, but targets them for retention so that as soon as they become older, they start to become a source of advertising profits.It’s well known that Meta is behind a lot of funding for nonprofits pushing these laws under a “protect the children” thing. But now even Pinterest’s CEO is shamelessly saying parents don’t have a responsibility to manage their own kids, and is supporting all of this. See https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-user-uncovers-who-is-beh... and https://time.com/article/2026/03/19/pinterest-ceo-government...Evangelist/theocratic conservatives welcome these laws because they view it as enabling and validating age-based restrictions for other things. For example, Project 2025 called for a ban on porn. And separately, the Heritage Foundation pushed age-verification for porn websites, and has openly admitted it is a defacto porn ban. That should have been ruled unconstitutional on free speech grounds, but the current SCOTUS upheld it unfortunately.In the end, everyone else will lose. If you have to prove your identity to anyone, there is a high chance it can be surveilled by the government. There is a high chance at some point, no matter what they claim, your identity data will be hacked and sold. And of course if you can be identified online, then anything you say or do can be traced back to you, and that can be used against you by the government. Suddenly, being a protester in these chaotic times will become a lot more risky.

smartmic: It’s only too late when we stop fighting back and accept it as a given. Don’t underestimate civil disobedience and the hacker spirit.

catlifeonmars: [delayed]

sillysaurusx: I’m not sure it’s possible to have different priorities without being stupid or ignorant of history. Once you concede a certain right, such as a right to privacy, you rarely if ever get it back. Most people seem not to care about this, despite ample evidence that it’s something worth caring about. Stupid is the obvious term for it, though obtuse could work as well.Of course, I don’t blame them. They haven’t lived in a context where they need to care. All of the reasons they’ve heard to care have come from stories of people who lived before them. But ignoring warnings for no good reason is still dumb.A better thing to engage with is whether we can meaningfully change the situation. It might still be possible, but it requires an effective immune response from everybody on this particular topic. I’m not sure we can, but it’s worth trying to.

holyhnhell: I’m okay with internet access control if it means less AI slop like this shit. Bring it on. I’ll be there when it happens.

amarant: Why would IAC lead to less slop? What's the mechanism here?

vsgherzi: Y E S. I’m tired of hearing about child proofing the internet. We need a solution that’s not enforcing age or id verification on the os or internet itself like meta is pushing. We need better solutions and we should fight draconian enforcement with extreme prejudice

mattmanser: Go watch the newest Louis Theroux, into the manosphere.As Louis and whatever absolute scumbag he's with are walking around there are kids, literally 11/12 year olds, walking up to these predatory, evil, scammers on the street going "oh my god it's MC" or whatever their name is.It really is about the kids.

chaostheory: [delayed]

tangotaylor: Their real goals are even worse than that. Some of these groups have admitted they're also about suppressing LGBT+ content.As the Heritage Foundation admitted:> Keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids. No child should be conditioned to think that permanently damaging their healthy bodies to try to become something they can never be is even remotely a good idea.https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/kids-online-safe...

einpoklum: But the whole point of bringing up child protection was to restrict Internet access, to police Internet content and to legitimize mass surveillance.Or do we really believe that states which condone support, fund and sometimes engage in the mass killings children are motivated by genuine moral concern for the young?

phyzix5761: Which religious groups specifically are pushing for this and where? I want to know so I can call them out when I see it.

plasticeagle: AI;DRIt's too late in any case, the Internet as we know it will eat itself. It will be destroyed by AI, and AI agents from without. And it will be destroyed from within by stupid laws such as the ones under "discussion" in this AI-edited and AI-illustrated nothingpiece.By which I not mean the infrastructure. I mean the current crop of social media websites. The infrastructure will remain, and perhaps something better will come along to use that infrastructure.

kepeko: Maybe the positive is that access control might break the illusion of privacy.Okay it's quite private in the sense that we don't know our friends browsing history but we know somebody, somewhere is collecting data and selling it to their 100 partners.Do you think there might ever be a moment when someone decides, legally or not, dump enormous amount of info, in a way that allows people to see what google searches other people did or browsing history etc? A moment when people's embarrassing secrets come into light.

Keeeeeeeks: A theory that’s floating around is that since frontier models are so good at sounding like humans, companies paying for ads are arguing that Dead Internet Theory -> ad costs should go down.Therefore, the push to ID everyone using the internet (even down to the hardware) is a way to prove that ads are being served to real humans in their target demographic.

cat-turner: parents need to do their job and raise their children, and moderate their content.

jjk166: The people pushing for "child protection" went to the island. It's not even about control, it's about shifting liability away from platforms so they can further gut moderation, reducing their expenses and getting away with doing nothing to stop the actual bad actors.

gruez: >The people pushing for "child protection" went to the island.What does this even mean aside from a thinly veiled accusation that such efforts are being pushed by a shadowy cabal of pedophiles elites? I'm sure you can find some overlap between people who want to push age verification laws and people who went to the island, but what about everyone else pushing for the law but who didn't go?

drnick1: Absolutely, but this can only happen if we refuse to run nonfree software on our machines. Even if the maintainers of a distro decide to somehow implement some anti user feature like age attestation, it would be trivial to patch out from the source or remove from a running system with root access. The real danger here is devices that are not fully owned by the user, such as iPhones.

smallmancontrov: I don't know the precise combination of stupidity vs evil that compelled the "think of the children" crowd to choose the single most publicly implicated man in the Epstein scandal as their champion and elect him over someone who wasn't and hasn't been implicated at all in the slightest, but they did. Either way, they receive the culpability for doing so and we should expect their future decision making to be equally compromised.

bilekas: While I agree with you, my worry is that younger generations have been conditioned to just expect privacy invasions, and I hear the same "Well I have nothing to hide" more and more with my younger family at least.

girvo: > and I hear the same "Well I have nothing to hide" more and more with my younger family at least.Which is funny as thats what I heard from my older family growing up. Except it's a lie and they have plenty to hide!

Kim_Bruning: > They haven’t lived in a context where they need to care.You might believe you don't need opsec, and then new laws are passed, or your national supreme court overturns the case that gave you your rights, or someone invades; and now suddenly you're wanted for anything from overstaying a visa, outright murder, or simply existing.USA, right now, peoples lives are being destroyed because the wrong people got their data. Lethal consequences exist in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran.Certain professions per definition: Journalists, Lawyers, Intelligence, Military.Certain Ethnicities. (Jewish, Somali) ; Faiths...It doesn't need to be quite this dramatic though. But you might accidentally have broken some laws and don't even know about it yet. Caught a fish? Released a fish? Give the wrong child a bowl of soup [1]. Open the door, refuse to open the door. Signed a register; didn't sign a register. The list of actual examples is endless. The less people know about you, the less they can prosecute.[1] A flaw in the Dutch Asylum Emergency Measures Act (2025) that would have criminalized offering even a bowl of soup to an undocumented person. The Council of State confirmed this reading. A follow-up bill was needed to fix it.

Ylpertnodi: Whose great-grandparents are you going to blame?

girvo: > shadowy cabal of pedophiles elitesIts a shame that this used to just be a conspiracy theory one could mostly ignore, but we simply can't pretend that there isn't rampant CSA by those in power, because we've had proof of it despite their best efforts. Without wanting to get into politics, the leader of the United States right now was friends with the supposed ring-leader...> but what about everyone else pushing for the law but who didn't go?Useful idiots, perhaps? Wanting to protect their own power and gain more?It's certainly not actually about protecting children. Never has been.

micromacrofoot: they are saddled with more problems that they can reasonably care about and broader issues like privacy drop off of their radars because they've never had it

micromacrofoot: you mean the guys who are working alongside a bunch of pedophiles and doing little about it?

Tarq0n: I don't like the "those in power" framing because it implies that they all participated and that such a homogenous group even exists.

iwontberude: Cry me a river please

dzogchen: Am I the only one that simply disregards everything that follows an AI slop image?

pipes: I might be misreading you, but are you saying that the whole Qanon thing isn't a baseless conspiracy theory?

phendrenad2: [delayed]

catapart: Like who? Name some names of people pushing for this, and we can dissect their motivation.

gruez: >we simply can't pretend that there isn't rampant CSA by those in power, because we've had proof of it despite their best effortsWhat's "rampant"? The news coverage provides no shortage of people, but ringing off 100 (or whatever) people that are in the files doesn't say much, even if we make the questionable assumption that inclusion in files implies guilt. I'm sure that everyone would prefer the amount of pedophiles that are in power to 0, but if it's the same rate as the general population that can hardly be considered "rampant", or a "conspiracy". Given some neutral inclusion criteria (eg. members of legislative bodies), is there any evidence they have disproportionate amount of pedophiles?>the leader of the United States right now was friends with the supposed ring-leader...You conveniently omit the fact that they broke up 5 years before he was first convicted. From wikipedia:"Trump had a falling out with Epstein around 2004 and ceased contact. After Epstein was said to have sexually harassed a teenage daughter of another Mar-a-Lago member in 2007, Trump banned him from the club. ">Useful idiots, perhaps?So basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness?> Wanting to protect their own power and gain more?How does adding age verification help in that? Are they blackmailed by the shadowy cabal? Are they just doing what the voters/lobbyists want? If so, what makes invocation of this reasoning more suitable than for any other political issue? Is everything from tax policy to noise ordinances just something pushed by pedophile elites, helped by useful idiots and people who want to "protect their own power and gain more"?