IMO instead of age gating everything, it should've been the other way around, which is making unrestricted smartphones or similar an 18 or 16+ device, much like cars.
The big issue isn’t even age verification. The end goal is verified user identification. They want every transaction on the internet to be associated with the exact identity of the user. No more anonymity.
In the short term the way it will be implemented is this — age verification will not be a binary, it will also want to push your DoB, name, location etc and they say “the choice is with the user” but the default will be to send everything. Very soon there will be services that require DoB or name or something else to gate new or existing functionality. That is the slippery slope it will be built as and that is how they win the game
You got suckered by the marketing. Google's "zero knowledge" approach requires devices locked down with remote attestation, which prohibits end users from running their own code (when interacting with websites that prevent it, which as time goes on under this plan will be everywhere). The only actual difference here is that this is Google's desired approach to destroying anonymity and personal computing.
I truly share your concerns, especially as someone belonging to a minority.
At the same time, we have to be real: Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks. I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place. As society is more and more digitized, the stakes become much, much higher. An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a fairly limited impact radius. Today it can lose you your house, your savings, your relationships, and even your life ("swatting" comes to mind).
This extremely ill-advised legislation across various jurisdictions cannot just be brushed off as a global turn towards fascism. It is that, but there are also real, legitimate concerns that need to be addressed, and the tech world has not leveraged its expertise to come up with any solutions so far. Sticking our head in the sand crying "git gud" while millions get scammed out of their life savings... It's not great.
(Children getting into trouble is honestly the least of my concerns here. Don't let your child go online unsupervised. The internet is not for them. You wouldn't let them roam free in a red light district or an underground illegal weapon's market either, even though they are unlikely to come to any harm.)
When financial institutions in the USA are not even adding basic things like... approve transaction on phone, keeping most things pull based based on knowing a few magic numbers vs. push based and other really basic things, this really doesn't hold water. Things being anon doesn't even register in the day to day of what is bad with the internet, vast majority of it is from very non-anonymous sources, influencers, apps or institutions.
> An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a fairly limited impact radius. Today it can lose you your house, your savings, your relationships, and even your life ("swatting" comes to mind).
So you are afraid of minor information leaks getting you killed, but you’re also trying to tell us that online anonymity is a bad thing?
Come on.
> I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place
This is such a strange argument as the internet was most definitely NOT an innocent place, even relatively speaking, in that period.
I think there is a lot of nostalgic history rewriting in these claims. Much like political movements that claim that the past was a better time, it’s easy to only remember the good parts of how things were in the past.
> Sticking our head in the sand crying "git gud" while millions get scammed out of their life savings...
The solution is called a durable power of attorney and then moving significant assets to different financial institutions with estatements. Or the heavyweight option is a living trust.
This problem really has no bearing on mandatory identity verification or locking down software. Scammers leverage generic apps in the app stores just fine.
This problem most certainly is a part of the global turn towards fascism, which is ultimately based on frustrated people demanding easy answers and then empowering those who are able to give them easy answers by lying to them.
I was a kid with unrestricted, unsupervised internet access, and it definitely affected many things in my life. If I happen to have a child in the future, they won't go through that.
The Brazilian government passed a law requiring age verification for every site categorized as 16+. It can't be self-declared, so companies usually resort to facial scans and ID verification. I DO NOT want photos of our Brazilian children going to foreign agents who are PROVEN to profit from and do God-knows-what with our biometric data. And the funniest part? The same law says 'regulation shall not, under any circumstances, authorize or result in the implementation of mass surveillance mechanisms,' but also mandates that these measures must be 'AUDITABLE.' In other words, someone needs access to that data. It’s all so stupid and incoherent.
People who are less tech-literate FIERCELY support the measure, and whenever someone opposes it, they claim that person supports digital child abuse...
Anyway... the responsibility of protection should come from the parents, not from companies that profit off your biometric data.
I guess the opposite case might not be as interesting to many, but I achieved basically unfiltered internet access as a child, and it has been immensely helpful for me as a person. Everything I am today -- a programmer, technically literate, a founder of a startup with momentum, I am because I had freedom and autonomy as a child (which was not granted to me, rather achieved by me). Many of the people of my age who grew up with strict controls and supervisory parents seem kind of lost and uninformed to me, now that they are turning into adults. I feel this narrative is surprisingly rarely heard on HN, but I cannot be the only one?
I mean... access to adult content at that age is really, really bad. It really messed up my brain. Gore videos, chatting with adults, etc. But I learned many good things, too. It's a double-edged sword.
I don't see how this "child protection" enforcement would help in case of small obscure websites with porn and gore? No way their admins gonna comply. I doubt ISPs would go that far to DNS whitelist compliant websites only.
I never said this would help... in fact, I’m against this kind of measure, at least the way it’s being done. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Brazilian ISPs are forced to block this sort of thing (just look at what happened with Twitter (X) the year before last).
For me, it didn't mess up my brain at all, it showed me a much broader range of what humanity really is, which is exactly what I wanted to understand at that time. I understood the depravity humans will exact upon others, or those they see as lesser (such as the treatment of animals, or prisoners, "the enemy" whoever/whatever that may be). I also saw unfiltered sharing of valuable knowledge, science, tech stuff, software, games, music, culture...
The uncensored internet taught me more than I could ever have been taught in school, and I'll be forever grateful for that. It didn't take me long to understand that I could generally hate no ethnicity or people or country, and the people who do are manipulated by their government or other powerful figures in their life (or disproportionately swayed by experiences in their life). Humans are pretty much all the same, we all have far far more in common than we do differences. I have a stronger perspective of this than my immediate ancestors (demonstrated over and over throughout my life) and I do credit my exposure to the open internet for a huge amount of that.
There is one huge and problematic difference now, though: the uncensored internet of the 90's is nothing like the disinformation-saturated internet of today.
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.
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.
This. Fatigue and despair are by far the most effective way to control a population. You don’t need to convince people you’re doing the right thing, you just have to convince them that it’s too late.
Absolutely, but this can only happen if we refuse to run nonfree software on our machines. Even if the maintainers of a Linux distro decided to somehow implement some anti user feature like age attestation, it would be trivial to patch that out from the source or to remove it from a running system with root access. The real danger here is devices that are not fully owned by the user, such as iPhones.
I do underestimate the hacker spirit. HN's response to Client Side Scanning was disheartening, barely anyone could condemn Apple despite the obvious red-line being crossed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741
And once you step outside HN, forget it. You can save yourself, but there are thousands of people that do respond to the "think of the children!" nonsense and will call you a creep for objecting to it. It's game over now, you will fight against this for the rest of your life.
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.
You can be in favor of privacy while simultaneously thinking porn, gambling, and advertisers shouldn't be targeting children. The age verification bills I've read have steep penalties for retaining information, so that seems fine since that's literally more protection than you get in person.
It's really more just concluding that those corporations should be liable for their behavior. It also has nothing to do with "the Internet" which is largely unaffected. Except of course ideas for forcing OS behavior coming out of California which are obviously bad.
I actually think things could be a lot simpler if we just made the laws like alcohol: it's illegal (with criminal liability) for a non-parent adult to provide <restricted thing> to a child. Simple enough. Seems to work fine as-is for Internet alcohol purchases. Businesses dealing in restricted industries can figure out how to avoid that liability. That's entirely compatible with making it illegal for businesses to stalk everyone, which we should also do!
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.
> 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.
There is no world where a totalitarian government’s law enforcement ambitions on some object-level question are thwarted by the same government’s enforcement of privacy law. Countries with GDPR that are thinking of rounding up and kicking out the refugees know perfectly well who and where the refugees are.
You're not entirely wrong; ultimately if they put enough resources towards it they can probably catch quite a number of people. But governments have limited resources and really don't track everyone all the time. Not even in 2026 are they able to do that yet. It helps if you maintain some level of opsec. If they really want to get you, they can get close, but see eg Ed Snowden; who managed to stay ahead of the US government just long enough to reach relative safety (FSVO).
I have the right to my own senses, my own observations, my own memories. I have the right to photograph what I can see with my eyes, and to write down what I can remember. Unless enjoined by a specific duty of care (doctor/patient, attorney/client, security clearance, etc) I have the right to discuss my memories with others. This obtains even when using electronic tools and even when working in association with others.
I don’t intend to give up or accept limitations on these rights because you consider yourself to have “privacy rights” or ownership interests in my records, my memories, my perceptions, or the reality in front of me. I find the notion of the government or another person interfering in this process, the perception and recollection of reality, to be creepy and totalitarian by itself.
In 1984, it is not only that the government is aware of Winston, but that it routinely tampers with or destroys evidence of the past & demands to control the perception of the present. I do not think we should let a government do that, even for a good reason like “protect your privacy” any more than we should let it destroy general purpose computing “for the children.”
I'm actually fine with that; so long as that is restricted to your own senses, observations, and memories; and doesn't somehow spill over and somehow pertain to mine. Basically the typical freedom to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose argument. This is probably a solvable problem between reasonable people; give or take.
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
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)
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.
> 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
Yes - you buy the house in the bay, and companies will lock you in with the vesting schedule. Just another 3, 4 years and you’ll be rich enough to afford a second one, or retire early. Some people can self justify what they do, or pretend because they work in a “nicer” part of a company than the core revenue part that it’s all okay that what pays their checks is mass behavior manipulation. I don’t like ads or social coercion, at all.
I live in an area that has been declared among the safest in America. Two months ago a 17 year old girl from our city disappeared. Turns out she had been being groomed for a year over Discord and in Roblox by a 39 year old the next state over. He eventually convinced her to let him pick her up, after which he filmed himself having sex with her, killed her, and then dismembered her body. He apparently was grooming other underaged girls in a similar way as well.
The digital age presents with it novel forms of danger for children, and for adults for that matter, and there is absolutely no way to effectively address these risks without some amount of reduction in privacy. And before someone inevitably says “where were the parents?” and wash their hands of the situation, a healthy society should care for and protect all children, especially those whose parents do not.
It’s one thing to hold the opinion “I am willing to sacrifice some number of lives, in order to preserve privacy”. That is an honest and potentially justifiable opinion someone may hold. But declaring the situation to simply be a facade to harvest people’s data seems to me like a reflexive response to avoid uncomfortable truths regarding the situation.
Go watch the newest Louis Theroux, into the manosphere.
At points Louis and whatever absolute scumbag he's with walk around the streets while the guy is filming his own content.
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. Multiple times.
And he hardly gets to spend any time with these men because they clock pretty quickly they're not going to come off well.
In the space of like 3 days, Louis caught on camera at least 10/20 young kids recognizing these toxic people from videos they had watched. Even the ones who'd been banned from most platforms, because their videos get reshared under different accounts and insta/tiktok/facebook aren't bothering to catch these reshares.
It really is about the kids.
And it all comes down to these people convincing young men to spend money on scam courses or invest in scam brokerages by getting them to join telegram group chats. And suddenly it's really clear to me why telegram's under scrutiny.
I share your observations and concerns. But I don't think the current erosion of digital privacy and the censorship creep were made to address those. There are better ways (even though they are not fully fleshed out yet) to minimize toxic/populist influence, but a blank cheque to sacrifice our rights isn't one.
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.
It makes a lot of sense, too. Previously, governments wanted everyone to have to swipe their driver's license before accessing the internet. But now, businesses want it too. And that makes all the difference in a world built on capitalism.
We have to separate child protection from Internet control so that the "protect the kids" narrative loses its potency. So here's a counter-narrative: we can implement digital child protection without Internet-wide access control, and it requires just 3 simple features that can be implemented in less than a week. There's no need to introduce new laws at all. This could just be done tomorrow if there is genuine will to protect the kids.
1) If you're a platform like Discord or Gmail, give users the option to create an extra password lock for modifying their profile information (which includes age). This could also be implemented at the app level rather than at the account level. Parents can take their child's phone, set the age, and set these passwords for each of their child's apps/accounts.
2) If you're an OS developer, add a password-protected toggle in the OS settings that gates app installation/updates, like sudo on Linux. Parents can take their child's phone and set this password, so they can control what software runs on their child's phone. If we have this, then 1) isn't even strictly needed because parents can simply choose to only install apps that are suitable for their child.
3) If you're a device manufacturer, you should open-source your drivers and firmware and give device owners the ability to lock/unlock the bootloader at will with a custom password. Parents should be able to develop and install an open-source child-friendly OS. Companies like Apple and Samsung have worked against this for years by introducing all kinds of artificial roadblocks to developing an alternative OS for their hardware.
So basically parents set the child's age and apps rely on that if they need to know if the user is old enough?
That's pretty similar to the California bill. Parents set an age when creating a child's account. The OS provides an API to get the user's age bracket from that, which apps that need to know the age bracket of the user can call.
The California bill gets it backwards. Rather than Internet services taking the user's age and deciding what content to serve, the Internet service or app should broadcast the age rating of its content to the OS (if convenience is desired), like how movie ratings work. The responsibility to decide what content is suitable for a child should rest in the hands of that child's parent, not the state or the corporation.
1) Could be simpler for a start if 2) ensures that no web sites that send a special "over 18" server header are displayed. The header could be more detailed and the parent could select what things are allowed, but for a start make it simple.
Yes, that's even better. Make apps and websites provide an API that broadcasts the age rating of its content, then let the OS attest the apps and websites, not the other way around.
Devices with child locks turned on really shouldn't have access to everything on the Internet. A simple protocol could let cooperating websites know when child locks are on, so they don't show inappropriate content. Whitelisting or blacklisting could handle the rest.
This doesn't mean every device needs to implement child locks. It also shouldn't affect anyone using unlocked devices at all.
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.
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.
Isn't it a stretch to round off "trans content" to "LGBT+ content"? I mean, from a pure logical point of view the statement is correct, because "trans content" is a subset of "LGBT+ content", and therefore "suppressing LGBT+ content" is technically correct, but it's at least misleading. The left's version of this would be something like "twitter is suppressing anti-immigration content!", and the actual example is some alt-right commenter saying that immigrants should be lynched. Immigrants being lynched is certainly an subset of "anti-immigration", but it's still misleading.
I mean, I don't disagree with the sentiment of keeping trans ideology away from kids, in exactly the way I'd want to protect them from any kind of religious indoctrination.
The idea that even a single person in the world is trans because of "trans ideology" is what's absolutely insane here.
If you think you could be convinced by anyone that you're not living out your true gender identity, I have news for you... Most people, children too, are not having those thoughts unless there's actually a journey waiting for them.
It stopped being centered around gender dysphoria quite a while ago. Gender identity is where it's at now, and the idea that one does not need to be dysphoric to be trans is currently the most mainstream one.
Firey take there, but I know a few people who are trans and neck deep in the kool aid. They will tell you that 25-30% of population is trans, and just haven't been liberated/are in denial.
Look, it's cool to be trans, no problem. These women I know are good people and net contributors to society. But they are off the ideological deep-end, and would happily spend 3 hours at the family BBQ lecturing an impressionable 13 year old about how those weird body feelings are very likely gender dismorphia. They're just as drunk on their flavor of delusional social media as any other religious nut is crazy about God.
I fail to see why the "protections" that child data deserves, isn't also the same kind of protection that everyone deserve. In what way are children special, in a digital world, that adults shouldn't be protected the same way?
how about if i do nothing the internet assumes i'm a child and therefore does not track me, show me ads or permit doom scroll feeds. then if i want i can jump through some hoops and pay some money or something to get a digital id that lets me attach a zkp to all my http requests that then unlock the magic of ads, tracking and doom scroll feeds.
That would be a solution if the people pushing this actually cared about "protecting kids."
But let's be honest, governments want a dragnet they can use to monitor/control all internet communication. The people running western democracies are equally as power hungry and zealously authoritarian (my ideas will bring utopia!) as the people running the CCP.
The only difference is, the CCP has permissionless authority, so they ended internet freedom in China decades ago. They didn't have to ask.
Western authoritarians on the other hand, have to fight a slow battle to cleverly grind you down over time, so that you get tricked into allowing them to gatekeep the internet. It hasn't worked so far. The next step (this one) is "okay, so you don't want to have to ask us permission before you visit a website...but won't anybody think of the poor beautiful innocent children???"
Emotions activated. Rational thought deactivated.
They'll get what they want because they always get what they want. And you'll be convinced it's good for you over time, because most people just follow whatever the mainstream "vibes" are, and the elite sets the vibes. It's amazing a free internet existed this long. Great while it lasted.
i'm only half joking. adding zkps to http requests is probably the correct privacy preserving technical solution that could be built into something sensible.
the bigger issue is that lawmakers are thinking in terms of smartphones, tablets and commercial pcs as shrink wrapped media consumption devices with a setup step... not protocol level support that preserves parts of computing and the internet they don't even really know exists. seems like the ietf should have lobbyists or something.
It's irksome that these laws and bills in multiple countries are trying to put limits on the general purpose computer. It's the wrong solution and arguably put forward in bad faith.
If you want access control, the appropriate point for regulation is with ISPs and cellular providers, and the appropriate mode of regulation is requiring these companies to provide choice and education for families, and awareness of liability.
Require ISPs and cellular network providers to offer a standard set of controls to their customers informing the common person (in common language) who is using those connections and what they are doing with them. For ISPs, this looks like an option for a router with robust access controls, designating some devices (based on MAC address) as belonging to children and filtering those devices' network requests at the network gateway, or filtering one hop up onto the provider's infrastructure (e.g. the ONT for fiber connections). For cellular providers, it looks like an app available to parents' devices and similar filtering for devices designated as belonging to children (based on IMEI).
When a family signs up for Internet service, either at-home access or cellular data, the provider must give both parents a presentation about these tools, and about the liability the parents face for allowing their children unsupervised, latchkey access to adult content, no different than allowing children to drink alcohol.
It may even make sense to require ISPs and cellular providers to track MAC addresses and IMEIs of devices their own customers designate as "for children" and make those providers liable for not filtering Internet for those devices, and also liable for allowing targeted advertising against those devices.
I don't think achieving that setup is likely, but it's fundamentally the right way to solve this problem, and parents are pushing for a solution one way or another. I don't love it, but if it's coming almost inevitably we should at least push to do it right. It's a dead-end, losing strategy to blanket oppose one solution to legislators and provide no alternative. I write all of that as someone who values privacy and liberty, both in meatspace and cyberspace.
The people pushing these bills are the same that are looking to ban library books. They’re either bad or ineffective parents (or both). Instead of having a healthy relationship and discussion with their kids they’d rather impose their own regressive ideas by way of legislation on everyone.
I'd be ok with this if both ends of the spectrum were covered. Sorry, you're too old to access this computer. Go ask a younger adult if you want to read the news or see photos of your grandkids.
It'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.
For the US, the worst of it started in 2019, when the held YouTube liable for all content that a child might access. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_and_privacy#COPPA_sett...) That's what pushed all of the content networks to lobby for the liability to go somewhere else.
For almost three decades authorities have been wondering how to put this 'free communications' genie back into the bottle without taking the GFW approach. It looks like this time they just might get it.
If you really believe that this is about child protection then you are much too gullible, that was never the main reason. If the authorities really wanted to do something about child protection online they'd spend a fraction of what they are going to spend on this on building out the departments in the various countries that actually work on that problem exclusively. As it is they have more work they can handle, which leaves a lot of cases lying and far more of these perps active than what would otherwise be the case.
So as long as you don't see that you know for a fact that this child protection is not the real reason.
I think the truth is closer to them being tightly bound to one another over their shared "love" of children. Epstein bouncing around the academic community was the tip of an iceberg. Imagine the reputation laundering that goes on with all of these "for the children" NGOs.
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.
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
Controlling access to certain websites, i.e., so-called "social media", is not "internet access control". The web is not the internet. Nor are these laws limiting access to _all_ websites. Third, not all operating systems are controlled by corporations like Apple, Google, etc. and used to protect and promote corporate interests
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.
It's not about gutting moderation. They want you to dox yourself to get online. It's a pro-censorship authoritarian-friendly move. I don't believe the narrative that Meta is behind it all either. If they are, they are probably serving someone else.
Here are just some of the things you can do with tracking:
- Dox, coerce, blackmail, and ruin political candidates, powerful CEOs, and wealthy people. If they watch a category of porn that is embarrassing or have an affair, suddenly you have leverage against them. You can parlay that to accomplish lots of things.
- Make it impossible to talk about certain things and eventually eliminate those things. Porn today, abortion tomorrow. LGBT, women's rights ... it's a tool to start enforcing an ideology. Eventually these things can be disappeared entirely, not just the discourse. You just cordon off and begin washing it away bit by bit, year by year. Once the control mechanisms are in place, it cannot be stopped.
- Kill anonymous communication. This can pin identities to online comments. You can then punish people of the ideology you don't like by denying them jobs, auditing them, etc. This has a chilling effect on political opposition. This also makes it much harder to leak or report information safely and harms the ability to whistle blow.
- In general, this also pushes society into more religious, more conservative views. With it comes a lack of skepticism and a greater appreciation for authority.
- Ultimately, this is a step into 1984. If we go down that route, we will eventually be owned in whole by the authoritarian powers at top. This entire conversation will be memory holed.
Once a right is lost, we will not get it back. Then it's just one step after another into hell.
We must fight this.
Our lives, our freedom, our future - depend on it.
I disagree with almost all of your political opinions, and some of your positions I very much hate. But we should be free to have the argument, without the thread of handcuffs or the threat of starvation. Although I use my real name here, sometimes I prefer not to, and that should be allowed.
The right to actual real privacy is the same thing as the right to actual real freedom of speech, and we should harm anyone who is trying to take that most basic foundation of all rights away.
Regardless of how we (mis?)align on social and economic issues, we should align on dislike of authoritarianism and surveillance. It is our common enemy.
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Edit: I can't respond to comments anymore (HN rate limits on downvotes and commenting within a single thread), but I also wanted to respond to a sibling comment:
> "your team"
Just because I believe in personal freedom of people from the government does not mean I'm left-wing. I agree with some democratic party policies, and I disagree with others.
I'm not strictly a libertarian either, because I believe government regulation is necessary to prevent monopolies. But over-regulation is also stifling to progress.
But it shouldn't matter what my politics are. Social and economic issues are orthogonal, and frankly, not as dangerous as this one issue.
The point here is that Democrats and Republicans alike should be aligned on their disdain of surveillance and authoritarianism. Either party in power (or any power) can use it against the "other side" (or the entire population outside of the oligopoly).
These tools are nothing but evil and designed to control. Once they start sinking their teeth in, they only sink in deeper. Every free person should hate them.
If you think the heat has started, you're mistaken. We're not even in the fire yet. It can and will get waaaay worse.
We've been able to push back against these efforts time and time again. Don't stop. Call your legislators. Talk with your friends and get them to do the same. Vote against politicians that support it.
My understanding is that Abraham Lincoln literally had all the nation's telegraph lines routed through DC during the civil war, and AT&T has been an honorary branch of the US government ever since.
You've accurately described what could happen with right-wing authoritarians in power. You've not described what could happen with left-wing authoritarians in power.
Don't be fooled that your team doesn't have people with the same impulses. Privacy and civil liberties exist to protect us from abuse of authority on all sides.
- "Oh I see John is connected to this account. I really don't like this HN comment and opinion he posted, I find it deeply offensive. Put him on the bank KYC fail list."
- "We'd love to give you this mortgage backed by the US government, but why didn't you post the right flag in support of the new hip thing?"
- "Before you login to your retirement account, how much wealth are you secretly harboring there from this job we think you unfairly got due to your privilege?"
- "If you just let us monitor your activity and the ideas you see, we'll stop you from wrong-think and will create a utopia"
> ruin political candidates, powerful CEOs, and wealthy people
This is mostly fantasy propagated by works of fiction. In the real world release of any evidence of sins has practically zero impact on the wealthy people and when it very occasionally does have an impact it just happens in cases of people who weren't wealthy enough for the circumstances.
The government can do a whole lot more than embarrass CEOs and powerful people they don't like. Look at how China controls its tech CEOs by making them disappear until their views align.
>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?
How about the first country to ban social media for kids, Australia[1]? So far as I can tell the PM/party leader was not in the files. Of course, if you make your inclusion criteria absurdly wide (eg. anyone who voted or advocated for age based restrictions in any shape or form), you'll probably find some pedophiles or even epstien island visitors from sheer luck alone.
...because they're pushing age verification legislation? Did I miss some massive Labor pedophile scandal? If not, this just feels like a tautology. Labor is only pushing age verification because they're pedophiles, and they're pedophiles because they're pushing age verification.
Moreover even if we ignore that, what does that mean for the rest of their platform items? If Labor is pro net-zero, is it fair to characterize the situation as "the people pushing for net-zero are pedophiles"?
This table seems suspect. I spot checked Texas, and while the party affiliation is correct, the dates are not. You put Sept 19, 2023 as the date for Texas, but Wikipedia[1] says it "Enacted September 1, 2024" and "Enacted June 13, 2023". Looking at the other dates, I'm not sure how you got Sept 19, 2023, even through a typo.
No, it's bipartisan and even fucking international. I think there is a very obvious conspiracy to get this done, but maybe it's a big coincidence that governments and politicians everywhere suck now.
I was talking about the party. This shit is and always has been pushed from both parties. Even democrat states like California and Colorado are on board. See also, the OS age verification legislation.
TBH California one doesn't require age verification (while many other states do). It only requires the OS to provide a mechanism for the user to indicate their age group and apps should use the information (instead of asking for PII themselves). It's a fake one, but somehow drew most attention.
It means that especially those who went to the island but also most of the others don't care about protecting children. They merely see a way to consolidate power and are jumping on it.
Its 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.
In the USA it literally is two homogenous groups though? One of which is majorly complicit in covering up the files, against their constituents’ wishes.
I wouldn't even call them two groups. It's just one group ostensibly and publicly split in half, but it's still one group that intermingles behind the courtains.
I would say both parties are complicit at this point.
Keep in mind Epstein died in 2017. We had two GOP terms and one Democrat term from then to now.
With what we know from the files that have been released thus far (and how obviously the worst if it has either been shredded or will never see the light of day), the fact they refused to release/prosecute those implicated tells you all you need to know.
Yes, and many people have an extreme incentive to retreat to that framing because
* In 2024, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.
* In 2020, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.
* In 2016, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.
There was plenty of evidence of this association in 2016 (bragging about creeping into Ms Teen USA dressing rooms, bragging about being Epstein's best friend in the same sentence as acknowledging he's a pedo, victim testimony under oath that he diddled kids, etc etc), so "I didn't know" isn't an excuse if they cared one iota about the children at any step of the way.
It should be good news that the powerful pedophiles are largely (but not exclusively) concentrated in one party, but those who put them in power will do anything to avoid admitting culpability.
Hillary has not been implicated by the Epstein files. Not today and not by evidence available in 2016.
Biden has not been implicated by the Epstein files. Not today and not by evidence available in 2020.
Bonus: not only was Trump implicated in the Epstein files both today and by evidence available in 2016, he was also in charge of every federal prison and every US spook agency in 2019 when Epstein died under mysterious circumstances.
>Bonus: not only was Trump implicated in the Epstein files both today and by evidence available in 2016, he was also in charge of every federal prison and every US spook agency in 2019 when Epstein died under mysterious circumstances.
Who was in charge when Epstein got the sweetheart deal on his first conviction?
>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
What'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. "
> 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"?
2. I'm not sure what you're trying to refute. I specifically quoted a passage saying that they broke up in 2004, which implies they were together prior to that.
3. For the specific claim that Trump's a pedophile, a "drawing of a curvaceous woman" is hardly proof. At best it's a proof that he's a womanizer, but we hardly need proof of that given the "grab her by the pussy" quote.
The resistance to the release of the files including redactions and outright refusal of Congressional order is enough to reveal the magnitude of what's going on. I would even dare say this Iran war is in part due to blackmail gained on DJT.
>The resistance to the release of the files including redactions and outright refusal of Congressional order is enough to reveal the magnitude of what's going on.
I agree this makes him look suspect, but it's hardly conclusive. Moreover Democrats did a similar U-turn a few years before. The only difference is that they weren't bombastically pushing the conspiracy theory during the election campaign, which made it easier for them to backtrack later.
>When Maxwell was charged in 2020, Democrats continued to push for transparency. [...] After Biden took office in 2021, Democrats appeared to dial back their public calls for Epstein records’ release.
I dont disagree with anything you have written in the above reply. But why does democrats' reversal somehow annul or invalidate the claim about trump? Do you honestly believe it could all be an overly-embellished fable? If you do, then do you think the hundreds, some-say-thousands, of women who claim they were raped are lying?
Another explanation could be the democrats' AIPAC handlers told them to back off because it wasn't the precise time to leverage the material yet.
>The president of the United States was friends with the alleged ring leader of a large pedophile network.
You're making some leaps logic here here. If someone's outed as a pedophile, everyone who's friends with him should be assumed to be a pedophile? Surely not, given that pedophilia is considered taboo, we'd expect them to hide it, and therefore at least some friends might not be in the know. That's not to say there's no conspirators, but "he was friends with a pedophile therefore he's a pedophile too" is just guilt by association. What you need to prove is that he knew, or ought to have known that his friend was a pedophile. A conviction works decently for this, because it's presumably public knowledge, although even that's questionable because most people don't do a background check on people they met. In the case of Epstien he also hired reputation management firms to suppress his conviction from showing up in the results, which weakens the case even more.
> but what about everyone else pushing for the law but who didn't go?
Who exactly is influential & organized enough across many western countries to push legislation that no one is asking for? Notice that epstein said he worked for [withheld] in some of his emails.
>Who exactly is influential & organized enough across many western countries to push legislation that no one is asking for?
The anti-social media sentiment has been brewing for a while now, not least due to books like The Anxious Generation (2024). It's also reflected in opinion polls and media coverage. Unless you want to imply there's some massive conspiracy by The Elites™ (ie. not just a few lobbyists Meta hired, but those in academia and media as well), it's probably organic.
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.
But why is Meta lobbying for this? The bills they push move compliance onto the app stores. And Meta doesn't run an app store. I think the execs think its some sort of 4D chess move to put liabilities onto their competitors. I'm not sure it will work out that way. Seems like FB has a lot more to lose than they think.
why? If age restriction get legislated into the OS, it puts a damper on further attempts on adding restrictions to sites, because they can point to the existing legislation and claim it's enough.
They're pushing for an API at the system level, where they can query the age
Such an API can then be extended to provide location data to "help the police find bad guys", track purchase histories to "prevent fraud"; all the stuff that Apple and Google blocked fb from sniffing from user devices
It's circumvention of these privacy protections with added vengeance since now Google and Apple will be sitting with the cost of implementation and the liability
>Such an API can then be extended to provide location data to "help the police find bad guys", track purchase histories to "prevent fraud"; all the stuff that Apple and Google blocked fb from sniffing from user devices
/s?
In case this is serious, why do they need an age API to ask for a location backdoor API?
I mean sure; but look at it from their POV, controlling the medium is the message right from 1984. Like LLMs, you can't learn about doing evil things without seeing how they benefit yourself.
The 'nanny state' prevents people from driving cars without a license?
That prevents you from buying myriad substances without a note from the doctor?
That makes it illegal for you to buy a gun?
" become governed by the country in which they operate not the whims of foreign entities"
... is not going to work, at face value, because 'operation' involves the consumer and the producer, each of whom may be in different jurisdictions, and even if they were in the 'same nation' ... this is still a hard problem.
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.
Saw a mini documentary once, which was filmed in China, that showed how easy it was to buy this data. Many apps spy on location and sells it to brokers. In the documentary, they showed a common practice: people buying their romantic partner's location history to make sure they haven't been doing anything naughty.
Access control and pervasive surveillance has been the plan since day one; child protection is the leverage. Also, I don't expect people who repeatedly hide the contents of certain files to care about children.
We had a good run when the internet was a disruptive force. But mass adoption of anything always leads to where we are. The internet is an established institution. The wild west days are over. If you're looking for that vibe, p2p technology in small corners will be where you can find it.
Given that it seems Meta is commissioning these laws, I wonder if a viral open source license that explicitly fails to grant Meta a license to use or modify the software would effectively deter future lobbying for regulations which are especially difficult for the open source community to comply with.
> Given that it seems Meta is commissioning these laws
That's not given. Someone found some good evidence that Meta was supporting (and even supplying language) for some of the earlier laws. Those were the laws doing age checks on websites and typically requiring uploading ID documents or face scans to those websites.
I've not seen anyone provide evidence that Meta has anything to do with the laws that are like the California one, which do not require providing any documentation or proof whatsoever of age. They just required that the parent of a child who uses a device be asked to provide a birthdate or age when setting up the child's account, and that the OS providing an API that apps on that device can use to get the age bracket of the child.
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?
-----
Still, there is somewhat of a silver lining: Perhaps this will encourage young people, and people who value their privacy, to avoid those "social networks" in favor of places where there is no age verification, 2FA with a physical phone number, etc. etc.
The people who want to control internet access use children to achieve their means. Why these creeps get to power? Normally people thinking too much about children would be casted out of society at best.
You don't understand, the children need to be exposed to Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, and algorithmically generated suicidal ideation from Facebook. It's crucial for their development, actually
Is there something wrong in particular with that image? The composition fits in well with the content of the article, and the art seems pretty well down. I'm only seeing one error that would make me think "a human probably didn't draw this" and took a while to notice that.
The only people on the planet that care about this, and understand it enough to maybe do something about it, are reading this thread right now. I got nothing. Anyone else got any ideas?
For many it's not about the children. For many it is.
I haven't made my mind up on this topic, but Jesus, the comments here strawmanning everyone who supports this kind of thing as disingenuous or worse... Wow.
I'm not sure how we make any corner of the internet usable within the next few years without verification given all the misinfo, bots & AI slop anyway.
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...
I read in some other discussions that this is about social media companies being able to increase their profits and nothing else. But the social media companies lobbying for these laws are shamelessly making it look like some kind of protect the children thing. It is all pushing more ads annd getting more users.
The way it works: 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 can’t advertise and have to lose those profits even though MAYBE the user is an adult. Now they can shift the legal compliance costs and liability to the operating system provider or phone manufacturer and not be responsible for the user’s identity. And then they can advertise much more at that point, without being conservative. This also lets them have a different experience for minors that doesn’t advertise to them, but targets them carefully to keep them as users until they are older, so they start to become a source of advertising profits later.
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. They’ll next use age-based verification for all sorts of content - maybe for LGBTQ stuff, maybe for something else.
In the end, everyone else will lose. If you have to prove your identity to anyone, there is a high chance this information can be accessed and 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.
In the short term the way it will be implemented is this — age verification will not be a binary, it will also want to push your DoB, name, location etc and they say “the choice is with the user” but the default will be to send everything. Very soon there will be services that require DoB or name or something else to gate new or existing functionality. That is the slippery slope it will be built as and that is how they win the game
At the same time, we have to be real: Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks. I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place. As society is more and more digitized, the stakes become much, much higher. An information leak 30 years ago was bad, but it had a fairly limited impact radius. Today it can lose you your house, your savings, your relationships, and even your life ("swatting" comes to mind).
This extremely ill-advised legislation across various jurisdictions cannot just be brushed off as a global turn towards fascism. It is that, but there are also real, legitimate concerns that need to be addressed, and the tech world has not leveraged its expertise to come up with any solutions so far. Sticking our head in the sand crying "git gud" while millions get scammed out of their life savings... It's not great.
(Children getting into trouble is honestly the least of my concerns here. Don't let your child go online unsupervised. The internet is not for them. You wouldn't let them roam free in a red light district or an underground illegal weapon's market either, even though they are unlikely to come to any harm.)
So you are afraid of minor information leaks getting you killed, but you’re also trying to tell us that online anonymity is a bad thing?
Come on.
> I don't think it's reasonable to keep dreaming of the 90s or 00s when the internet was a comparatively innocent place
This is such a strange argument as the internet was most definitely NOT an innocent place, even relatively speaking, in that period.
I think there is a lot of nostalgic history rewriting in these claims. Much like political movements that claim that the past was a better time, it’s easy to only remember the good parts of how things were in the past.
Online anonymity has significant, real-world benefits which every doxxed person ever will list for you.
The solution is called a durable power of attorney and then moving significant assets to different financial institutions with estatements. Or the heavyweight option is a living trust.
This problem really has no bearing on mandatory identity verification or locking down software. Scammers leverage generic apps in the app stores just fine.
This problem most certainly is a part of the global turn towards fascism, which is ultimately based on frustrated people demanding easy answers and then empowering those who are able to give them easy answers by lying to them.
The Brazilian government passed a law requiring age verification for every site categorized as 16+. It can't be self-declared, so companies usually resort to facial scans and ID verification. I DO NOT want photos of our Brazilian children going to foreign agents who are PROVEN to profit from and do God-knows-what with our biometric data. And the funniest part? The same law says 'regulation shall not, under any circumstances, authorize or result in the implementation of mass surveillance mechanisms,' but also mandates that these measures must be 'AUDITABLE.' In other words, someone needs access to that data. It’s all so stupid and incoherent.
People who are less tech-literate FIERCELY support the measure, and whenever someone opposes it, they claim that person supports digital child abuse...
Anyway... the responsibility of protection should come from the parents, not from companies that profit off your biometric data.
The uncensored internet taught me more than I could ever have been taught in school, and I'll be forever grateful for that. It didn't take me long to understand that I could generally hate no ethnicity or people or country, and the people who do are manipulated by their government or other powerful figures in their life (or disproportionately swayed by experiences in their life). Humans are pretty much all the same, we all have far far more in common than we do differences. I have a stronger perspective of this than my immediate ancestors (demonstrated over and over throughout my life) and I do credit my exposure to the open internet for a huge amount of that.
There is one huge and problematic difference now, though: the uncensored internet of the 90's is nothing like the disinformation-saturated internet of today.
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.
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!
Above all, the LLM panopticon will watch us all.
Technology will not save us. Nothing will save us but ourselves and we're busy making rent and doomscrolling.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And once you step outside HN, forget it. You can save yourself, but there are thousands of people that do respond to the "think of the children!" nonsense and will call you a creep for objecting to it. It's game over now, you will fight against this for the rest of your life.
For example, it seems to me there is a whole lot of worry around megacorporations, often related to capitalism and the inequalities it brings.
In that context, if you don't place privacy as a priority, how are you not either stupid or ignorant? Is my premise just wrong?
It's really more just concluding that those corporations should be liable for their behavior. It also has nothing to do with "the Internet" which is largely unaffected. Except of course ideas for forcing OS behavior coming out of California which are obviously bad.
I actually think things could be a lot simpler if we just made the laws like alcohol: it's illegal (with criminal liability) for a non-parent adult to provide <restricted thing> to a child. Simple enough. Seems to work fine as-is for Internet alcohol purchases. Businesses dealing in restricted industries can figure out how to avoid that liability. That's entirely compatible with making it illegal for businesses to stalk everyone, which we should also do!
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.
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.
I don’t intend to give up or accept limitations on these rights because you consider yourself to have “privacy rights” or ownership interests in my records, my memories, my perceptions, or the reality in front of me. I find the notion of the government or another person interfering in this process, the perception and recollection of reality, to be creepy and totalitarian by itself.
In 1984, it is not only that the government is aware of Winston, but that it routinely tampers with or destroys evidence of the past & demands to control the perception of the present. I do not think we should let a government do that, even for a good reason like “protect your privacy” any more than we should let it destroy general purpose computing “for the children.”
> 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
It didn't take long for the CIA to sniff everything on everyone, early 2000's.
Maybe you're referring to the 90's but at that time the internet wasn't really that popular, it was a niche thing.
The digital age presents with it novel forms of danger for children, and for adults for that matter, and there is absolutely no way to effectively address these risks without some amount of reduction in privacy. And before someone inevitably says “where were the parents?” and wash their hands of the situation, a healthy society should care for and protect all children, especially those whose parents do not.
It’s one thing to hold the opinion “I am willing to sacrifice some number of lives, in order to preserve privacy”. That is an honest and potentially justifiable opinion someone may hold. But declaring the situation to simply be a facade to harvest people’s data seems to me like a reflexive response to avoid uncomfortable truths regarding the situation.
At points Louis and whatever absolute scumbag he's with walk around the streets while the guy is filming his own content.
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. Multiple times.
And he hardly gets to spend any time with these men because they clock pretty quickly they're not going to come off well.
In the space of like 3 days, Louis caught on camera at least 10/20 young kids recognizing these toxic people from videos they had watched. Even the ones who'd been banned from most platforms, because their videos get reshared under different accounts and insta/tiktok/facebook aren't bothering to catch these reshares.
It really is about the kids.
And it all comes down to these people convincing young men to spend money on scam courses or invest in scam brokerages by getting them to join telegram group chats. And suddenly it's really clear to me why telegram's under scrutiny.
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.
1) If you're a platform like Discord or Gmail, give users the option to create an extra password lock for modifying their profile information (which includes age). This could also be implemented at the app level rather than at the account level. Parents can take their child's phone, set the age, and set these passwords for each of their child's apps/accounts.
2) If you're an OS developer, add a password-protected toggle in the OS settings that gates app installation/updates, like sudo on Linux. Parents can take their child's phone and set this password, so they can control what software runs on their child's phone. If we have this, then 1) isn't even strictly needed because parents can simply choose to only install apps that are suitable for their child.
3) If you're a device manufacturer, you should open-source your drivers and firmware and give device owners the ability to lock/unlock the bootloader at will with a custom password. Parents should be able to develop and install an open-source child-friendly OS. Companies like Apple and Samsung have worked against this for years by introducing all kinds of artificial roadblocks to developing an alternative OS for their hardware.
That's pretty similar to the California bill. Parents set an age when creating a child's account. The OS provides an API to get the user's age bracket from that, which apps that need to know the age bracket of the user can call.
This doesn't mean every device needs to implement child locks. It also shouldn't affect anyone using unlocked devices at all.
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...
>> Keeping trans content away [...]
Isn't it a stretch to round off "trans content" to "LGBT+ content"? I mean, from a pure logical point of view the statement is correct, because "trans content" is a subset of "LGBT+ content", and therefore "suppressing LGBT+ content" is technically correct, but it's at least misleading. The left's version of this would be something like "twitter is suppressing anti-immigration content!", and the actual example is some alt-right commenter saying that immigrants should be lynched. Immigrants being lynched is certainly an subset of "anti-immigration", but it's still misleading.
If you think you could be convinced by anyone that you're not living out your true gender identity, I have news for you... Most people, children too, are not having those thoughts unless there's actually a journey waiting for them.
Look, it's cool to be trans, no problem. These women I know are good people and net contributors to society. But they are off the ideological deep-end, and would happily spend 3 hours at the family BBQ lecturing an impressionable 13 year old about how those weird body feelings are very likely gender dismorphia. They're just as drunk on their flavor of delusional social media as any other religious nut is crazy about God.
seems like a good plan to me.
But let's be honest, governments want a dragnet they can use to monitor/control all internet communication. The people running western democracies are equally as power hungry and zealously authoritarian (my ideas will bring utopia!) as the people running the CCP.
The only difference is, the CCP has permissionless authority, so they ended internet freedom in China decades ago. They didn't have to ask.
Western authoritarians on the other hand, have to fight a slow battle to cleverly grind you down over time, so that you get tricked into allowing them to gatekeep the internet. It hasn't worked so far. The next step (this one) is "okay, so you don't want to have to ask us permission before you visit a website...but won't anybody think of the poor beautiful innocent children???"
Emotions activated. Rational thought deactivated.
They'll get what they want because they always get what they want. And you'll be convinced it's good for you over time, because most people just follow whatever the mainstream "vibes" are, and the elite sets the vibes. It's amazing a free internet existed this long. Great while it lasted.
the bigger issue is that lawmakers are thinking in terms of smartphones, tablets and commercial pcs as shrink wrapped media consumption devices with a setup step... not protocol level support that preserves parts of computing and the internet they don't even really know exists. seems like the ietf should have lobbyists or something.
If you want access control, the appropriate point for regulation is with ISPs and cellular providers, and the appropriate mode of regulation is requiring these companies to provide choice and education for families, and awareness of liability.
Require ISPs and cellular network providers to offer a standard set of controls to their customers informing the common person (in common language) who is using those connections and what they are doing with them. For ISPs, this looks like an option for a router with robust access controls, designating some devices (based on MAC address) as belonging to children and filtering those devices' network requests at the network gateway, or filtering one hop up onto the provider's infrastructure (e.g. the ONT for fiber connections). For cellular providers, it looks like an app available to parents' devices and similar filtering for devices designated as belonging to children (based on IMEI).
When a family signs up for Internet service, either at-home access or cellular data, the provider must give both parents a presentation about these tools, and about the liability the parents face for allowing their children unsupervised, latchkey access to adult content, no different than allowing children to drink alcohol.
It may even make sense to require ISPs and cellular providers to track MAC addresses and IMEIs of devices their own customers designate as "for children" and make those providers liable for not filtering Internet for those devices, and also liable for allowing targeted advertising against those devices.
I don't think achieving that setup is likely, but it's fundamentally the right way to solve this problem, and parents are pushing for a solution one way or another. I don't love it, but if it's coming almost inevitably we should at least push to do it right. It's a dead-end, losing strategy to blanket oppose one solution to legislators and provide no alternative. I write all of that as someone who values privacy and liberty, both in meatspace and cyberspace.
It'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.
If you really believe that this is about child protection then you are much too gullible, that was never the main reason. If the authorities really wanted to do something about child protection online they'd spend a fraction of what they are going to spend on this on building out the departments in the various countries that actually work on that problem exclusively. As it is they have more work they can handle, which leaves a lot of cases lying and far more of these perps active than what would otherwise be the case.
So as long as you don't see that you know for a fact that this child protection is not the real reason.
Coincidently, that system was provided by IBM.
Actually, this sentiment is a 'litmus test' for common sense.
We use age discrimination universally in all affairs, across the globe, across all cultures.
Of course the same thing is going to apply to 'content', it's just a lot harder and creates ugly externalizations.
It's a real problem, with no real solutions, at least not yet.
- Dox, coerce, blackmail, and ruin political candidates, powerful CEOs, and wealthy people. If they watch a category of porn that is embarrassing or have an affair, suddenly you have leverage against them. You can parlay that to accomplish lots of things.
- Make it impossible to talk about certain things and eventually eliminate those things. Porn today, abortion tomorrow. LGBT, women's rights ... it's a tool to start enforcing an ideology. Eventually these things can be disappeared entirely, not just the discourse. You just cordon off and begin washing it away bit by bit, year by year. Once the control mechanisms are in place, it cannot be stopped.
- Kill anonymous communication. This can pin identities to online comments. You can then punish people of the ideology you don't like by denying them jobs, auditing them, etc. This has a chilling effect on political opposition. This also makes it much harder to leak or report information safely and harms the ability to whistle blow.
- In general, this also pushes society into more religious, more conservative views. With it comes a lack of skepticism and a greater appreciation for authority.
- Ultimately, this is a step into 1984. If we go down that route, we will eventually be owned in whole by the authoritarian powers at top. This entire conversation will be memory holed.
Once a right is lost, we will not get it back. Then it's just one step after another into hell.
We must fight this.
Our lives, our freedom, our future - depend on it.
The right to actual real privacy is the same thing as the right to actual real freedom of speech, and we should harm anyone who is trying to take that most basic foundation of all rights away.
I agree with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
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Edit: I can't respond to comments anymore (HN rate limits on downvotes and commenting within a single thread), but I also wanted to respond to a sibling comment:
> "your team"
Just because I believe in personal freedom of people from the government does not mean I'm left-wing. I agree with some democratic party policies, and I disagree with others.
I'm not strictly a libertarian either, because I believe government regulation is necessary to prevent monopolies. But over-regulation is also stifling to progress.
But it shouldn't matter what my politics are. Social and economic issues are orthogonal, and frankly, not as dangerous as this one issue.
The point here is that Democrats and Republicans alike should be aligned on their disdain of surveillance and authoritarianism. Either party in power (or any power) can use it against the "other side" (or the entire population outside of the oligopoly).
These tools are nothing but evil and designed to control. Once they start sinking their teeth in, they only sink in deeper. Every free person should hate them.
If you think the heat has started, you're mistaken. We're not even in the fire yet. It can and will get waaaay worse.
We've been able to push back against these efforts time and time again. Don't stop. Call your legislators. Talk with your friends and get them to do the same. Vote against politicians that support it.
It does work.
North America is rooted. There is no recovery plan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Don't be fooled that your team doesn't have people with the same impulses. Privacy and civil liberties exist to protect us from abuse of authority on all sides.
- "Oh I see John is connected to this account. I really don't like this HN comment and opinion he posted, I find it deeply offensive. Put him on the bank KYC fail list."
- "We'd love to give you this mortgage backed by the US government, but why didn't you post the right flag in support of the new hip thing?"
- "Before you login to your retirement account, how much wealth are you secretly harboring there from this job we think you unfairly got due to your privilege?"
- "If you just let us monitor your activity and the ideas you see, we'll stop you from wrong-think and will create a utopia"
This is mostly fantasy propagated by works of fiction. In the real world release of any evidence of sins has practically zero impact on the wealthy people and when it very occasionally does have an impact it just happens in cases of people who weren't wealthy enough for the circumstances.
Every single one of those people has a noose around their neck and is being told what to do. They have a gun to their head now.
The intelligence apparatus has been exploiting dynamics like this for a long time.
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?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Amendment_(Socia...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-09/government-abandons-p...
...because they're pushing age verification legislation? Did I miss some massive Labor pedophile scandal? If not, this just feels like a tautology. Labor is only pushing age verification because they're pedophiles, and they're pedophiles because they're pushing age verification.
Moreover even if we ignore that, what does that mean for the rest of their platform items? If Labor is pro net-zero, is it fair to characterize the situation as "the people pushing for net-zero are pedophiles"?
https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb25-201
Looks like the CA bill went through though.
https://legiscan.com/CA/text/AB1043/id/3269704
I updated the list. Still looks rather tilted to me!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCOPE_Act
https://mashable.com/article/tech-ceos-epstein-files-musk-ga...
Its 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.
Keep in mind Epstein died in 2017. We had two GOP terms and one Democrat term from then to now.
With what we know from the files that have been released thus far (and how obviously the worst if it has either been shredded or will never see the light of day), the fact they refused to release/prosecute those implicated tells you all you need to know.
* In 2024, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.
* In 2020, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.
* In 2016, they had a choice between pedophiles and not pedophiles and chose the pedophiles.
There was plenty of evidence of this association in 2016 (bragging about creeping into Ms Teen USA dressing rooms, bragging about being Epstein's best friend in the same sentence as acknowledging he's a pedo, victim testimony under oath that he diddled kids, etc etc), so "I didn't know" isn't an excuse if they cared one iota about the children at any step of the way.
It should be good news that the powerful pedophiles are largely (but not exclusively) concentrated in one party, but those who put them in power will do anything to avoid admitting culpability.
Hillary has not been implicated by the Epstein files. Not today and not by evidence available in 2016.
Biden has not been implicated by the Epstein files. Not today and not by evidence available in 2020.
Bonus: not only was Trump implicated in the Epstein files both today and by evidence available in 2016, he was also in charge of every federal prison and every US spook agency in 2019 when Epstein died under mysterious circumstances.
Who was in charge when Epstein got the sweetheart deal on his first conviction?
Bonus: at no point did I refute Trump being a pedophile or being in the Epstein files.
The overall idea that far too many of those in power politically and economically are involved in CSA isn't though, it seems.
What'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"?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/see-the-alleged-tr...
1. "alleged"
2. I'm not sure what you're trying to refute. I specifically quoted a passage saying that they broke up in 2004, which implies they were together prior to that.
3. For the specific claim that Trump's a pedophile, a "drawing of a curvaceous woman" is hardly proof. At best it's a proof that he's a womanizer, but we hardly need proof of that given the "grab her by the pussy" quote.
I agree this makes him look suspect, but it's hardly conclusive. Moreover Democrats did a similar U-turn a few years before. The only difference is that they weren't bombastically pushing the conspiracy theory during the election campaign, which made it easier for them to backtrack later.
>When Maxwell was charged in 2020, Democrats continued to push for transparency. [...] After Biden took office in 2021, Democrats appeared to dial back their public calls for Epstein records’ release.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/6/fact-check-did-democ...
Another explanation could be the democrats' AIPAC handlers told them to back off because it wasn't the precise time to leverage the material yet.
And? It doesn’t change the reality of the original statement.
The president of the United States was friends with the alleged ring leader of a large pedophile network.
You're making some leaps logic here here. If someone's outed as a pedophile, everyone who's friends with him should be assumed to be a pedophile? Surely not, given that pedophilia is considered taboo, we'd expect them to hide it, and therefore at least some friends might not be in the know. That's not to say there's no conspirators, but "he was friends with a pedophile therefore he's a pedophile too" is just guilt by association. What you need to prove is that he knew, or ought to have known that his friend was a pedophile. A conviction works decently for this, because it's presumably public knowledge, although even that's questionable because most people don't do a background check on people they met. In the case of Epstien he also hired reputation management firms to suppress his conviction from showing up in the results, which weakens the case even more.
Who exactly is influential & organized enough across many western countries to push legislation that no one is asking for? Notice that epstein said he worked for [withheld] in some of his emails.
The anti-social media sentiment has been brewing for a while now, not least due to books like The Anxious Generation (2024). It's also reflected in opinion polls and media coverage. Unless you want to imply there's some massive conspiracy by The Elites™ (ie. not just a few lobbyists Meta hired, but those in academia and media as well), it's probably organic.
why? If age restriction get legislated into the OS, it puts a damper on further attempts on adding restrictions to sites, because they can point to the existing legislation and claim it's enough.
My kid had classmates as young as 8 using it. Facebook knows this.
Such an API can then be extended to provide location data to "help the police find bad guys", track purchase histories to "prevent fraud"; all the stuff that Apple and Google blocked fb from sniffing from user devices
It's circumvention of these privacy protections with added vengeance since now Google and Apple will be sitting with the cost of implementation and the liability
/s?
In case this is serious, why do they need an age API to ask for a location backdoor API?
It's darkly comedic that the single most toxic experience since the pop up ad - the cookie consent popup was similarly imposed.
The solution is simple. Websites and services (including ISPs) become governed by the country in which they operate not the whims of foreign entities.
The 'nanny state' prevents people from driving cars without a license?
That prevents you from buying myriad substances without a note from the doctor?
That makes it illegal for you to buy a gun?
" become governed by the country in which they operate not the whims of foreign entities"
... is not going to work, at face value, because 'operation' involves the consumer and the producer, each of whom may be in different jurisdictions, and even if they were in the 'same nation' ... this is still a hard problem.
No easy answers, and there are legit concerns.
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.
That's not given. Someone found some good evidence that Meta was supporting (and even supplying language) for some of the earlier laws. Those were the laws doing age checks on websites and typically requiring uploading ID documents or face scans to those websites.
I've not seen anyone provide evidence that Meta has anything to do with the laws that are like the California one, which do not require providing any documentation or proof whatsoever of age. They just required that the parent of a child who uses a device be asked to provide a birthdate or age when setting up the child's account, and that the OS providing an API that apps on that device can use to get the age bracket of the child.
A lot of these trajectories aren't really for us - the techy folk.
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?
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Still, there is somewhat of a silver lining: Perhaps this will encourage young people, and people who value their privacy, to avoid those "social networks" in favor of places where there is no age verification, 2FA with a physical phone number, etc. etc.
- Australia
I haven't made my mind up on this topic, but Jesus, the comments here strawmanning everyone who supports this kind of thing as disingenuous or worse... Wow.
I'm not sure how we make any corner of the internet usable within the next few years without verification given all the misinfo, bots & AI slop anyway.
The unfortunate true is IAC is coming to most countries in the world, no matter how much the Hacker News audience hates it...
The way it works: 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 can’t advertise and have to lose those profits even though MAYBE the user is an adult. Now they can shift the legal compliance costs and liability to the operating system provider or phone manufacturer and not be responsible for the user’s identity. And then they can advertise much more at that point, without being conservative. This also lets them have a different experience for minors that doesn’t advertise to them, but targets them carefully to keep them as users until they are older, so they start to become a source of advertising profits later.
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. They’ll next use age-based verification for all sorts of content - maybe for LGBTQ stuff, maybe for something else.
In the end, everyone else will lose. If you have to prove your identity to anyone, there is a high chance this information can be accessed and 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.