Before anyone who hasn’t read the actual link reacts to its current title and gets swept up by the single thread that’s dominated the entirety of this submission, it’s an interview.
Alexander Linton of the Session Technology Foundation on building decentralized messaging and why platform-wide content moderation is impractical on encrypted platforms.
Not familiar with him or the platform. But sounds like an interesting exchange.
For years, technical people insisted it was the parent’s job to monitor Internet safety. Parents, especially with the advent of social media, hardcore pornography, and every childhood friend having a device, correctly said this was unreasonable and impossible.
Technical people had a chance for two decades to solve this problem on their terms. Instead we collectively decided that anyone articulating this point of view must be a morally panicked maniac, and that this is a problem with “no reasonable solutions” that we would tolerate. Now we don’t get to dictate the terms, because everyone has had enough, and nobody has patience left for kids watching BDSM on their friend’s phones at 12.
Because of our industry’s refusal to take those concerns seriously, we lost our voice, we lost the grounds of sounding reasonable, and the floodgates are now open - for everything. Nobody is listening anymore to our point of view and arguably correctly so.
Why does a 12 year old have a smartphone that's connected to the internet?
When I was 12 our computer was in the living room and shared by everyone. It could access porn but you had to wait till you were the only one in the home.
There's a pretty simple solution here if you don't already see it and I'm not sure why it isn't more acceptable. It solves all the problems you mention. You don't want kids being sucked into social media? Sucked into porn? Constantly staring at their screens?
Have you ever considered not giving your kids smartphones?
Or have you decided the benefits are worth the costs?
Let's be honest here, even with strong government intervention this is always a cat and mouse game. The play of "no smartphone" is going to be far stronger than anything the government can ever do. Why is this not an option?
“No smartphone” is a boundary, and U.S. parents are often raised not to set boundaries under threat of mental, emotional, and/or physical abuse. So it makes perfect sense that we have now-parents completely unable to define and discuss boundaries with their children. Far better to capitulate in the face of an uncertain and not life-threatening risk than to allow their child to ever think that boundaries are healthy, etc. For the unfamiliar, here is a good starting point for understanding the generational cognitive dissonance in play: https://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/contradicto...
Even the most Laissez-faire of parenting has boundaries; no reasonable adult is allowing their teenager to experiment with heroin or giving their 12 year old permission to drive their car down the freeway. The problem is that smartphone access isn't seen in the same category of danger that recreational opiates and unlicensed driving are in.
It's a pretty generalized phenomena too. Few people actually think about the assumptions their arguments rely upon. It makes actual discussions difficult to have and leads to more arguing than problem solving
It's starting to change in places, including in the US.
The reality is it's not the smartphone, but the slot machine type software running on it.
There's more than enough science that placing this kind of content in front of humans before their prefrontal cortex is fully formed at age 25-26 leads them to leaning on the pre-frontal context of the adults around them, and missing that, whatever they're spending the most time with that's then possibly raising them.
Screens at lower resolutions and quality didn't seem to be as much of an issue compared to the hyper saturated motion with sound effects that are consciously chosen to keep eyeballs.
Like anything, digital can be used for good, or bad, and in lieu of good, the other can to happen and become more of a default.
I agree but it is much harder to stop people from building slot machines than to stop children from using them. Even easier than telling people to stop using them.
And hey, maybe if we actually take some autonomy and remove that market from actors who don't want to build the things the market is requesting then they'll actually build the things the market is requesting... it's easy to say we want something but no one listens when we still buy the thing we say we hate. Maybe it's addiction but it's still hard to fight against. (Though we could still do better by accommodating those who are trying to break the network effects. You can complain how hard it is to get off Facebook but if you're not going to make the minuscule extra effort to accommodate those who do leave then how can you expect the ground to be laid for you to?)
At the end of the day though, with kids, the OP's argument fails because it either assumes smartphones are an inevitability or that the benefits outweigh the costs. It's a bad argument.
I remain sympathetic to parents who don't know where to start in terms of understanding technology and computers. It is a big topic. But I am entirely unsympathetic to parents who throw up their hands and make no effort.
At this point, any parent saying, "I just don't understand technology," or, "I just don't have the time to mind my childrens' computer use or monitor their Internet access," is morally equivalent to saying, "I just don't understand traffic safety," and, "I just don't have the time to teach my children the rules of the road or how to cross the street," while living in a big, bustling city.
It is lazy, entitled, and negligent. The world is full of networked computers and, barring some new massive Carrington event, is never going back to the way it was before.
Many parents think their kids are safe when they are inside the home, without realizing they are letting in the entire world, including things worse than they ever imagined into their homes, through the devices.
In the past, the general disconnection of the world and information had a natural insulation factor. Probably less so today.
Rather than admonish adults, it's actually quite common that many people in many professions don't know how to purchase, or implement software in their day to day work, let alone at home.
Maybe, this is is an aspect of digital literacy that has been lacking - we know that the consumer habit loop that smartphones go after is not always about digital health, or the user's digital literacy, it's about capturing their attention.
Parents actually seem to want the same kind of quality curation not just with the internet, but all areas of their children's lives.
The free for all they may have grown up with 20-40 years ago is simply not the same any more online, or offline.
In that way, even trying to make an effort sometimes isn't enough I'd say. Ignorance is one thing, but maybe it could seem like negligence to others.
Would there be some possible solutions or approaches you or others could offer here to help parents build the skills that lead to not giving up? Sincerely curious where folks see the starting point of these skills.
>Ignorance is one thing, but maybe it could seem like negligence to others.
In person I've found the difference to be usually very clear. It's why I distinguish between the sympathic attitude of "I don't know where to start" and the contemptible reaction that "therefore I will act as if nothing is wrong, or write it off as someone else's fault."
>Would there be some possible solutions or approaches you or others could offer here to help parents build the skills that lead to not giving up? Sincerely curious where folks see the starting point of these skills.
It's a hard problem. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, and almost as much time talking to relatives with children. I have come to no happy, easy answers.
Carey Parker's Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons is a good starting point to Security and Privacy, but not really how computers work. There are various books I remember from childhood about how computers work, but I don't really remember the process of coming to understand computers distinctly because it was both early and continuous over a long period.
I think the best we'll do as a species is one-to-three computer people per extended family. And I think the key will be teaching those people how to be of service to their families. But there's not really an existing framework for a "computer court wizard" in each family nor for what maxims and/or proscriptions such a person might teach computer illiterate family members in order to use computers safely and protect the family's children from the worst of dark algorithms, surveillance, and snuff/abuse/predators online.
TV channels used to get managed. Magazines used to get managed.
There is a lot more volume now, obviously.
Tools like Circle can provide some level of family level DNS which can help.
Something that stands out is also helping parents get a handle on their own consumption and habits to be able to better teach kids on what to look out for.
This frames the issue in a fundamentally incorrect way.
Since the dawn of pseudoanonymous communication, politicians have been trying to get their nasty little claws into it. See Clipper Chip in the 90's. They've tried many avenues to deanonymize and centralize. Going after the parents is just their latest - they've discovered they could use convincing language like this to trick a bunch of people who previously had no reason to care about The Internet to now suddenly "realize" oh gosh it's scary out there, what can we do to help.
Unfortunately their latest tactic is working. They figured out how to recruit a (possibly) well-intentioned bloc into supporting efforts that undermine privacy in an irreversible way.
> Because of our industry’s refusal to take those concerns seriously, we lost our voice,
Fighting against demands to censor, unmask, and neuter the closest thing we've got to a global platform of freedom is a valiant effort. Not entertaining these bureaucrats isn't some moral failing of our industry, in the same sense that ignoring a persistent busker on the street entitles him to your money after some uninvolved observer has arbitrarily decided he's made the same demand enough that somehow it's starting to make sense because the victim hasn't yelled at him with a good enough argument against it.
In other words: yep, still the parents' job, yep, internet was still there when I grew up, yep, I turned out fine, yep, politicians have been trying to take away our privacy for 30 years (and unfortunately, they're finding more creative and convincing ways to disguise it). Hint: it's never about the kids
Well yes it is. It is about both the cover problem (child safety), and the ulterior motive (surveillance, control).
And not taking the reasonably concerning cover problem seriously, by finding sensible solutions, both leaves it festering unsolved in its own right, and growing in usefulness as a cover problem.
The reality is those parents have tried nothing and are all out of ideas, or, in the vast majority of cases, simply don't care.
This is not at all about children by the way, because all millenials have grown while consuming porn and social media, and haven't turned into degenerates. It is 100% an excuse to spy on citizens, and nothing else.
If it's simple to begin with doing this, or things to try specifically that can build any parents skills and competencies in this area, mind sharing that?
When people are operating at two levels, you can't leave either unaddressed.
That plays into the hands of those using subterfuge.
The power grab is riding on reasonable concerns about children. So its worth improving safety there for two reasons: (1) better, reasonable child safety measures for that stated purpose, and to (2) take that issue off the table (or meaningfully reduce the leverage it supplies), for the power grabbers.
Ironically, the fact that the underhanded motives lie beneath a reasonable concern, makes solving that reasonable concern in a healthy way even more critical.
While we’re posting honest opinions that run against the consensus on this site:
In my view, freedom of speech is a natural right that no government can take away. But no such guarantee exists that you can do so anonymously.
Now before you immediately flame me to death, please read a bit further:
We already have a hodgepodge of laws in basically every jurisdiction around logging IP addresses, cooperating with law enforcement when there’s a warrant, being able to track down who is (say) organizing violence, posting csam, etc. Like it or not, the government is entitled to search and seizure if there is a warrant signed by a judge to do so, and if you run an online service where can people can post things publicly, you better damn well keep logs of who’s posting things and you better cooperate if a law enforcement officer with a warrant asks you to.
So what I propose is that we streamline all of this. At age 16 you get a digital ID that works something like a FIDO chip that can be used to prove your identity to a government authentication server. Sub in/out whatever tech you want, it can be a passkey (blech), something resembling a yubikey, etc. You get them at your local post office, where you can actually prove your identity in person. There’s post offices everywhere, and they’re already meant to serve everyone in the country.
But critically, this key isn’t used to auth to any sites except a government-run signin service. The service itself would be a modified form of OAuth/OIDC that preserves privacy from the site you’re making an account on. They don’t know who you are, they just get a signed payload from the government signin site saying “this is a user over the age of 16”, and via a pre-established relationship between the website in question and the government auth site, a UUID is minted for that legal person. It will be the same UUID for that website for the same person, so you can’t just pretend you’re multiple people when you create multiple accounts.
With this system, and using Reddit as an example site that may leverage this:
- Reddit can’t know who you actually are, they only get a UUID and a signed payload indicating you’re over 16 (or whatever other set of properties are legally salient for the account.) In the event of a breach, all you’d get is a list of Reddit-specific UUID’s. You’d have to also hack the government auth service to know who these people actually are.
- The government doesn’t know who owns your username on Reddit, they only know the list of citizens that have Reddit accounts at all.
- In the event of a crime with a warrant, the government can compel Reddit to inform them which UUID corresponds to some account. Reddit continues to not know who the account belongs to.
- Every site using this system gets a completely different UUID for the same legal person and has no ability to correlate them
- Every legal person using this system has no idea what their UUID is for any site
- Every site using this doesn’t have to worry at all about proving identity. They get working auth for every legal person in $country, streamlining signups and onboarding, and doesn’t have to worry about asking the user to prove they’re over 16.
- You still get pseudo-anonymity in that you can use an alias (as many as the site allows, too), the site can remain blissfully ignorant as to who you really are, as well as everyone who reads your posts, etc.
- The government can find out who owns an account, but only with a warrant. They don’t have a list of account/UUID mappings anywhere.
This system is probably the most closely aligned to how I would do things if I was somehow “in charge”… you have a right to pseudo-anonymity, but you don’t have a right to cover your tracks so thoroughly that the government can’t track you down with a proper warrant.
With such a system, saying “social media is for ages 16 and up” is a simple checkbox in the signup flow. Done.
You can argue all day about whether a government should be able to uncloak your accounts with a warrant, but to me that question is already settled: yes, they absolutely can do that, they do so today all the time. Except today we have messy data breaches where everyone’s identity gets leaked because every site has to reinvent their own form of proving your legal identity (in the case of Facebook/etc) or simply proving you’re a certain age (uploading ID, etc.). I’d take a centralized government-run approach to what we have today any day.
You could ask “but should government be in the business of electronic authentication and identity?” And my answer is: “YES.” It’s basically the primary function of a working government! We trust them to issue passports for chrissake. To me this is basic table stakes in the 21st century. If we did government all over again, having the government provide a service to prove online identity is basically right up there with “collects tax revenue.”
Now, in the current government up to the challenge of doing this, and not fucking it up? Yeeesh, probably not. You got me there. But one can dream…
Treating users like adults and allowing them full control over setting system capability and app launch restrictions on devices (and even implementing fully optional, widely blocking restrictions as "parental safety options") was the industry taking it seriously. You considering the freedom of choice to the user as disastrous and the lack of heavily restricted lockdowns by default as "refusal to take concerns seriously" is just a reflection on your attitudes about other people, not any real argument for improving privacy or safety. You ARE a morally panicked maniac if your only grossly offensive things you want to keep pretending are horrifying examples have absolutely nothing to do with the invasion of privacy of children and more to do with puritanical outrage on children accessing adult material.
> Parents, especially with the advent of social media, hardcore pornography, and every childhood friend having a device, correctly said this was unreasonable and impossible.
It is neither unreasonable or impossible. No need to hand the kids a device that can access the open internet. If parents do, restrict or deny gadget time. Stick to a Nintendo or console.
Learned helplessness and codependency on internet is part of the sales pitch of big tech, salesmen in general. They push self doubt and sell their solution.
Fill the time showing kids how to rotate tires and change oil. Show them how to make pizza crust.
Learned helplessness is a feature of capitalism. Not immutable feature of physical existence.
It's still moralist pearl-clutching in service of totalitarian horseshit no matter how you'd like to justify it.
I don't even think you're strictly 100% incorrect here. That said, I refuse to entertain the "think of the children" horseshit when parents happily park their kid in front of an iPad for hours a day because it shuts them up, not with kink content they shouldn't see, but with AI/algorithmically generated garbage, or for that matter, human generated garbage, that rots their brains far more than any gimp costume ever could.
For fucks sake, 12 kids in America die PER DAY due to mass shootings, and we can't even pass common sense gun regulations that the vast majority of gun owners are completely fine with. We don't give a fuck about our kids here. This has from jump, and continues to be, astro-turfed puritan whining not merely to pornography of whatever preferred kind of the moment, but to the existence of queer people as a whole.
It IS parents' fucking responsibility, and maybe that is an onerous burden, but instead of even attempting to meet it, the majority of parents have abdicated it. And it isn't porn fucking their kids up, it's non-stop screen exposure leaving them with no attention span and no ability to simply BE BORED.
There is probably nothing that is safe for a toddler to have displayed on a screen 6 inches from their face for an hour+ a day, either for their physical or mental development. Adults suffer as well, but at least by their own agency.
Also to point out, if a 10 year old walks in to the street and is hit by a car, their parent gets charged now (in some US jurisdictions.) The idea that the adult is not responsible for the child does not correspond with US law. Maybe it's different in Europe.
A secondary issue is tech companies on-boarding children to having public social media profiles (and their parents posting the child's entire lives on their own) -- which is completely asinine and appalling. That bridge was breached years ago and somehow no one complained loud enough. Certainly a mistake.
Well, gang members go out looking for trouble, for one thing. For another, they would just as well use knives, bats, chains, hatchets, or any other terrible implement to commit crime. Banning guns just makes it difficult or impossible for non-gang members to defend themselves.
Fucking AI summaries. Correct you are, 12-per-day is the combo shot of all gun deaths in children in totality, which includes much more banal things like unsecured firearms in the home.
That being said, my point remains: the #1 threat to children in this country is guns, wielded by classmates, road-ragers, gang members, or stored improperly. We still have no meaningful gun regulation in huge areas, and no public will to see it done. And this kind of insipid bullshit is what we're doing instead.
If you look it up, the most gun crimes occur in Democrat-run gun-grabber areas that have the most gun laws. Disarming people is an unacceptable solution for many reasons. It also doesn't work. The best solution to gun crime is to arm the law-abiding.
> If you look it up, the most gun crimes occur in Democrat-run gun-grabber areas that have the most gun laws.
Highly populated areas tend to be Democrat-run. People commit crimes so places with more people = more crimes. More gun crimes cause people to push for more gun laws. Gun laws limited to cities (or even states) have limited impact when it's trivial to get guns from neighboring areas without those laws. Gun laws with limited impact can still be helpful.
It's not as if we don't know for a fact that legislation works (since it works for many many other counties) but a patchwork system of laws that only applies to some areas and not others is bound to perform worse than federal systems. Even federal systems need to be smart and actually managed and enforced correctly to work well.
> Disarming people is an unacceptable solution for many reasons.
Disarming people is an acceptable solution for many reasons. We already do it to all kinds of people in many circumstances. It's just a question of when/how much is appropriate for which circumstances.
> The best solution to gun crime is to arm the law-abiding.
Only if you're a gun/ammo manufacturer. Real world evidence has shown over and over that the best solution is laws placing legal regulations on firearms. We can point to nation after nation whose gun problems are drastically lower than ours because of the laws they enacted.
On the other hand, there exists only fantasy world evidence that giving every man woman and child a gun would solve the problem. Arguably it's already been tried in the US and the result was complete failure.
Assuming that the number is real, 12 children dying every day from guns is the opposite of VERY low. It's insane. What is your limit? How many child corpses do you think need to be put into the ground every day before the government should pass the kind of laws most Americans are asking them to?
Unlike how most Americans want something done about guns, they don't want to be tracked. There is a lot of opposition to it once people are made aware of the issue. Censorship is pretty unpopular too, although while the majority tends to oppose it, it's far more popular with people in the US than is should be.
I guess, but there's a philosophy that goes something along the lines of: Government is not the answer to every problem. It's a very divisive issue, clearly. Technical people were never going to solve the problem of kids having access to adult materials online because tech people are only interested in making gobs of money, not in dealing with delicate social issues. Government isn't going to fix anything, either, mind you, because the moment the crackdowns begin, the technologists will walk right in with a solution. Maybe we'll finally have the distributed, peer-to-peer network we always thought we were getting but instead got centrally controlled nodes featuring mass surveillance.
I stopped worrying about it as a parent. My kids want to look at porn? Let them. If they want to see horrible, violent shit that gives them nightmares and they can't un-see it, let them. They'll either figure it out or they will be lifetime children looking for big daddy government to solve all their stupid problems for them and society will collapse.
I don't know whats more damaging - watching some beheading video when 12 or having controlling parents that do not leave you any autonomy even in the digital space.
Personally i prefer the beheading video as its not far from whats already on TV.
Alexander Linton of the Session Technology Foundation on building decentralized messaging and why platform-wide content moderation is impractical on encrypted platforms.
Not familiar with him or the platform. But sounds like an interesting exchange.
For years, technical people insisted it was the parent’s job to monitor Internet safety. Parents, especially with the advent of social media, hardcore pornography, and every childhood friend having a device, correctly said this was unreasonable and impossible.
Technical people had a chance for two decades to solve this problem on their terms. Instead we collectively decided that anyone articulating this point of view must be a morally panicked maniac, and that this is a problem with “no reasonable solutions” that we would tolerate. Now we don’t get to dictate the terms, because everyone has had enough, and nobody has patience left for kids watching BDSM on their friend’s phones at 12.
Because of our industry’s refusal to take those concerns seriously, we lost our voice, we lost the grounds of sounding reasonable, and the floodgates are now open - for everything. Nobody is listening anymore to our point of view and arguably correctly so.
When I was 12 our computer was in the living room and shared by everyone. It could access porn but you had to wait till you were the only one in the home.
There's a pretty simple solution here if you don't already see it and I'm not sure why it isn't more acceptable. It solves all the problems you mention. You don't want kids being sucked into social media? Sucked into porn? Constantly staring at their screens?
Have you ever considered not giving your kids smartphones?
Or have you decided the benefits are worth the costs?
Let's be honest here, even with strong government intervention this is always a cat and mouse game. The play of "no smartphone" is going to be far stronger than anything the government can ever do. Why is this not an option?
The reality is it's not the smartphone, but the slot machine type software running on it.
There's more than enough science that placing this kind of content in front of humans before their prefrontal cortex is fully formed at age 25-26 leads them to leaning on the pre-frontal context of the adults around them, and missing that, whatever they're spending the most time with that's then possibly raising them.
Screens at lower resolutions and quality didn't seem to be as much of an issue compared to the hyper saturated motion with sound effects that are consciously chosen to keep eyeballs.
Like anything, digital can be used for good, or bad, and in lieu of good, the other can to happen and become more of a default.
And hey, maybe if we actually take some autonomy and remove that market from actors who don't want to build the things the market is requesting then they'll actually build the things the market is requesting... it's easy to say we want something but no one listens when we still buy the thing we say we hate. Maybe it's addiction but it's still hard to fight against. (Though we could still do better by accommodating those who are trying to break the network effects. You can complain how hard it is to get off Facebook but if you're not going to make the minuscule extra effort to accommodate those who do leave then how can you expect the ground to be laid for you to?)
At the end of the day though, with kids, the OP's argument fails because it either assumes smartphones are an inevitability or that the benefits outweigh the costs. It's a bad argument.
At this point, any parent saying, "I just don't understand technology," or, "I just don't have the time to mind my childrens' computer use or monitor their Internet access," is morally equivalent to saying, "I just don't understand traffic safety," and, "I just don't have the time to teach my children the rules of the road or how to cross the street," while living in a big, bustling city.
It is lazy, entitled, and negligent. The world is full of networked computers and, barring some new massive Carrington event, is never going back to the way it was before.
In the past, the general disconnection of the world and information had a natural insulation factor. Probably less so today.
Rather than admonish adults, it's actually quite common that many people in many professions don't know how to purchase, or implement software in their day to day work, let alone at home.
Maybe, this is is an aspect of digital literacy that has been lacking - we know that the consumer habit loop that smartphones go after is not always about digital health, or the user's digital literacy, it's about capturing their attention.
Parents actually seem to want the same kind of quality curation not just with the internet, but all areas of their children's lives.
The free for all they may have grown up with 20-40 years ago is simply not the same any more online, or offline.
In that way, even trying to make an effort sometimes isn't enough I'd say. Ignorance is one thing, but maybe it could seem like negligence to others.
Would there be some possible solutions or approaches you or others could offer here to help parents build the skills that lead to not giving up? Sincerely curious where folks see the starting point of these skills.
In person I've found the difference to be usually very clear. It's why I distinguish between the sympathic attitude of "I don't know where to start" and the contemptible reaction that "therefore I will act as if nothing is wrong, or write it off as someone else's fault."
>Would there be some possible solutions or approaches you or others could offer here to help parents build the skills that lead to not giving up? Sincerely curious where folks see the starting point of these skills.
It's a hard problem. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, and almost as much time talking to relatives with children. I have come to no happy, easy answers.
Carey Parker's Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons is a good starting point to Security and Privacy, but not really how computers work. There are various books I remember from childhood about how computers work, but I don't really remember the process of coming to understand computers distinctly because it was both early and continuous over a long period.
I think the best we'll do as a species is one-to-three computer people per extended family. And I think the key will be teaching those people how to be of service to their families. But there's not really an existing framework for a "computer court wizard" in each family nor for what maxims and/or proscriptions such a person might teach computer illiterate family members in order to use computers safely and protect the family's children from the worst of dark algorithms, surveillance, and snuff/abuse/predators online.
It's completely uncharted territory.
I'm not sure its entirely uncharted territory.
TV channels used to get managed. Magazines used to get managed.
There is a lot more volume now, obviously.
Tools like Circle can provide some level of family level DNS which can help.
Something that stands out is also helping parents get a handle on their own consumption and habits to be able to better teach kids on what to look out for.
Since the dawn of pseudoanonymous communication, politicians have been trying to get their nasty little claws into it. See Clipper Chip in the 90's. They've tried many avenues to deanonymize and centralize. Going after the parents is just their latest - they've discovered they could use convincing language like this to trick a bunch of people who previously had no reason to care about The Internet to now suddenly "realize" oh gosh it's scary out there, what can we do to help.
Unfortunately their latest tactic is working. They figured out how to recruit a (possibly) well-intentioned bloc into supporting efforts that undermine privacy in an irreversible way.
> Because of our industry’s refusal to take those concerns seriously, we lost our voice,
Fighting against demands to censor, unmask, and neuter the closest thing we've got to a global platform of freedom is a valiant effort. Not entertaining these bureaucrats isn't some moral failing of our industry, in the same sense that ignoring a persistent busker on the street entitles him to your money after some uninvolved observer has arbitrarily decided he's made the same demand enough that somehow it's starting to make sense because the victim hasn't yelled at him with a good enough argument against it.
In other words: yep, still the parents' job, yep, internet was still there when I grew up, yep, I turned out fine, yep, politicians have been trying to take away our privacy for 30 years (and unfortunately, they're finding more creative and convincing ways to disguise it). Hint: it's never about the kids
Well yes it is. It is about both the cover problem (child safety), and the ulterior motive (surveillance, control).
And not taking the reasonably concerning cover problem seriously, by finding sensible solutions, both leaves it festering unsolved in its own right, and growing in usefulness as a cover problem.
This is not at all about children by the way, because all millenials have grown while consuming porn and social media, and haven't turned into degenerates. It is 100% an excuse to spy on citizens, and nothing else.
If it's simple to begin with doing this, or things to try specifically that can build any parents skills and competencies in this area, mind sharing that?
Is that the reason? I really don't think so.
I just think it's a power grab by the participants in government and tech companies.
That plays into the hands of those using subterfuge.
The power grab is riding on reasonable concerns about children. So its worth improving safety there for two reasons: (1) better, reasonable child safety measures for that stated purpose, and to (2) take that issue off the table (or meaningfully reduce the leverage it supplies), for the power grabbers.
Ironically, the fact that the underhanded motives lie beneath a reasonable concern, makes solving that reasonable concern in a healthy way even more critical.
In my view, freedom of speech is a natural right that no government can take away. But no such guarantee exists that you can do so anonymously.
Now before you immediately flame me to death, please read a bit further:
We already have a hodgepodge of laws in basically every jurisdiction around logging IP addresses, cooperating with law enforcement when there’s a warrant, being able to track down who is (say) organizing violence, posting csam, etc. Like it or not, the government is entitled to search and seizure if there is a warrant signed by a judge to do so, and if you run an online service where can people can post things publicly, you better damn well keep logs of who’s posting things and you better cooperate if a law enforcement officer with a warrant asks you to.
So what I propose is that we streamline all of this. At age 16 you get a digital ID that works something like a FIDO chip that can be used to prove your identity to a government authentication server. Sub in/out whatever tech you want, it can be a passkey (blech), something resembling a yubikey, etc. You get them at your local post office, where you can actually prove your identity in person. There’s post offices everywhere, and they’re already meant to serve everyone in the country.
But critically, this key isn’t used to auth to any sites except a government-run signin service. The service itself would be a modified form of OAuth/OIDC that preserves privacy from the site you’re making an account on. They don’t know who you are, they just get a signed payload from the government signin site saying “this is a user over the age of 16”, and via a pre-established relationship between the website in question and the government auth site, a UUID is minted for that legal person. It will be the same UUID for that website for the same person, so you can’t just pretend you’re multiple people when you create multiple accounts.
With this system, and using Reddit as an example site that may leverage this:
- Reddit can’t know who you actually are, they only get a UUID and a signed payload indicating you’re over 16 (or whatever other set of properties are legally salient for the account.) In the event of a breach, all you’d get is a list of Reddit-specific UUID’s. You’d have to also hack the government auth service to know who these people actually are.
- The government doesn’t know who owns your username on Reddit, they only know the list of citizens that have Reddit accounts at all.
- In the event of a crime with a warrant, the government can compel Reddit to inform them which UUID corresponds to some account. Reddit continues to not know who the account belongs to.
- Every site using this system gets a completely different UUID for the same legal person and has no ability to correlate them
- Every legal person using this system has no idea what their UUID is for any site
- Every site using this doesn’t have to worry at all about proving identity. They get working auth for every legal person in $country, streamlining signups and onboarding, and doesn’t have to worry about asking the user to prove they’re over 16.
- You still get pseudo-anonymity in that you can use an alias (as many as the site allows, too), the site can remain blissfully ignorant as to who you really are, as well as everyone who reads your posts, etc.
- The government can find out who owns an account, but only with a warrant. They don’t have a list of account/UUID mappings anywhere.
This system is probably the most closely aligned to how I would do things if I was somehow “in charge”… you have a right to pseudo-anonymity, but you don’t have a right to cover your tracks so thoroughly that the government can’t track you down with a proper warrant.
With such a system, saying “social media is for ages 16 and up” is a simple checkbox in the signup flow. Done.
You can argue all day about whether a government should be able to uncloak your accounts with a warrant, but to me that question is already settled: yes, they absolutely can do that, they do so today all the time. Except today we have messy data breaches where everyone’s identity gets leaked because every site has to reinvent their own form of proving your legal identity (in the case of Facebook/etc) or simply proving you’re a certain age (uploading ID, etc.). I’d take a centralized government-run approach to what we have today any day.
You could ask “but should government be in the business of electronic authentication and identity?” And my answer is: “YES.” It’s basically the primary function of a working government! We trust them to issue passports for chrissake. To me this is basic table stakes in the 21st century. If we did government all over again, having the government provide a service to prove online identity is basically right up there with “collects tax revenue.”
Now, in the current government up to the challenge of doing this, and not fucking it up? Yeeesh, probably not. You got me there. But one can dream…
It is neither unreasonable or impossible. No need to hand the kids a device that can access the open internet. If parents do, restrict or deny gadget time. Stick to a Nintendo or console.
Learned helplessness and codependency on internet is part of the sales pitch of big tech, salesmen in general. They push self doubt and sell their solution.
Fill the time showing kids how to rotate tires and change oil. Show them how to make pizza crust.
Learned helplessness is a feature of capitalism. Not immutable feature of physical existence.
I don't even think you're strictly 100% incorrect here. That said, I refuse to entertain the "think of the children" horseshit when parents happily park their kid in front of an iPad for hours a day because it shuts them up, not with kink content they shouldn't see, but with AI/algorithmically generated garbage, or for that matter, human generated garbage, that rots their brains far more than any gimp costume ever could.
For fucks sake, 12 kids in America die PER DAY due to mass shootings, and we can't even pass common sense gun regulations that the vast majority of gun owners are completely fine with. We don't give a fuck about our kids here. This has from jump, and continues to be, astro-turfed puritan whining not merely to pornography of whatever preferred kind of the moment, but to the existence of queer people as a whole.
It IS parents' fucking responsibility, and maybe that is an onerous burden, but instead of even attempting to meet it, the majority of parents have abdicated it. And it isn't porn fucking their kids up, it's non-stop screen exposure leaving them with no attention span and no ability to simply BE BORED.
Also to point out, if a 10 year old walks in to the street and is hit by a car, their parent gets charged now (in some US jurisdictions.) The idea that the adult is not responsible for the child does not correspond with US law. Maybe it's different in Europe.
A secondary issue is tech companies on-boarding children to having public social media profiles (and their parents posting the child's entire lives on their own) -- which is completely asinine and appalling. That bridge was breached years ago and somehow no one complained loud enough. Certainly a mistake.
Dead kids are dead kids.
That being said, my point remains: the #1 threat to children in this country is guns, wielded by classmates, road-ragers, gang members, or stored improperly. We still have no meaningful gun regulation in huge areas, and no public will to see it done. And this kind of insipid bullshit is what we're doing instead.
Highly populated areas tend to be Democrat-run. People commit crimes so places with more people = more crimes. More gun crimes cause people to push for more gun laws. Gun laws limited to cities (or even states) have limited impact when it's trivial to get guns from neighboring areas without those laws. Gun laws with limited impact can still be helpful.
It's not as if we don't know for a fact that legislation works (since it works for many many other counties) but a patchwork system of laws that only applies to some areas and not others is bound to perform worse than federal systems. Even federal systems need to be smart and actually managed and enforced correctly to work well.
> Disarming people is an unacceptable solution for many reasons.
Disarming people is an acceptable solution for many reasons. We already do it to all kinds of people in many circumstances. It's just a question of when/how much is appropriate for which circumstances.
> The best solution to gun crime is to arm the law-abiding.
Only if you're a gun/ammo manufacturer. Real world evidence has shown over and over that the best solution is laws placing legal regulations on firearms. We can point to nation after nation whose gun problems are drastically lower than ours because of the laws they enacted.
On the other hand, there exists only fantasy world evidence that giving every man woman and child a gun would solve the problem. Arguably it's already been tried in the US and the result was complete failure.
The most full stop, yes. But that's not surprising, is it? Since densely populated places disproportionately vote blue.
But not the most per capita:
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116676/documents/...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2023/04/28/red-s...
Assuming that the number is real, 12 children dying every day from guns is the opposite of VERY low. It's insane. What is your limit? How many child corpses do you think need to be put into the ground every day before the government should pass the kind of laws most Americans are asking them to?
Unlike how most Americans want something done about guns, they don't want to be tracked. There is a lot of opposition to it once people are made aware of the issue. Censorship is pretty unpopular too, although while the majority tends to oppose it, it's far more popular with people in the US than is should be.
I stopped worrying about it as a parent. My kids want to look at porn? Let them. If they want to see horrible, violent shit that gives them nightmares and they can't un-see it, let them. They'll either figure it out or they will be lifetime children looking for big daddy government to solve all their stupid problems for them and society will collapse.
Personally i prefer the beheading video as its not far from whats already on TV.