This frames the issue in a fundamentally incorrect way.

Since the dawn of pseudoanonymous communication, politicians have been trying to get their nasty little claws into it. See Clipper Chip in the 90's. They've tried many avenues to deanonymize and centralize. Going after the parents is just their latest - they've discovered they could use convincing language like this to trick a bunch of people who previously had no reason to care about The Internet to now suddenly "realize" oh gosh it's scary out there, what can we do to help.

Unfortunately their latest tactic is working. They figured out how to recruit a (possibly) well-intentioned bloc into supporting efforts that undermine privacy in an irreversible way.

> Because of our industry’s refusal to take those concerns seriously, we lost our voice,

Fighting against demands to censor, unmask, and neuter the closest thing we've got to a global platform of freedom is a valiant effort. Not entertaining these bureaucrats isn't some moral failing of our industry, in the same sense that ignoring a persistent busker on the street entitles him to your money after some uninvolved observer has arbitrarily decided he's made the same demand enough that somehow it's starting to make sense because the victim hasn't yelled at him with a good enough argument against it.

In other words: yep, still the parents' job, yep, internet was still there when I grew up, yep, I turned out fine, yep, politicians have been trying to take away our privacy for 30 years (and unfortunately, they're finding more creative and convincing ways to disguise it). Hint: it's never about the kids

I guess, but there's a philosophy that goes something along the lines of: Government is not the answer to every problem. It's a very divisive issue, clearly. Technical people were never going to solve the problem of kids having access to adult materials online because tech people are only interested in making gobs of money, not in dealing with delicate social issues. Government isn't going to fix anything, either, mind you, because the moment the crackdowns begin, the technologists will walk right in with a solution. Maybe we'll finally have the distributed, peer-to-peer network we always thought we were getting but instead got centrally controlled nodes featuring mass surveillance.

I stopped worrying about it as a parent. My kids want to look at porn? Let them. If they want to see horrible, violent shit that gives them nightmares and they can't un-see it, let them. They'll either figure it out or they will be lifetime children looking for big daddy government to solve all their stupid problems for them and society will collapse.

It's still moralist pearl-clutching in service of totalitarian horseshit no matter how you'd like to justify it.

I don't even think you're strictly 100% incorrect here. That said, I refuse to entertain the "think of the children" horseshit when parents happily park their kid in front of an iPad for hours a day because it shuts them up, not with kink content they shouldn't see, but with AI/algorithmically generated garbage, or for that matter, human generated garbage, that rots their brains far more than any gimp costume ever could.

For fucks sake, 12 kids in America die PER DAY due to mass shootings, and we can't even pass common sense gun regulations that the vast majority of gun owners are completely fine with. We don't give a fuck about our kids here. This has from jump, and continues to be, astro-turfed puritan whining not merely to pornography of whatever preferred kind of the moment, but to the existence of queer people as a whole.

It IS parents' fucking responsibility, and maybe that is an onerous burden, but instead of even attempting to meet it, the majority of parents have abdicated it. And it isn't porn fucking their kids up, it's non-stop screen exposure leaving them with no attention span and no ability to simply BE BORED.

  > watching BDSM on their friend’s phones at 12.

Why does a 12 year old have a smartphone that's connected to the internet?

When I was 12 our computer was in the living room and shared by everyone. It could access porn but you had to wait till you were the only one in the home.

There's a pretty simple solution here if you don't already see it and I'm not sure why it isn't more acceptable. It solves all the problems you mention. You don't want kids being sucked into social media? Sucked into porn? Constantly staring at their screens?

Have you ever considered not giving your kids smartphones?

Or have you decided the benefits are worth the costs?

Let's be honest here, even with strong government intervention this is always a cat and mouse game. The play of "no smartphone" is going to be far stronger than anything the government can ever do. Why is this not an option?

The reality is those parents have tried nothing and are all out of ideas, or, in the vast majority of cases, simply don't care.

This is not at all about children by the way, because all millenials have grown while consuming porn and social media, and haven't turned into degenerates. It is 100% an excuse to spy on citizens, and nothing else.

Treating users like adults and allowing them full control over setting system capability and app launch restrictions on devices (and even implementing fully optional, widely blocking restrictions as "parental safety options") was the industry taking it seriously. You considering the freedom of choice to the user as disastrous and the lack of heavily restricted lockdowns by default as "refusal to take concerns seriously" is just a reflection on your attitudes about other people, not any real argument for improving privacy or safety. You ARE a morally panicked maniac if your only grossly offensive things you want to keep pretending are horrifying examples have absolutely nothing to do with the invasion of privacy of children and more to do with puritanical outrage on children accessing adult material.

While we’re posting honest opinions that run against the consensus on this site:

In my view, freedom of speech is a natural right that no government can take away. But no such guarantee exists that you can do so anonymously.

Now before you immediately flame me to death, please read a bit further:

We already have a hodgepodge of laws in basically every jurisdiction around logging IP addresses, cooperating with law enforcement when there’s a warrant, being able to track down who is (say) organizing violence, posting csam, etc. Like it or not, the government is entitled to search and seizure if there is a warrant signed by a judge to do so, and if you run an online service where can people can post things publicly, you better damn well keep logs of who’s posting things and you better cooperate if a law enforcement officer with a warrant asks you to.

So what I propose is that we streamline all of this. At age 16 you get a digital ID that works something like a FIDO chip that can be used to prove your identity to a government authentication server. Sub in/out whatever tech you want, it can be a passkey (blech), something resembling a yubikey, etc. You get them at your local post office, where you can actually prove your identity in person. There’s post offices everywhere, and they’re already meant to serve everyone in the country.

But critically, this key isn’t used to auth to any sites except a government-run signin service. The service itself would be a modified form of OAuth/OIDC that preserves privacy from the site you’re making an account on. They don’t know who you are, they just get a signed payload from the government signin site saying “this is a user over the age of 16”, and via a pre-established relationship between the website in question and the government auth site, a UUID is minted for that legal person. It will be the same UUID for that website for the same person, so you can’t just pretend you’re multiple people when you create multiple accounts.

With this system, and using Reddit as an example site that may leverage this:

- Reddit can’t know who you actually are, they only get a UUID and a signed payload indicating you’re over 16 (or whatever other set of properties are legally salient for the account.) In the event of a breach, all you’d get is a list of Reddit-specific UUID’s. You’d have to also hack the government auth service to know who these people actually are.

- The government doesn’t know who owns your username on Reddit, they only know the list of citizens that have Reddit accounts at all.

- In the event of a crime with a warrant, the government can compel Reddit to inform them which UUID corresponds to some account. Reddit continues to not know who the account belongs to.

- Every site using this system gets a completely different UUID for the same legal person and has no ability to correlate them

- Every legal person using this system has no idea what their UUID is for any site

- Every site using this doesn’t have to worry at all about proving identity. They get working auth for every legal person in $country, streamlining signups and onboarding, and doesn’t have to worry about asking the user to prove they’re over 16.

- You still get pseudo-anonymity in that you can use an alias (as many as the site allows, too), the site can remain blissfully ignorant as to who you really are, as well as everyone who reads your posts, etc.

- The government can find out who owns an account, but only with a warrant. They don’t have a list of account/UUID mappings anywhere.

This system is probably the most closely aligned to how I would do things if I was somehow “in charge”… you have a right to pseudo-anonymity, but you don’t have a right to cover your tracks so thoroughly that the government can’t track you down with a proper warrant.

With such a system, saying “social media is for ages 16 and up” is a simple checkbox in the signup flow. Done.

You can argue all day about whether a government should be able to uncloak your accounts with a warrant, but to me that question is already settled: yes, they absolutely can do that, they do so today all the time. Except today we have messy data breaches where everyone’s identity gets leaked because every site has to reinvent their own form of proving your legal identity (in the case of Facebook/etc) or simply proving you’re a certain age (uploading ID, etc.). I’d take a centralized government-run approach to what we have today any day.

You could ask “but should government be in the business of electronic authentication and identity?” And my answer is: “YES.” It’s basically the primary function of a working government! We trust them to issue passports for chrissake. To me this is basic table stakes in the 21st century. If we did government all over again, having the government provide a service to prove online identity is basically right up there with “collects tax revenue.”

Now, in the current government up to the challenge of doing this, and not fucking it up? Yeeesh, probably not. You got me there. But one can dream…

I remain sympathetic to parents who don't know where to start in terms of understanding technology and computers. It is a big topic. But I am entirely unsympathetic to parents who throw up their hands and make no effort.

At this point, any parent saying, "I just don't understand technology," or, "I just don't have the time to mind my childrens' computer use or monitor their Internet access," is morally equivalent to saying, "I just don't understand traffic safety," and, "I just don't have the time to teach my children the rules of the road or how to cross the street," while living in a big, bustling city.

It is lazy, entitled, and negligent. The world is full of networked computers and, barring some new massive Carrington event, is never going back to the way it was before.

"because everyone has had enough, and nobody has patience left for kids watching BDSM on their friend’s phones at 12."

Is that the reason? I really don't think so.

I just think it's a power grab by the participants in government and tech companies.

> Parents, especially with the advent of social media, hardcore pornography, and every childhood friend having a device, correctly said this was unreasonable and impossible.

It is neither unreasonable or impossible. No need to hand the kids a device that can access the open internet. If parents do, restrict or deny gadget time. Stick to a Nintendo or console.

Learned helplessness and codependency on internet is part of the sales pitch of big tech, salesmen in general. They push self doubt and sell their solution.

Fill the time showing kids how to rotate tires and change oil. Show them how to make pizza crust.

Learned helplessness is a feature of capitalism. Not immutable feature of physical existence.

BDSM at twelve!?! Thats nothing compared to what we grew up with… just make it really really slow to download, being back the old internet!

It is not my job to parent your fucking child. You want to talk about responsibility? Take some.

I see this distinction mentioned from time to time and it doesn't make sense to me. IMO, your actions not being tracable to your identity is privacy. In this framing, anonymity is part of privacy. You desire anonymity because of the privacy it gives you. Which is not to say that anonymity is always required for privacy though it tends to strengthen it.

Similarly, sometimes people say there's a tradeoff between security and privacy, which doesn't make sense since privacy (confidentiality) is one dimension of information security.

If you still disagree, could you attempt at defining privacy and anonymity and how you can prioritize meaningful anonymity without caring about privacy?

The longer you rely on anonymity for your privacy, and keep leaving tidbits about yourself out there, the more likely it becomes that anyone interested in breaking that anonymity can do so.

In my experience, companies care about things that affect them but not their competitors. But government shenanigans tend to affect all companies equally, and so does not affect market share, and is therefore mostly ignored by companies.

Or parents could set accounts to "child" and every service send the proper tags so the programs deny access locally. No third parties involved.

PICS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...

POWDER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...

ASACP/RTA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...

I have a categorical swipe to make, sadly this is a human problem, and attempts to solve it using technology are doomed to fail or to be increasingly complex and require endless modifications.

Your solution sounds good and should work fine, and be easy to implement, which is perfect! But people will soon wonder what all the elderly people that are living in retirement homes without internet access are doing on porn sites watching mostly the overwatch and fortnite cosplay themed videos...

How do you prevent people from using their keys to set up servers that remotely provide tokens to anyone?