Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

3/21/2026 at 11:17:12 PM

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

by yalogin

3/22/2026 at 2:09:20 AM

It’s not very soon, it’s already the case that if one wants to enable the latest models in the OpenAI api you have to submit your details to their “identity provider”.

by totetsu

3/22/2026 at 2:16:58 AM

Which is why it’s important to be able to run models locally. Which also might explain the strategy behind buying all of the memory that is or will exist for at least a year out. Maybe we’ll eventually see AI safety be used to prevent people from running local models.

by abracadaniel

3/22/2026 at 5:14:29 AM

+1 for local models. It also teaches users about how much energy they are using. One's perspective on 24/7 chatbots and agentic operating systems changes when you feel the heat coming from a rack of gpus.

(Spring is nearly here and my excuse about my rig also heating my house is about to end. Soon I will be paying extra to run my a/c as my rig pumps out a steady 1000w under load.)

by sandworm101

3/22/2026 at 7:25:43 AM

You could use it to heat a tropical greenhouse.

by 1e1a

3/22/2026 at 7:56:28 AM

You mean having to sign into your Microsoft account to get your bootloader co-signed before your legally mandated TPU 3.1 allows you to install a govenment blessed and sufficiently telemetrized signed OS to "your" computer if you are on the whitelist of not-yet-misinformation-spreaders?

by PeterStuer

3/22/2026 at 12:44:40 PM

Well I suppose in that case it depends on how freedom loving TSMC (Taiwan) or ASML (Netherlands) want to be.

No chips for you, random government. No chips for you either, or you. And you.

by fennecbutt

3/22/2026 at 2:46:55 AM

Given the recent mexican telecom hacks were allegedly done with significant help from openai/anthropic's chatbots, it seems at least somewhat prudent to require some sort of identity verification for API access? I'm struggling to see how this isn't the tech community's version of "no background checks for gun purchases" or "no KYC for bank accounts".

by gruez

3/22/2026 at 6:53:35 AM

Is api access really really so extreme that it's italics worthy? Technology should be available to us in other roles than just passive consumer using front ends that might not suit what we need, or work against us in some way. Already I am giving a credit card to openai to use the service, but in addition now I have to hand my government ID over to withpersona.com. who are they? who are their investors? will the leak my information accidentally/accidentally-on-purpose/on-purpose? Okay maybe Rick Song and Persona Identities are genuinely trustworthy, but what happens when someone wants an exit in the future and they merge with palantir and now when i generate a picture i have to worry about being added to a target list for some automated kamakazi drone kill-chain a-la black mirror. Or if this becomes standard practice .. maybe its not Persona Inc. but i have to vet dozens of these companies and it becomes too hard. Rather than guns, this is more like Identity verification for pipe purchases from the hardware store because one could use it got build a rocket.

by totetsu

3/22/2026 at 2:56:12 AM

They were also likely done with keyboards and mice. Should we require id at point of purchase for those?

by paradox460

3/22/2026 at 3:00:51 AM

Alright, so does that mean we don't need KYC for gun purchases or bank accounts either?

Of course you're probably going to say something about how guns and bank accounts are crucial components to crime, in which case the same holds for AI in the mexican telecoms hack.

by gruez

3/22/2026 at 5:21:10 AM

> Alright, so does that mean we don't need KYC for ... bank accounts either?

That sounds reasonable. A bank can just be an institution that holds money for people; they don't need to be all over their customer's business. It is like a telecom not being responsible for what their customers say. In a simple sense banks don't need KYC.

by roenxi

3/22/2026 at 10:35:54 AM

>> A bank can just be an institution that holds money for people

Nope. That is a storage locker. A bank uses the money it holds for other purposes such as loans or its own investments, possibly returning interest to the depositor. But, most importantly, a bank disperses money. it therefore needs to know who deposits what so that it doesn't eventually release funds to the wrong person. And then there are the lengthy procedures for handing out money without customer permission. People die. Governments garnish wages. Courts order payments to for child support. If you hold money you have to be prepared for this stuff. So you need to be absolutely confident in the identity of everyone you deal with.

Want a simple bank? A bank that doesn't ask for ID? Keep your cash under your mattress. Or put it all in a crypto wallet.

by sandworm101

3/22/2026 at 12:25:56 PM

I don't think this makes sense. You seem to be saying that a bank has to do all these things to control criminals while simultaneously arguing that there are simple methods criminals could use to bypass the banks (ie, deal in cash and keep it under the mattress or use crypto).

Given that the criminals aren't going to be using the banks it would make sense for the banks to not have mandatory administrative overhead that is easy to avoid.

> Nope. That is a storage locker.

Again, sounds good to me. Let people have a storage locker with a plastic debit card attached. If people had the option of a bank that was a little bit more responsible and didn't roll the dice of total collapse every financial crisis there'd be many that would go for that. Prepper types for example. The discourse glosses over how crazy it is that full-reserve or near-full-reserve banks are soft-banned.

by roenxi

3/22/2026 at 4:01:12 AM

Just yesterday I thought about the right middle ground for KYC when buying guns.

The issue with centrally registering guns is than when you country is taken over by hostile forces (whether an invading army or a democratically elected abuser who turns it into a dictatorship), they know who has the guns and can force those people to surrender them (politely at first, authoritarians always use a salami slicing technique).

The issue with no controls is that even anti-social and mentally ill people can get them.

I wonder if the right middle ground could be:

- Sellers have to do their due diligence - require ID, proof of psychological examination, whatever else is deemed the right balance.

- Not doing due diligence means they get punishment equal to that for any offense committed with that gun.

- They might be required to mark/stamp the gun so that it can be traced back to them or have witnesses for the transfer.

by martin-t

3/22/2026 at 7:07:29 AM

The arguments for background checks generally have to be split into two separate classes of people.

The first is the mentally ill. Intuitively it seems desirable to say that someone undergoing treatment for e.g. depression shouldn't buy a gun. The problem here is the massive perverse incentive. If you're pretty depressed but you're not inclined to forfeit your ability to buy firearms, you now have a significant incentive to avoid seeking treatment. At which point you can still buy a gun but now your mental illness is going untreated, which is very worse than where we started.

The second is career criminals, i.e. people who have already been convicted of a crime and want to commit another one. The problem here is that career criminals... don't follow laws. If they want a gun they steal one or recruit someone without a criminal record into their gang etc., both of which are actually worse than just letting them buy one.

On top of that, when people get caught, prosecutors generally try to get them to testify against other criminals in exchange for a deal, who are then going to be pretty mad at them. Which gives them a much higher than average legitimate need to exercise their right to self-defense once they get back out. And then you get three independent bad outcomes: If they can't defend themselves they get killed for snitching, if they acquire a gun anyway so they don't then they could go back to prison even if they were otherwise trying to reform themselves, and if they think about this ahead of time or are advised of it by their lawyers then they'll be less likely to cooperate with prosecutors because the other two scenarios that are both bad for them only happen if they snitch.

Meanwhile the proposal was only ever expected to address a minority of the problem to begin with because plenty of the people who do bad things can pass the background check. And if you have a policy that doesn't even solve most of the original problem while creating several new ones, maybe it's just a bad idea?

by AnthonyMouse

3/22/2026 at 7:35:20 AM

Third, non career violent people. Domestic violence or other interpersonal viole ce should prevent you from having a gun. Regardless of whether you are career criminal

by watwut

3/22/2026 at 5:12:08 PM

That isn't a third category, those are people who have been convicted of a crime and want to commit another one. It's the same general category of not being able to solve people committing crimes by making already-illegal things even more illegal. And on top of that you get to add two new problems.

The first is the deterrent to reporting, both before and after a conviction. In the original case the victim now can't even report a domestic misdemeanor in the subculture where gun ownership is sacrosanct because either they themselves consider "permanently can't own a gun" too severe a penalty for the crime they were trying to report, or they know the perpetrator will and they're afraid of being booted out into the street or worse if they do it. And for someone who already has a conviction but still has a gun, now the other people in the household can't be calling the police for any reason because if the police find the gun the person keeping a roof over their head is going to prison for years. In general you want the penalties for things to be proportionate and making them disproportionate makes things worse instead of better.

The second is that the victim, or any future victims, are living in the same household as the perpetrator, and then how do you answer this question: Is the victim now prohibited from having a firearm? You're screwed either way, because if you say no you're denying the innocent victim's right to self-defense but if you say yes the perpetrator now has an excuse to have them in the house.

Then these things combine poorly because the overconfident drunk who wants a gun is willing to bet they can convince anyone it belongs to their sweetheart but the sweetheart is nowhere near as confident they can control what happens if they call the police.

by AnthonyMouse

3/22/2026 at 11:08:26 PM

> those are people who have been convicted of a crime and want to commit another one

FWIW, this is why i said "anti-social" and not criminals in my original post. I think with many habitual abusers, the warning signs are there for a long time (often from childhood) before they break the law and before they are convicted.

> "permanently can't own a gun"

This points to other issues with the current system of punishments. OOH you have people claiming prison is meant for rehabilitation and released prisoners are to be considered fully rehabilitated, having paid their debt (which they argue is to society and not the victim) and not longer a threat to society. OTOH you have the reality that many people are repeat offenders and that also some people can genuinely change (or at least maintain the facade of internal change for the rest of their life).

Maybe what we need is a post-prison evaluation to determine which case we're dealing with and whether restrictions (if any) should be temporary or permanent.

---

FWIW regarding domestic violence, I think any target of it would be crazy to stay with the aggressor in the same household. People who commit it are often deeply and inherently anti-social without a way to treat them. Instead, as a society, we should be looking for ways to ease the process of their targets separating from them permanently. Case studies of what this kind of abuse looks like should be part of primary education, the abuser should be required to pay for housing for a reasonable period of time so the target can move away, etc.

by martin-t

3/23/2026 at 2:03:36 AM

> FWIW, this is why i said "anti-social" and not criminals in my original post. I think with many habitual abusers, the warning signs are there for a long time (often from childhood) before they break the law and before they are convicted.

But then what are you proposing to do? Tell people they lose a right based on vibes even though they've never been convicted of anything?

> Maybe what we need is a post-prison evaluation to determine which case we're dealing with and whether restrictions (if any) should be temporary or permanent.

Maybe we should reorient prisons into places that actually rehabilitate prisoners and then release the ones that are actually rehabilitated.

> FWIW regarding domestic violence, I think any target of it would be crazy to stay with the aggressor in the same household.

This is one of the things which is hard for the system to tell from the outside. There are legitimate predators with no record because they have the right friends. Then there are alcoholics who are violent drunks and therefore have a record, but haven't had a drink in ten years and then everything seems fine until they have a relapse. Or the exact same thing except that they stay clean and then everything actually is fine.

There are also people who live with an occasionally violent partner because the alternative was their relentlessly violent parents. I find it hard to judge people who have only bad options and then pick one of them.

> the abuser should be required to pay for housing for a reasonable period of time so the target can move away, etc.

The situation commonly happens to begin with because they're both poor and can only stay above water by sharing accommodations. If you want shelters then build shelters; we don't need things that would only work when the perpetrator has enough money to lawyer their way out of it anyway.

by AnthonyMouse

3/24/2026 at 2:36:08 AM

> then release the ones that are actually rehabilitated

Yep. The issue becomes what do to with those who are not or cannot be rehabilitated. But maybe it would be politically tenable, after all, some places have "three strike laws" which are essentially a heavy handed way to get a similar effect.

> they lose a right based on vibes > hard for the system to tell from the outside

Same issue. The people close to the person know but are hard to prove to outsiders. BTW I wouldn't call it vibes. It's vibes if you've seen it the first time and haven't had any education about cluster B disorders. When you have seen a few people with them and know the names and patterns, you can have a fact based discussion about what drives the person to do what they do and what the probabilities of harmful acts are.

For example, if somebody has a documented pattern of bullying others, especially from childhood, it should reduce their rights unless they prove they have undergone successful treatment. It's common to give child offenders more leeway but I think it should be the opposite. Those who offend from childhood do so because they haven't yet learned to hide their nature and abusers are who they really are internally.

> There are also people who live with an occasionally violent partner because the alternative was their relentlessly violent parents

Maybe the real problem here is housing. The second problem here is that violent (physically or emotionally) people get to keep their property instead of the target, especially when they clearly use the property as leverage against the target.

> enough money to lawyer their way out of it

Yes another systemic issue. We should do studies about the effects of layers on the outcome of cases. Maybe they happen but I haven't heard about any. We should redefine laws to close loopholes and make them as simple as possible so the need for lawyers is reduced as much as possible - I think the need for layers is a symptom/metric of the system not working. We could also cap the allowed spending on layers.

by martin-t

3/22/2026 at 1:25:26 PM

It already does. Here is the list of prohibited persons:

convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;

who is a fugitive from justice;

who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act, codified at 21 U.S.C. § 802);

who has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution;

who is an illegal alien;

who has been discharged from the Armed Forces under dishonorable conditions;

who has renounced his or her United States citizenship;

who is subject to a court order restraining the person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of the intimate partner;

or who has been convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.

by acidphreak2k

3/22/2026 at 10:44:45 PM

> interpersonal viole ce should prevent you from having a gun

Nitpick but violence is not wrong on its own. Self defense is also violence and should not prevent your from having a gun for next time. Defense of others or reasonable defense of property likewise.

Forcibly removing a person from power who has gained or maintained that power without consent of those he has power over is also violence and even most current states allow us to celebrate it (usually as long as we don't argue it should be repeated against the current government).

by martin-t

3/22/2026 at 10:54:52 PM

> And if you have a policy that doesn't even solve most of the original problem while creating several new ones, maybe it's just a bad idea?

Are you saying everyone should be allowed to have a gun?

Because that's genuinely an interesting position. My proposal came from the view that if we need gun control, we should make sure it cannot be abused into a self reinforcing loop where a completely disarmed population is the end state (and possible end goal).

I would be interested if there is research into these indirect effects you talk about. For example I'd like to know how often people actually snitch, whether there are attempts/procedures to protect info about who snitched, how often they are killed for snitching, how often having a gun helps them, etc. E.g. because if a hit can come at any time from anywhere, having a gun might only give a feeling of safety.

by martin-t

3/23/2026 at 1:27:20 AM

> Are you saying everyone should be allowed to have a gun?

We can probably make an exception for people who are currently in prison.

> I would be interested if there is research into these indirect effects you talk about.

This is a political question so all of the research is performed by partisans for one side or the other. On top of that, most of this stuff is inherently hard to measure, e.g.:

> For example I'd like to know how often people actually snitch, whether there are attempts/procedures to protect info about who snitched, how often they are killed for snitching, how often having a gun helps them, etc.

The government is going to try to avoid disclosing who snitches and the criminals are going to try to find out and retaliate. But if the criminals have a way of finding out (e.g. bribe the cops) then it will be illegal and no one will want to admit it's happening, and likewise if they successfully retaliate they'll want to do it a way that doesn't catch them a murder conviction.

So now someone few people are going to notice winds up dead. If they were an informant at some point in the past, those records are closely guarded for obvious reasons, so how is someone trying to collect statistics even supposed to know that? Likewise, if their death is made to look like an accident or the killer is never caught, how do you know how often it was actually an accident or an unrelated crime?

Which then leads into this:

> E.g. because if a hit can come at any time from anywhere, having a gun might only give a feeling of safety.

Part of the premise of having a weapon is as a deterrent, which gives you another measurement problem: If a lot of the snitches are keeping weapons even though they're not allowed to and that's successfully deterring anyone from trying to kill them, neither the snitches nor their hitmen are going to admit to either one because they're both breaking the law.

The lack of anybody having good numbers also feeds into the problem itself, because then the snitches have to guess whether it will help them and a lot of them are going to regard the risk of getting killed as a bigger threat than the risk of getting caught with a gun. Or worse, the hitmen will like their chances better when the law requires their target to be unarmed. And both of those happen stochastically as a result of the inherent uncertainty regardless of your own guess for how effective the victim having a weapon is at deterring retaliation.

by AnthonyMouse

3/22/2026 at 7:34:00 AM

Personal guns have absolutely nothing with defense against "hostile forces'. That is pure fantasy.

Occasionally, gun owners are THE hostile force buying guns explicifely to bully and threaten. But that is about it, really.

by watwut

3/22/2026 at 3:16:47 AM

What happens when everyone needs to use AI for their job? Genuine question that I think gets at the heart of the debate.

Once a common technology that everyone has access to becomes powerful enough to alter the lives of others on command, do we as a society just need to do away with the concept of anonymity? We are all just too powerful in isolation, and too much of a threat to the collective, that we cannot reasonably expect not to have some governing body watching at all times?

Today, you can buy parts/print a completely untraceable firearm, so do we license sales of steel tubing and 3D printers?

by BobbyJo

3/22/2026 at 3:30:16 AM

>What happens when everyone needs to use AI for their job? Genuine question that I think gets at the heart of the debate.

Considering most places does direct deposit and that requires a bank account (so KYC), I don't see what's particularly new here. Many places also do background and/or work eligibility checks, which again is a form of KYC.

>Today, you can buy parts/print a completely untraceable firearm, so do we license sales of steel tubing and 3D printers?

Fortunately 3d printed guns are bad enough that it's not really an issue, although the bigger threat is probably CNC machines. However that's probably will get a pass, because they're eye-wateringly expensive compared to black market guns that nobody would bother.

by gruez

3/23/2026 at 3:39:22 PM

> Fortunately 3d printed guns are bad enough that it's not really an issue

It does actually seem like they are an issue - the technology has now been used in several high profile murders and police are reporting seizing them pretty regularly.

I don't think that justifies taking away the freedom to 3D print, but the truth is that if you're committing a crime there are a lot of advantages to a dirt-cheap untraceable nonferrous gun even if it only lasts a few shots.

by SR2Z

3/22/2026 at 6:05:49 AM

> Considering most places does direct deposit and that requires a bank account (so KYC), I don't see what's particularly new here.

Slippery slope is a fallacy, they said.

> Many places also do background and/or work eligibility checks, which again is a form of KYC.

Except that it isn't KYC at all, both because employees aren't customers (most people are the employees of one company but the customers of hundreds or more), and because the majority of people don't have that requirement imposed on them by the government. There are many jobs you can get without a background check.

by AnthonyMouse

3/22/2026 at 1:22:51 PM

You can buy 80% lowers, which require no serial numbers on them if you don't transfer or sell, and it is pretty trivial to complete the machining necessary to make it a 100% lower. It does not require a professional CNC machining shop.

Buy an 80%, machine it to finish it, and you now have a completely unregistered long rifle with no serial number, and it is completely legal.

by acidphreak2k

3/22/2026 at 5:42:46 PM

Well for one, API access has nothing to do with it, you could to the same hacks through the chatbox, perhaps with a bit more time.

And the same logic about hacks also applies to access to a command line or Linux or a programming language or just a general-purpise computer.

"Given the recent [everything] hacks were [definitely] done with [Python scripts, a Linux distro and a computer with disabled secure boot], it seems [...]"

I hope you get my point.

As for your gun comparison, a gun is a very optional thing and the identification is just for purchase. It's not like a GPS tracker and shot counter is welded onto it at the time of purchase, nor do you need a gun to do the vast majority of everyday tasks.

As for bank KYC, well, I for one am actually not sold on the idea that having to send a blurry photo of my ID and smiling at my phone camera to open a Relovut account is in any way beneficial to society. Terrorism still gets financed, money still gets laundered, taxes still get evaded. But every swipe of my card can and will be used against me by banks, loan providers, advertisers, government agents and eventually also hackers.

by franga2000

3/23/2026 at 2:53:51 PM

Personally I think this is untrue, and that acting like it's true is a defeatist attitude that sabotages any efforts to build alternative systems that accomplish the goal of age verification without user verification.

Right now my personal preference would be a standard for web services certifying content as "kid friendly" combined with a standard for "kid friendly" devices that block uncertified content by default. This would accomplish the alleged goal of blocking children from accessing adult content without infringing on the rights of adults.

by Ajedi32

3/23/2026 at 3:21:45 PM

> Personally I think this is untrue, and that acting like it's true is a defeatist attitude that sabotages any efforts to build alternative systems that accomplish the goal of age verification without user verification.

It may well be true, and worrying about the possibility that it is is what should motivate people to build alternatives/workarounds.

by Gormo

3/23/2026 at 6:08:25 PM

I guess my point is that if any substantial portion of the people in favor of age verification are actually acting in good faith, then responding to their efforts to protect children with "NEVER! I WILL OPPOSE YOU TO MY LAST BREATH!" isn't really helping your cause.

Find a way to accomplish the stated goal in a way that doesn't erode our rights, and you'll win a lot more people over.

by Ajedi32

3/23/2026 at 7:00:24 PM

Well, you do have to draw the line somewhere when up against opponents pursuing a salami-slicing strategy. If you keep compromising on incremental measures, you ultimately do lose everything.

by Gormo

3/23/2026 at 7:25:57 PM

True, but I don't think you need to compromise to do age verification; there are plenty of ways to achieve the stated goal without any privacy impact, like the one I just suggested.

Once people start arguing those measures aren't good enough and that you need to start sacrificing some of your rights in order to keep kids safe, then your position will look a lot more reasonable to moderates when you push back.

by Ajedi32

3/22/2026 at 8:34:00 PM

It's easy to say that but I don't see evidence. Who is this 'they' who wants my ID for every transaction? Where is the proposal?

I've used the internet for 30 years, built websites etc. I've never been asked ID for general transactions. On the other hand we've had restrictions on porn for kids since before I was born. I'm skeptical much is new.

by tim333

3/22/2026 at 9:21:32 PM

Same as ever, advertisers and the government. Plus, it would mean platforms could ban troublesome people or those they deem undesirable more effectively.

by code_duck

3/22/2026 at 4:56:51 AM

I hope someone takes those Meta glasses or an Oculus or Apple Vision or something and hooks it up to clearview or some other facial recognition service and agentically scrapes OSINT sources to doxx people on the street, in real time.

One glance and I have your full name, home address, SSN, all online handles and aliases, employment history, email, and phone number, instantaneously on a HUD. It doesn't even need to be marketed as "doxxing as a service;" it can just be marketed as "professional networking" or "social media." That way people will voluntarily submit their information and all rights over it to the platform.

Until people feel their privacy being viscerally raped on a minute to minute basis nothing will change.

by rdevilla

3/22/2026 at 6:25:58 PM

Already done: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2024/10/03/metas-r...

by Manuel_D

3/22/2026 at 5:54:07 AM

My black-mirror prediction for how augmented reality and AI will interact: In order of horribleness.

1> Auto-nude. Today we can "nudify" photos and videos. Soon, augemented reality glasses will be able to nudify eveyone in real time. (This is totally possible today.)

2> Auto-tranlation. Cool. Everyone can talk to everyone, but users will have censorship options. I don't much like hearing australians so I will just have the glasses make them all sound like proper Texans. And the sound of people with alternative views to my own are replaced with calming country music.

3> Lie detection. Glasses will look for facial/voice body ticks suggestive of deception. Good luck talking your way out of a ticket, or explaining to you boss how you were "sick", when they have a lie detector online 24/7.

4> Censorship of "bad" objects. Signs with ads or news that I do not agree with will be blocked and replaced with more appropriate text. Mosques will appear as churches. Garbage and pollution will become happy birds and clear blue skies. Homeless people will be replaced with attractive young people (see #1 above).

5> Race replacement. I don't like certain races. So my glasses now make everyone Chinese. So long as I don't turn off the glasses, I can live my custom racist utopia.

by sandworm101

3/22/2026 at 11:53:55 AM

All are indeed plausible- translation is iffy due to diarization not being all there yet - but why the specific order of horribleness?

Live translation seems either better than autonude or worse, but not in the middle of the pack I’d assume? Am I missing something here?

by foobar10000

3/22/2026 at 6:57:03 PM

It isnt the translation. Translation if good. But if you have a machine handling the voices of other people the option to censor/edit/replace those voices can lead to bad things.

by sandworm101

3/22/2026 at 6:17:52 AM

This is great. I finally feel for the first time in my life that science has in fact gone too far. At this point living in the so-called "third world" to avoid digital-rape-as-a-service and the ever increasing pace of technology sounds eminently reasonable.

by rdevilla

3/22/2026 at 6:48:39 AM

I forgot about lip reading. Lots of possible evils if glasses can read lips.

by sandworm101

3/22/2026 at 12:57:59 PM

Let's be nice to science here. Machine learning was the science. All this bad shit that has followed is purely the fault of capitalist companies.

by legacynl

3/22/2026 at 12:56:28 PM

Lie-detection is not going to happen (for a long time). There are no known 'ticks' that can reliably detect lies. Even if there were, there is so much variability in individuals that there is basically no way to find a generalized way of telling if somebody is lying.

by legacynl

3/22/2026 at 6:15:37 AM

An account level flag in a user account on an operating system is the opposite of verified identification. It is self assertion by the owner of the computer: the parent. If such a control works in the same way as enterprise supervision the child won't be able to install a vpn, or other software to bypass the control.

by BlackFly

3/22/2026 at 7:18:23 AM

Yeah, none of this is about children. "Think of the children" is just a means to an end, and most likely what we'll find is even when we lose all pretense of anonymity somehow the kids will figure out a way to get access.

by laughing_man

3/22/2026 at 11:32:10 AM

> somehow the kids will figure out a way to get access.

This is what they want to happen with the initial round of "it's just a DOB field bro" legislation. It'll be completely useless, easy to bypass, and annoying to adults. But, everyone will be warming up to this government mandated prompt in their OS. Perfect, now legislators know they have a foundation to work with to introduce "reasonable" amendments to this prompt that require you to upload ID, for example. Frogs in a pot.

by hypeatei

3/22/2026 at 4:37:23 AM

IMAGINE A WAR.

Now - wouldn't a government LOVE to know who's saying what? Rather than shutting down the entire $$$$$ international corporate internet.

Money concerns as usual.

by SarahC_

3/22/2026 at 11:19:26 AM

[dead]

by mondomondo

3/21/2026 at 11:39:26 PM

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.)

by simonask

3/22/2026 at 2:09:12 AM

I feel like I see these comments basically verbatim and it's freaking me out. The whole "I share your concerns, but hear me out: anonymity is bad." It's basically identical wording every single time.

I think people who say this should back it up by posting their full name, date of birth, SSN or other ID number, and address. A phone number would also be helpful so we can call and verify that they made the post. Otherwise they're not being honest.

by kdheiwns

3/22/2026 at 5:46:35 AM

> I think people who say this should back it up by posting their full name, date of birth, SSN or other ID number, and address. A phone number would also be helpful so we can call and verify that they made the post. Otherwise they're not being honest

But this isn't (intellectually) honest, either?

Maybe you can justify asking that they post under their real name, but asking for the kind of information that's required to steal their identity isn't the same as asking them who they are.

by try_the_bass

3/22/2026 at 9:02:47 AM

Never once did I say that "anonymity is bad", but people in this thread and piling on as if that's what I said. I said there are drawbacks, and that those drawbacks are real.

by simonask

3/22/2026 at 1:53:12 AM

> Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks.

Do please be specific about those. Provide concrete examples and justify for the class why those involved couldn't have voluntarily done away with anonymity for that particular interaction.

Hypothetically someone can browse a tor site in one tab, post on 4chan in a second one, all while accessing online banking in a third. The bank can use hardware backed 2FA to verify you. Where's the issue here?

by fc417fc802

3/22/2026 at 9:10:26 AM

> Do please be specific about those.

Here is one example: It's likely that we will never know who was behind the attempted backdoor in the xz library, which was almost successful in making a huge number of Linux installations worldwide vulnerable to remote exploitation. [1]

That malicious contributor is protected by online anonymity. Now, I know that it's probable that a state actor was behind "Jia Tan", meaning they could have been supplied with a fake ID as well, but that's still a higher barrier.

I don't think (and have not stated) that anonymity is worthless - it definitely is, especially if you're persecuted minority or under other kinds of threat. I just don't think it's helpful to pretend that it is completely unproblematic.

[1]: https://tukaani.org/xz-backdoor/

by simonask

3/22/2026 at 1:08:44 PM

> > and justify for the class why those involved couldn't have voluntarily done away with anonymity for that particular interaction.

The project in question could have chosen to verify identities if they deemed it worthwhile to do so.

by fc417fc802

3/23/2026 at 1:52:30 AM

> The project in question could have chosen to verify identities if they deemed it worthwhile to do so.

But isn't this exactly what various social media companies are doing now? Choosing "to verify identities" because they have "deemed it worthwhile to do so?"

And don't tell me "the difference is scale", unless you're prepared to explain exactly what difference that makes.

by try_the_bass

3/22/2026 at 12:42:41 AM

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.

by novok

3/22/2026 at 2:02:32 AM

In many other countries, these are enforced by central bank, bank association or legislations.

In USA, small business, small bank and credit unit are often used as excuse to push back these kind of rules.

by j16sdiz

3/22/2026 at 12:07:23 AM

> Online anonymity has significant, real-world drawbacks.

Online anonymity has significant, real-world benefits which every doxxed person ever will list for you.

by scotty79

3/22/2026 at 12:52:11 AM

And drawbacks, too. Imagine if you could only dox someone else by doxxing yourself at the same time.

by gzread

3/22/2026 at 2:08:35 AM

I don’t think that is really a sufficient defense? The amount of focus pointed at the person matters for this.

by drdeca

3/22/2026 at 12:43:14 AM

> 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. This argument isn’t even coherent from paragraph to paragraph.

> 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.

by Aurornis

3/22/2026 at 1:12:23 AM

[flagged]

by simonask

3/22/2026 at 1:17:16 AM

> I neither believe nor did express any of the opinions you accuse me of.

I directly quoted your beliefs that minor information leaks on the internet can lose your house and get you killed, as well as your claim that the internet was significantly more innocent in the past.

These were the points you were putting forward along with your insistence that we have to “be real” about the problems of anonymity on the internet.

Its hard for me to believe that you don’t recognize the dissonance between the two points you were putting forward.

Your silly “Are you an American” attempt at an insult or rebuttal reveals the level of conversation you’re having, though.

by Aurornis

3/22/2026 at 9:16:35 AM

You said:

> 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?

Which is a really severe misrepresentation of my argument.

My argument is that anonymity has drawbacks, and that it's bad to just ignore those drawbacks.

> Its hard for me to believe that you don’t recognize the dissonance between the two points you were putting forward.

But there absolutely is a dissonance? This is what's called a dilemma: Online anonymity protects some people, and puts other people at risk. If competent people ignore the latter, incompetent people will be trying to solve it instead, so we get these laws.

> Your silly “Are you an American” attempt at an insult or rebuttal reveals the level of conversation you’re having, though.

Sorry about the accusation, it was somewhat flippant. It just seems you and others read an opinion that goes slightly against your own, and immediately you assume that I actually hold the polar opposite opinion, which I don't.

by simonask

3/22/2026 at 2:24:49 AM

He was definitely trying to make a point, and then immediately undercut it. It is not just you.

by RajT88

3/22/2026 at 12:52:42 AM

> As society is more and more digitized

How about this is actually the real problem? Online banking is not worth an omniscient global surveillance state, let alone the immense amount of leverage gained by this digitization.

by ux266478

3/22/2026 at 1:02:57 AM

Theres no putting that genie back and most people wouldn't want to.

by voidfunc

3/22/2026 at 12:07:32 AM

> 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 e-statements. Or the heavyweight option is a living trust.

Mandatory identity verification or locking down software really have no bearing on this problem. 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.

by mindslight

3/22/2026 at 1:14:21 AM

Perhaps the first step is to actually listen to the frustrated people. Maybe at least some of their problems are real.

by simonask

3/22/2026 at 1:41:27 AM

I've definitely listened to the frustrated people, as well as even sharing many of their frustrations. And their (our) problems are definitely real. I still stand by what I said.

To show you that I'm maybe not just blowing smoke out of my ass on this topic, here is me personally dealing with a scammer-adjacent problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47125550

by mindslight

3/22/2026 at 2:27:49 AM

Somehow they will eliminate anonymity for real people, but bots will still be pushing Russian or... some other country's interests with massive bot farms.

by Buttons840

3/21/2026 at 11:32:23 PM

If the end goal was user identification then the digital ID + zero knowledge proof age verification methods would be disallowed, which they aren't. https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/platforms/google-...

by owisd

3/22/2026 at 12:01:29 AM

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.

by mindslight

3/22/2026 at 12:44:45 AM

Why is that required? The whole point of zero knowledge proofs is that it can run on untrusted devices.

by remcob

3/22/2026 at 1:21:44 AM

Because true “zero knowledge” proofs are actually useless for age gating purposes.

Conceptually, if a proof was truly zero knowledge and there were no restrictions on generating it, there would also be nothing stopping someone from launching a website where you clicked a button and were given a free token generated from their ID. If it was truly a zero knowledge proof it would be impossible to revoke the ID that generated it, so there is no disincentive to freely share IDs.

So every real world “zero knowledge” proof eventually restricts something. Some require you to request your tokens from a government entity. Others try to do hardware attention chains so theoretically you can’t generate them outside of the approved means.

But the hacker fantasy of truly zero knowledge proofs is impossible because 1 hour after launch there would be a dozen “Show HN” posts with vibe coded websites that dispense zero knowledge tokens.

by Aurornis

3/22/2026 at 5:57:57 AM

It's also unclear what they'd even be useful for to begin with.

You need some kind of proof system if you need a central authority to certify something, but why is that required? The parents know the age of their kids. They don't need the government to certify that to them. And then the parents can get the kids a device that allows them to set age restrictions.

Whether those restrictions are imposed by the device on content it displays (which is the correct way to do it) or by the device telling the service the approximate age of the user (which needlessly leaks information), you don't actually need a central authority to certify anything to begin with because either way it's just a configuration setting in the child's device.

by AnthonyMouse

3/22/2026 at 2:27:52 PM

> But the hacker fantasy of truly zero knowledge proofs is impossible because 1 hour after launch there would be a dozen “Show HN” posts with vibe coded websites that dispense zero knowledge tokens.

If I recall correctly, there exist variant cryptographic protocols that let you impersonate a user who provides such a service: that is, the token confers, or can be used to construct something that confers greater privileges in other contexts.

by moveaxebx

3/22/2026 at 9:12:30 PM

> can be used to construct something that confers greater privileges in other contexts

Then this wouldn't be zero knowledge, as it would convey whatever other greater information is available in that other context.

Are you perhaps thinking of the ecash double spending protocols? Where by double spending the same token to two different receivers, you leak enough information for your bank to recover your identity? That wouldn't be applicable here since each token would only be used once, there would just be many generated to share.

by mindslight

3/22/2026 at 12:52:10 AM

You’d have to ask Google

by gbear605

3/21/2026 at 10:47:13 PM

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.

by hei-lima

3/21/2026 at 11:49:34 PM

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?

by poly2it

3/22/2026 at 1:45:23 AM

I think the same for me, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be in my career if I had been restricted to an hour a day on a filtered iPad.

But I also think the internet has more potential for harm now. Widespread social media makes it easy for predators. YouTube actively incentivises content creators to produce brain numbing shit instead of the more amateur and educational content I was exposed to. Instagram creates vicious dopamine hooks that children have no mental defense against.

Also sorry to sound egotistical but I think I was an outlier that drifted into doing educational things, many or most kids will spend every moment they get just playing video games.

That being said, I’m in favour of parents doing the parenting, not the government.

by cedws

3/22/2026 at 9:37:53 AM

That being said, I’m in favour of parents doing the parenting, not the government.

This aspect of parenting is really hard. If your kid is 10 years old and all their classmates have Roblox, saying 'no' to your kid does isolate them socially, because all the other kids are talking about what they did in Roblox at school and play Roblox together after school. To make it worse, some primary schools even allow kids to play Roblox at school during breaks or the teachers make TikTok videos, making kids want to have Tik Tok as well (TikTok-teachers are a real phenomenon), etc. So, even when you are trying, it gets undermined by others. Trying to fight it is kind of pointless, because most other parents don't see the issue.

Same for e.g. instant messaging, it is basically Sophie's choice: you allow them into these addiction machines or you isolate them socially. It would be much easier if social media and certain types of addictive games were just not allowed under 16. Just like we don't sell cigarettes or alcohol to kids.

I also completely agree with the counterpoint that age verification on the internet is generally bad.

Luckily, some things can be done without grave privacy violations. E.g. where high schools 10-15 years ago would gloat about being iPad or laptop schools, more and more are completely banning smart phones and laptops during school time.

At any rate, it's perfectly possible to hold both views at the same time: social media and addictive games should be forbidden under 16 and the age verification initiatives are terrible for privacy.

Maybe we should just ban Facebook, TikTok, etc. no more addiction, no more age verification needed :).

by microtonal

3/22/2026 at 5:45:38 PM

Yeah you have a good point. I don't have kids so I didn't really think about this social pressure aspect.

I think if a perfect system existed that could gate websites behind age verification, without any privacy compromise and assure the user of this, I would support it. There are zero-knowledge proofs of course, but they're a black box, and the user still has to trust that the system has been implemented correctly. Unless mandated by law, companies have no incentive to build a perfectly private age verification system.

by cedws

3/22/2026 at 6:36:19 PM

As someone who grew up without TV, I would say that it's fine to be a little bit isolated socially. You learn to develop real social skills and the time wasted playing Roblox can be better invested anyway.

by Saline9515

3/22/2026 at 3:49:59 AM

> Also sorry to sound egotistical but I think I was an outlier that drifted into doing educational things, many or most kids will spend every moment they get just playing video games.

I am in the same predicament as both of you, having grown up with unfiltered internet access, and not wanting it to have went any other way (I love my life, actually!)

There is a condescending tendency when people hear what I said above, to tell me that I am an outlier, or, God forbid, a "genius", and other equally worrying conclusions regarding my character.

I agree that, today, there are millions more ways that children can fall for objectively negative things, that have been completely, and intentfully engineered to be terrible in a way which can be exploited for profit.

But also, I simply think that, with enough access to mind-numbing content, for long enough... people will simply realize that, actually, they don't want that. At least, not just that.

Adults are not a good term for comparision in the matter of less aggressive addictions, like with social media, because they already have lives they want to escape, with responsibilities and whatnot.

These are not scientifically sourced claims, but, in my experience, children have a lot more time, energy, curiosity, and will/intent to create, for one reason or another, and they have been doing those things since time immemorial.

This is just a consequence of having access to ~the entirety of all human knowledge at their fingertips, with no restrictions, and with an incredible amount of free time at their disposal.

by gabriela_c

3/22/2026 at 5:17:57 AM

I think the HN crowd is full of outliers. You folks are unrestricted internet success stories. Congrats! For every one of you there has to be 100 or 1000 gaming and social media addicts.

by sciencejerk

3/22/2026 at 6:37:51 PM

HN crowd grew up when they was no social media and when gaming patterns were not ultra-addictive.

by Saline9515

3/22/2026 at 9:23:48 AM

I am happy that I grew up in simpler times. I have to thank Linux Developer Resource CD-ROM sets, FreeBSD CD-ROM sets, etc. to make me a Unix fan, a programmer and technically literate. We lived in a small rural town in the north of The Netherlands, and the only way to access the internet was by using 25ct per minute dail-up, to which my parents said "no".

So instead every time I got a new Linux or FreeBSD CD-ROM set, I would go through all the documentation and try everything out, and read source code. I got Pascal and C books through the local library, where you had to order the book and usually wait two or three weeks.

But I also didn't have the omnipresent cameras (you could still do dumb stuff as a kid and not get filmed/photographed). No pressure to show a fake version of yourself on social media. No pressure to be always available through instant messaging.

I feel like it was the best time to be a kid. Access to information was relatively easy (albeit slower than on the internet), but without all the terrible downsides for kids. Without all the dopamine shots and highly addictive social media and games. Without the all-ways present tracking of your every move.

Though even the kids slightly after me probably still had a good time. Early 2000s, Internet access became more ubiquitous, but it still took almost 10 years for the worst of addictive websites, etc. to rise. I sure miss the early web.

by microtonal

3/22/2026 at 6:11:54 AM

I also had the same experience (not just with Internet - I had unfiltered access to basically any and all reading materials), and I felt that on the whole it was a massively positive experience for me. I feel really sad for all the children today who mostly grow up in much more closely controlled environments. I understand why parents do that, but I'm also not at all convinced that most parents actually know what is good for their kids - just believe that they do.

by int_19h

3/22/2026 at 6:33:23 PM

I don't know which age you are but as a millenial, the internet we had during our teens was really different than what we have today. There was no real social network, no (or little) addictive patterns, conversations happened on Skype or MSN and on php forums. Even newer platforms like Reddit were very different than what they are now.

Unfortunately, internet evolved to become much more predatory and addictive, with platforms like Meta running world-scale ops that they know lead to addiction, depression, scam and sexual harassment.

I honestly would like to give my children the same experience of the internet as the one I had. Unfortunately I fear that it may not be possible anymore. That's not to say that we should run a surveillance experiment with everyone connected to the web.

by Saline9515

3/22/2026 at 9:54:55 AM

I agree and disagree with you.

I'm roughly the same as you in terms of information access, though whether I was a child is debatable; was 14 when I got my first dialup connection. My family wasn't tech-adjacent so it was me who pushed for it; the only control in place was the amount of time I'd spend there.

The only control I have in place on my son in terms of content is whether something is scary or if he won't be able to understand most of it, because arguably he's still too young for many things.

But once he's 12 I don't think I want to restrict most things in terms of content, and by 16 I personally don't care if he watches hardcore midget porn, as long as I have the chance to contextualise and explain the industry.

But.

What I'd rather control (or ban, even) is rather all ML-driven doomscrolling platforms and the "social media" that turned people no longer social. The Internet you and I grew up in no longer exists (or it's a small hidden fraction of it), and now it's a wasteland of engagement traps and corporate revenue directed dark patterns.

You and I learnt to separate wheat from chaff, research, deep dive, and what not. Internet is now, by and large, instant gratification loops and user tracking. I don't want my son (or myself, actually) pulled into that. Porn is literally healthier: you bust a nut and go on with your day, but I see some people wasting hours on end, reel-after-reel, with increasingly targeted ads shoved to their face. Hard pass on that.

Age control, if any, should lie in the hands of the parent/guardian. Make it by law a setting on the routers (new devices are <18 until admin approves them), or the ISPs for mobiles. I'm okay with that. Absolutely not on random third parties handling personal information filling the gap for every random website.

All of that leaving aside the fact that zero knowledge proofs solve this problem without sharing any sensitive information.

But of course, the corporations benefiting from this are not interested in pushing those, IMO reasonable, age controls.

by fer

3/22/2026 at 5:36:08 PM

All my kids had and have unfiltered internet access. The oldest being 32 and the youngest being 12.

All fine. The dangers of access to unfiltered information are certainly real but not worthy of constant worry.

by egorfine

3/21/2026 at 10:59:35 PM

What did it affect in your life? Ultimately something with affect a kid’s life.

by deadbabe

3/21/2026 at 11:07:47 PM

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.

by hei-lima

3/22/2026 at 4:42:06 AM

Seeing people squish at a young age - and I am not being flippant here - helped reduce my teen "I'm immortal! I'm unstoppable!" phase.

I saw very quickly that what separates a live person from a very deceased flat person was a moment of sillyness/forgetfullness/stupidity. "I didn't SUSPECT that is even possible to happen to a person!" - "We're....fragile?!" - "Ah, bike helmet... I think they're REALLY GOOD idea...."

PSA's just aren't listened to by teenagers. But something that's real - that happened, with the security camera timestamp in the corner... kids learn safety.

by SarahC_

3/22/2026 at 9:52:44 AM

> helped reduce my teen "I'm immortal! I'm unstoppable!" phase.

I mean, is that good?

Isn’t another way of looking at that to say that it poisoned an innocent time and left you aware and afraid of death when you might otherwise have been enjoying the end of your childhood without that burden?

In general parents might want their kids to be a little more mindful, but not grow up too soon.

by Nursie

3/22/2026 at 10:34:08 AM

Not to mention that this could create perpetually morbidly afraid individuals.

Yeah now they know they might die, but they also know they will die.

Cool. What now? You might have a kid thinking that they are going to die tomorrow, for the next 70 years.

by imtringued

3/21/2026 at 11:23:18 PM

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.

by ivanjermakov

3/22/2026 at 12:52:56 AM

Does the admin of the small website hypothetically agree that they don't want to show gore to children?

by gzread

3/22/2026 at 1:23:46 AM

The admins of sites like that DGAF about anything or anyone. They enjoy the chaos and shock.

If you expect admins of edgelord websites to respect the laws of different countries or even care about kids, I suggest checking out 4Chan’s response to various attempts to regulate them.

by Aurornis

3/21/2026 at 11:45:15 PM

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).

by hei-lima

3/21/2026 at 11:58:55 PM

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.

by amatecha

3/22/2026 at 12:29:05 AM

What did it do to mess up your brain? What were the lasting negative effects?

by sneak

3/21/2026 at 11:32:41 PM

As a kid, I know that it is pretty easy to avoid those websites(because I do).

by udhottuhao

3/21/2026 at 11:42:49 PM

Congrats. Keep it that way.

by hei-lima

3/21/2026 at 11:24:44 PM

Messed up how?

by grvdrm

3/22/2026 at 7:16:39 AM

> 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.

I've heard this a few times, but what was so bad? And, sorry to break it you, reality has some bad bits to it - do you think being ignorant of these is useful, or that it just sets you up for a bigger fall?

Why do you think removing independence (nannying) from another human being is the answer? Would you want to be nannied for ever, by corporations and governments?

by verisimi

3/22/2026 at 7:48:55 AM

To me the question is more who is going to nanny me, and ideally its myself (the mature option), but in my experience starting as a child and going into adulthood, mental health can break this down to where people can't nanny/take care of themselves. In that case, the question at hand is: who is going to protect you from yourself? The state? Your family? Your friends?

Oftentimes the answer is "nobody". There's just nobody you can rely on to get the level of care you require. There are lots of arguments like Bowling Alone for how the breakdown of community has contributed to this separate issue.

In my view, by constructing and supporting legislation like this, people are implicitly admitting that parents, teachers, schools, communities, and all the rest are failing at their job of keeping moderation local and raising the next generation.

But the thing is, unfortunately this is a true statement in too many cases, including mine. My parents failed to parent me well enough, and my counselors were either instrumental in my own trauma or failed to address my issues soon enough, and as such I developed a sex addiction in adolescence fueled by persistent ongoing stress from my upbringing that I continue to seek treatment for to this day. Could content moderation laws have cured my parents' narcissism? Nope. Could they have prevented me from needing to act out to relieve the stress of my early relational trauma? Nope. Could they have helped match me with more competent therapists? Nope.

Could they have caused me to go to rehab for alcohol abuse instead of porn? Maybe. For all his statements I disagree with, I subscribe to Gabor Mate's view that traumatized individuals are compelled to be addicted to something. At that point, there are a lot of things to become addicted to other than the ones you can content moderate, given the (false) assumption that it's possible moderate enough of it.

Pornography was necessary but not sufficient for me to have it that bad coming out of childhood. Early exposure to it was only incidental. My upbringing was far more significant a cause in this. But unlike which websites I was allowed to visit as a child, a 100% chance of having emotionally involved parents isn't something you can legislate into existence.

What I feel isn't being talked about enough in this discussion is that this implicit realization that the world just sucks sometimes leads to justification that someone else needs to step in to protect children's fragile minds if the formerly trusted institutions aren't. The big option left is the platforms and systems hosting the tech themselves so they're targeted instead.

My opinion? If your parents aren't able to raise you to be free of significant trauma spawning "hungry ghosts" that you will need to turn to your unfettered internet access to feed, whether TikTok or LiveLeak or elsewhere, lest you are bombarded by stress every waking moment... then the situation was hopeless to begin with. You can't fix that problem with laws. You should have just had better parents, as awful as that sounds. And because of nothing more than bad luck, you're just going to have to unpack that problem with the healthcare system for years/decades, because there's not much else we know of that can meaningfully address childhood trauma that severe.

by 2duct

3/22/2026 at 8:38:06 AM

I agree, and thank you for your comment.

However, I don't think the medical establishment will necessarily help. Or looking outside generally - this will probably only compound or defer the problem. You will have to deal with it yourself in the end. I believe everyone already has all they need in themselves to do this.

by verisimi

3/22/2026 at 12:37:14 PM

Making parents control devices is too much. People do what’s “normal” right now normal is to give unrestricted access to kids when they’re 10 or 11.

It takes incredible conviction and force of will to keep your kids off the phone till they’re 16. Fewer than 1% of parents manage it. The problem is that the teenager wants a thing that everyone else has and it’s hard to keep saying no.

I think internet connected smartphones should be illegal for kids under 16 to own or use. It’s a tough sell tho.

by sjducb

3/22/2026 at 5:14:59 AM

[dead]

by matheusmoreira

3/21/2026 at 9:17:17 PM

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.

by bilekas

3/21/2026 at 9:27:26 PM

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

by smartmic

3/21/2026 at 10:57:27 PM

UK showed how to deal with civil disobedience (fast tracked judicial process). Hardware attestation will deal with the hacker spirit.

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.

by GeoAtreides

3/22/2026 at 3:45:15 AM

We won't save ourselves. We might slow the process, but the information environment is permanently altered and we can't put it back.

The information asymmetry between individuals and the powerful is permanently reversed.

Thinking about it in terms of the monopoly of violence being the root of power negotiations; typically a resistance movement has more information about the state/colonizer than vice versa, because power has to be visible - guerilla warfare thrives on this.

That's gone. The powerful will have complete detailed information and automatic analysis.

The medium is the message.

by nclin_

3/22/2026 at 6:16:00 AM

There will always be some form of underground.

What's different is that, for a while, the early Internet age (and a little bit earlier - Usenet etc) made that underground very accessible. Now we're reverting back to the original situation where it was very much shunned and criminalized.

by int_19h

3/22/2026 at 9:57:41 AM

> UK showed how to deal with civil disobedience (fast tracked judicial process)

What is it you mean by this?

I see so many offhand comments about the dystopian UK here but AFAICT there’s a lot of noise and very little meat. The only thing I can think you mean is the UK is currently debating a bill to limit jury trials to more serious offences. While I do find that pretty offensive, there’s nothing fast track about any of its justice system at the moment.

On the contrary, people are waiting years for trial, which is bad for the accused because they have it hanging over them, and bad for victims who get no swift resolution.

by Nursie

3/22/2026 at 10:25:35 AM

I meant the way it deal with the southport rioters (no judgement value on the riot itself or its reasons, just noticing how the uk gov dealt with the it)

For example:

>Courts will sit for 24 hours to fast-track sentencing under government plans to crack down on far-Right riots that swept Britain on Saturday.[1]

[1]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/03/courts-open-24-h...

There is also this:

>Only Australia arrested climate and environmental protesters at a higher rate than UK police. One in five Australian eco-protests led to arrests, compared with about 17% in the UK. The global average rate is 6.7%.

>The UK’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2021 and the Public Order Act 2022 transformed the relationship between protesters and the state, handing police extensive new powers to curtail protests and criminalising a range of protest activities. [2]

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/dec/11/britain-...

Boot, face, forever, etc

by GeoAtreides

3/22/2026 at 12:50:29 PM

Honestly, so long as there is adequate time for everyone to prepare and adequate oversight, fast tracking like seems to me far preferable to waiting for 2-3 years!

And given the Southport riots were, well riots, it’s unsurprising they were dealt with harshly.

That said, I agree that what’s happening with protest in both the UK and Australia is deeply wrong. New South Wales in particular seems to be awful on this front.

It’s a shame that guardian article doesn’t link to the actual study.

It’s not especially surprising that there is a high rate of arrests in the subcategory of protests they picked - environmental (not climate) protests often involve things like blockading mine sites and blocking roads here in Aus. In some of the countries mentioned in the article you may just be physically moved, beaten or even shot for that behaviour. Which is not to say that the higher arrests aren’t concerning, but the picture isn’t exactly clear after reading the article, particularly as it mentions over 2000 environmental protestors were killed during that period, I’d hope none in the UK or Aus, which to me that even though the arrests aren’t rates are higher in these countries, to imply that they are the worst in their treatment of protest is probably wrong.

by Nursie

3/22/2026 at 1:04:52 PM

>And given the Southport riots were, well riots, it’s unsurprising they were dealt with harshly.

you didn't read or care to understand my argument at all, which is not about the target of the process, but the existence of the process and the process itself. Looks like I have to spell it out: next time won't be race rioters, next time will be protesters protesting the farage gov crackdown on immigrants and minorities.

>It’s not especially surprising that there is a high rate of arrests in the subcategory of protests they picked

the article mentions the rate of arrests is high COMPARED with other countries. And again you're getting lost in the details; this wasn't about what the protests were about, but the brutal swift crackdown AND the laws passed giving police more powers.

Yes, this time they hit your out-group, so all is well. fine. next time, (and this is the crux of my argument), _using the exact same tools_, it's your group, you, that will be targeted.

by GeoAtreides

3/22/2026 at 1:14:35 PM

> the existence of the process

Yes, I know you think it’s bad that it exists. I don’t.

So long as it is carried out with proper oversight and people have time to prepare their cases, it actually appears preferable to endless delay which is the current hallmark of the British justice system. Do you disagree? Why?

Do you have a reason to think that justice served this way is less fair or rigorous?

Because frankly I’d rather get in the express lane at that point if I was on the receiving end, than have to live with the process over my head for 2-3 years.

> the article mentions the rate of arrests is high COMPARED with other countries.

Yes, and it also says some of those other countries are killing environmental protestors, so the picture is not as clear cut as you might like. It certainly suggests problems, but it also suggests that we may not be comparing apples to apples with these figures.

Seriously, maybe read it again if you think this is entirely un-nuanced. Personally I’d like to know more.

I agree with you that giving the police extra powers is bad. I agree the direction of travel is bad.

I disagree that faster justice is bad.

I disagree that a higher arrest rate than other countries on a subset of protests is as black and white as you think.

by Nursie

3/22/2026 at 10:49:55 AM

Presumably the 2011 riots: a college student with no criminal record was jailed for six months for stealing a £3.50 case of bottled water [0]

Or perhaps our current Home Sec in 2014 declaring "Rioters face years in prison as Home Secretary Yvette Cooper promises ‘swift justice’" [1]

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/8695988/London...

[1] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/riots-prison-justice-l...

It's all part of making effective protesting illegal. You can justify each little step as you clutch your pearls (even me, to an extent if I don't think of the bigger picture), but then when you realise that the sum of all that is permitted is standing alone creating no disturbance for anyone, effecting no change, and you realise effective protesting is banned.

by gib444

3/22/2026 at 12:55:51 PM

Those riots in 2011 were not protest in any meaningful way. I was in London at the time, it was a bunch of people stealing shit and setting fires because they thought they could. What was shocking was how hands-off the police were when they routinely kettle and arrest peaceful protestors. When confronted with people who were actually looting and burning stuff down, they were nowhere to be seen.

And the second article is about people setting fire to cars and buildings.

This is not “effective protest”, it’s criminal damage and arson and would be prosecuted as such in any western nation.

Are you seriously arguing you should be able to get away with setting fire to a community library because you reckon you’ve got a legit grievance?

Yeah nah, no thanks.

by Nursie

3/22/2026 at 2:13:32 PM

I neither argued that the 2011 riots were protest nor that setting fire to a community library is justified.

Are there any strawmen left or did you buy them all? Jesus

"Are you seriously arguing...?" style of discussion belongs to Reddit, not here.

Though it's clear that you are part of the pearl-clutching group that wants any protest banned and would support any law and any new law dreamt up by a Home Sec, so thanks for doing your bit. No doubt you believe "the law is the law" and any law is just.

edit: You're not British are you (based on your English – it's pretty good, but not quite good enough). Where were you born, out of interest? I always enjoy a foreigner lecturing me about my place of birth

by gib444

3/22/2026 at 2:31:52 PM

LOL. Home-counties born and bred, attended a minor public school and a Russel group university. Grandad was a Desert Rat, one grandmother was brought up in colonial India. I’m so English I’m a fucking stereotype, though it’s true I no longer live there.

Perhaps my English is so superior to yours that you’re having trouble understanding?

> Though it's clear that you are part of the pearl-clutching group that wants any protest banned

What were you saying about straw men?

Perhaps you could enlighten me here. If you believe that promising swift justice for arsonists and other rioters is a way to suppress effective protest, are you not categorising arson as a form of protest? If not, what is your objection to said swift justice for people who commit acts of criminal damage, arson etc?

I support the right to protest. I believe the UK state is on a bad path and has been for a long time with restrictions on this right. But it gives me no pause when rioting and looting is treated harshly.

by Nursie

3/22/2026 at 2:45:50 PM

Sure, with those over-corrected "’" apostrophes. "I’m so English I’m a fucking stereotype" is such a contorted sentence.

"The UK has problems, but it's not very useful to throw all of these cases together to make a big number", "None of which is to say I think the UK has things right" – literally nobody native to the UK writes like that.

Again, nice try, but try harder.

I'm /actually/ from a home county ;)

edit: Home counties isn't hyphenated btw.

by gib444

3/22/2026 at 3:01:45 PM

This has got to be the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had on here.

I have no reason to lie, nor do I have either a method or any particular desire to prove myself to you.

If you want to believe a foreigner is lecturing you on British society, you go ahead and live with that delusion I guess. :shrug:

> literally nobody native to the UK writes like that.

Have you hung around with many middle-aged ex public school types?

by Nursie

3/22/2026 at 3:07:16 PM

NOR any particular desire

I thought a 'public school type' would know that.

> Have you hung around with many middle-aged ex public school types?

Yes, I've been unfortunate enough to live in the heart of Surrey

You're trying to call me uneducated to distract from your poor attempt at passing off as a native. Nice try ;) (They tend not to write ":shrug:", I might add)

I hope it's not too cold in Russia! Have a great evening comrade.

by gib444

3/22/2026 at 3:51:31 PM

> NOR any particular desire

“Nor” doesn’t fit there IMHO, “or” is part of the nested either-or clause, so I don’t believe it to be incorrect.

Regardless, I lay no claim to perfect grammar, decades on the internet seems to have atrophied that skill. I also acknowledge my overuse of commas.

> You're trying to call me uneducated to distract from your poor attempt at passing off as a native

Funny, because to me it looked a lot like you started to throw doubt on my nationality when you didn’t want to deal with the subject we were discussing any more.

> I hope it's not too cold in Russia!

I hope it’s fucking freezing and Vladimir Putin freezes his balls off, personally. It couldn’t happen to a nicer dictator.

The fact you’re hoping for milder weather in Russia reveals that you are in fact the Russian troll in this conversation. Confirmed by your signoff calling me comrade. Major cockup there eh? Your handler will not be pleased…

by Nursie

3/22/2026 at 4:45:01 PM

> The fact you’re hoping for milder weather in Russia reveals that you are in fact the Russian troll in this conversation.

It's so funny how badly you misunderstand English.

This is highly entertaining :)

by gib444

3/22/2026 at 4:50:28 PM

Not for the first time, I was taking the piss out of you for how ridiculous this whole thread is. I guess you missed that though.

You don’t get sarcasm then Ivan?

by Nursie

3/21/2026 at 11:29:20 PM

[flagged]

by Velocifyer

3/22/2026 at 12:37:53 AM

Hey, could you please review the site guidelines and stick to them when posting here? We'd appreciate it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

by dang

3/21/2026 at 10:05:27 PM

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.

by bilekas

3/21/2026 at 10:28:27 PM

> and I hear the same "Well I have nothing to hide" more and more with my younger family at least.

Which is funny as thats what I heard from my older family growing up. Except it's a lie and they have plenty to hide!

by girvo

3/21/2026 at 11:04:00 PM

"Pass me your phone, I want to screenshot a few things and post on social media".

by ori_b

3/21/2026 at 10:34:33 PM

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.

by drnick1

3/22/2026 at 1:33:36 AM

And the overwhelming majority of anything running Android.

by nandomrumber

3/21/2026 at 9:54:09 PM

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.

by catlifeonmars

3/21/2026 at 9:58:04 PM

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.

by bigyabai

3/22/2026 at 12:54:21 AM

HN is mostly for people with entrepreneur spirit, not hacker spirit - entrepreneurs who want to be known as hackers. The difference is vast.

by gzread

3/22/2026 at 1:32:23 AM

big opportunity here for therealhackernews.com

by chinabot

3/22/2026 at 1:34:07 AM

Not really. You couldn't get the network effect. Real hackers hang out on IRC.

by gzread

3/22/2026 at 1:29:10 AM

That was almost 5 years ago. Lately, though, I see more people have stopped tolerating these attacks on freedom. See pewdiepie, louis rossman, deflock, piracy ressurection. Uk petition against digital ID becomes one of the largest petitions in history.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194

by Cider9986

3/21/2026 at 9:33:20 PM

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.

by tqi

3/21/2026 at 10:05:17 PM

And what would those values and priorities be? Because it doesn't seem to me that they align with what they actually do.

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?

by Levitz

3/21/2026 at 10:49:23 PM

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!

by ndriscoll

3/22/2026 at 7:36:18 AM

> 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.

The best way (and only way) to prevent retaining information is to not share them in the first place.

> You can be in favor of privacy while simultaneously thinking porn, gambling, and advertisers shouldn't be targeting children.

There are other method to achieve this without mandatory identification. You can force these content to be served with an HTTP header providing their legal minimum age of consultation or type of content, and blocking them browser side. Governments could maintain filter lists for different age bracket and release them to everyone, allowing easy compliance on the device parental control settings.

by choo-t

3/22/2026 at 1:53:55 PM

Headers could maybe work in a world where the technology were ubiquitous and people knew how to set it up (c.f. v-chip's failures), and kids couldn't just buy their own device for $20 and use it on the actually ubiquitous free pubic wi-fi to avoid any restrictions.

And actually I think it's a better world where kids can obtain e.g. a raspberry pi that they completely control no questions asked and free public wi-fi exists all over, and the onus is on service providers to not deal with children if they're not supposed to. Basically, a high trust society.

In any case, "don't retain records" is actually a pretty easy task. Trivial, actually (use a device with no disk to handle PII, an API that just returns yes/no to the rest of the system, and heavily restrict the firewall, e.g. no outbound connections). Or you buy a token/gift card in person with ID check. If you think the penalties aren't steep enough to get compliance, just raise them (e.g. business ending fines plus jail time).

by ndriscoll

3/22/2026 at 2:15:14 AM

If you implemented that simple solution the expected outcome is businesses collecting ID at the door. But unlike the age verification bills there'd be no prohibition of or penalty for misuse of the collected information. It's a strictly worse outcome.

You can make intentional targeting illegal without criminalizing the accidental. And mandating self categorization of content by service providers would enable standardized filtering that was broadly effective.

The above won't get kids off of social media and it won't serve the purposes of the surveillance state but it will meet the stated goals of those pushing these measures.

Keeping children off of social media is a much trickier problem. I think we'd be better served by banning certain sorts of algorithmic feeds.

by fc417fc802

3/22/2026 at 2:48:53 AM

Okay, so make it illegal for them to record any information which is what the actual laws do (or better, explicitly criminalize all the other current stalking). The point is you don't need to be prescriptive about how to prevent children from accessing the sites. Just make it so you can face massive fines and be arrested if you don't. They can figure out how to comply with the law, and they can be effective or be shut down.

They're not actually owed a solution for how to make their business model work. They can just be told that what they're doing is unacceptable, and they can figure out what they'd like to do next. If you're worried they might react with some other unacceptable thing, we can clarify that that's not okay either.

by ndriscoll

3/22/2026 at 3:15:29 AM

I agree that open ended requirements are better than the imposition of prescriptive solutions. But I don't want online ID verification and that's where your proposal logically leads so I am equally opposed to it.

> They're not actually owed a solution for how to make their business model work. They can just be told that what they're doing is unacceptable,

You listed a few different things previously. Which one are we talking about here?

I think the rest of us are owed a solution where we can still do what we want without having our privacy violated. Regulations need to take the end user into account.

I already proposed what I think would be a workable solution to achieve the stated goals without unduly eroding the status quo. Do you have any response to it?

by fc417fc802

3/22/2026 at 3:25:06 AM

Self categorization has been the status quo since the 90s and has proven to be insufficient. More generally, assuming people agree that something is a social problem/should be restricted, I don't think "have a third party come up with a solution that people can buy to filter us" makes sense. The liability belongs on the people dealing in the restricted item.

We don't give kids special debit cards that detect and block purchases of cigarettes and alcohol and say "make sure your kids don't get cash". We make it a crime to sell those things to a child.

Why is online ID verification a problem for e.g. porn and gambling but it's fine for alcohol? Why should it be fully anonymous? Should we also allow anonymous porn and cigarette vending machines in person? Why is online special?

This whole idea of anonymous access can't even work in a world where you actually pay for things online, which makes the whole proposition even more dubious. If you're an adult and spending money online, you already told them who you are (modulo darknet markets with crypto). Or you could buy a porn gift card in person with an ID flash like other restricted physical items if you're uncomfortable with online payments. And treat the gift card as restricted as well: giving it to a minor is a crime. So then what's the problem exactly? Ad supported porn specifically somehow is important enough to be special?

More to the point: as far as I know, if you perform a sex act in plain view inside of a private establishment that's open to the general public with no restrictions, then that's public indecency/lewd conduct, a criminal act, even if the owner consents. If children are present it can become a felony and you're going on the sex offender list along with jail time. Why is an unrestricted public website different?

Why are you "owed" this privacy online when someone running an open to all, fully anonymous, unchecked porn theatre in person would be arrested? How about the privacy you are owed is that your business stays between you and whomever you interact with, and even they can be asked/required not to keep or share notes about you? But they can still be expected to know you are an adult before they sell you adult services.

by ndriscoll

3/22/2026 at 4:56:49 AM

TBH I think this is all either fundamentally flawed or incredibly weak except for your final paragraph. That one actually poses a somewhat interesting question - why the seeming disparity between online and offline porn regulations in the US? Still, it fails to address (or even acknowledge) the differences in the impact of requiring ID between those scenarios.

Also I think you have this entire thing exactly backwards. It's not on the rest of us to convince the other camp that ID shouldn't be required. Rather it's on the other camp to put forward a convincing case that ID should be required - that there is no realistic alternative and that the tradeoffs are worth the cost. Otherwise the current status quo wins out.

> Self categorization has been the status quo since the 90s and has been proven to be insufficient.

What are you on about? Legally mandated self categorization has never been tried and would presumably work if there were penalties for violations. You don't even need 100% compliance, you just need high enough compliance that the default becomes to filter out any site that fails to do so.

Voluntary self categorization isn't particularly useful because almost no operators bother to do it. So you're left with no (workable) option other than whitelist filtering.

> have a third party come up with a solution that people can buy to filter us

I never suggested anything of the sort.

> The liability belongs on the people dealing in the restricted item.

The items are not currently restricted and I don't agree with you that they should be. However I would agree to changing things to make all providers liable for accurately self categorizing the content they serve up by means of a standardized header format or some other protocol.

> Why is online ID verification a problem for e.g. porn and gambling but it's fine for alcohol?

Presumably because you have to take receipt of the shipment so the vendor is already going to collect your PII.

Why is legally requiring that a gambling website send a header categorizing itself as such unworkable yet somehow it's all going to work out just fine if we require them to do the much more complicated thing of securely handling and accurately verifying identification documents? That seems like an obvious contradiction to me.

> Why should it be fully anonymous? Should we also allow anonymous porn and cigarette vending machines in person?

Don't we effectively do exactly that? There's no requirement for ID retention on sale of alcohol or cigarettes and until recently the norm was for the clerk to briefly eyeball your license. They also didn't used to bother checking ID if you looked old enough. (That's changed at the major retailers around here lately but that's a different matter.)

Anyway I never claimed the brick and mortar way of doing things was ideal so arguing as though I've agreed to that seems rather disingenuous.

> If you're an adult and spending money online, you already told them who you are

But I did not give them a copy of my ID or any otherwise unnecessary PII and do not want to be required to do so. Also there are plenty of ways to pay for things online without readily revealing your identity to the couterparty. I expect you are well aware of that fact.

> Why is an unrestricted public website different?

For practical reasons I'd imagine. Analogies are great and all but at the end of the day a global electronic communication network has rather different properties than a physical brick and mortar location that you walk into.

Regardless, the reputable services all seem to agree with you (as do I) and thus go out of their way to send headers marking them as adult only. It's roughly equivalent to a shop hanging a "no under 18 allowed" on the door but then not bothering to ID anyone. If parents can't be bothered to configure even the most basic of controls on their children's devices why should the rest of society be made to suffer for that?

by fc417fc802

3/22/2026 at 1:20:12 PM

Sending a header is unworkable because nothing obeys it, there are embedded browsers all over, and even if you mandated that every app/browser do so, kids can get a computer/phone for $20 with no restrictions.

There's no requirement for ID retention online either. In fact, unlike in person, it is banned. And a framework where you just say "you are liable for what you provide to children" actually allows for a site employee to briefly eyeball your ID or just look at you and decide you look old enough (though that doesn't really work with realtime video generation).

Record retention is a different question from checking. I think I and the actual relevant laws have been pretty clear that we should disallow that. No, we do not have anonymous cigarette vending machines (at least anywhere I've been in the US). They are always behind a counter with an ID check.

Except for crypto, I don't think I am familiar with any way to pay for something online without revealing my identity. I'm pretty sure 100% of online purchases I've made over the last 20 years have required name/address and usually phone number as part of payment details. Even with crypto, as far as I know common wisdom on darknet markets is (or was?) to use your real name/address as that's the least suspicious. I don't actually know a single place where you don't give that info to your counterparty. I can't imagine it's common.

What parental controls? As far as I know, Safari is the only modern browser that checks RTA headers (if it still does). There are no options for Chrome or more importantly Firefox, which is the only browser that's fit for purpose with malware blocking (especially for children). Similarly Android has no controls.

I don't see what part of being online makes it less practical to check ID. It seems more practical to me. It's just cheaper not to, and online businesses are big on avoiding labor. That's not some fundamental right of theirs.

by ndriscoll

3/22/2026 at 1:57:16 PM

The browsers don't support it because only a few major sites bother to send it. The issue here is not support by client software it is lack of participation. That could be fixed via legal mandate, no different than requiring ID checks or anything else.

Right now if you want to build out a filtering solution there's nothing to base it on. We could fix that via regulation and then filtering would just work.

> kids can get a computer/phone for $20 with no restrictions.

At that point ID checks are no good either. They can just visit a site from a different country that doesn't respect our legal framework or hop on tor or bittorrent or whatever else.

In fact when it comes to ID checks if you don't enable parental controls and filtering then they will be able to bypass it in the exact same way as above except using their regular device that you gave to them! No need to go purchase a new one!

So you're inevitably going to end up needing a client side filtering solution regardless. As I keep telling you, the solution you're gunning for here is strictly worse than content filtering based on mandatory headers.

> Except for crypto, I don't think I am familiar with any way to pay for something online without revealing my identity.

There are also virtual credit card services. Or gift cards (which you yourself mentioned earlier).

Of course anything shipped needs a name and address (and likely phone number) but there are plenty of services you can pay for that don't involve shipping a physical item.

> That's not some fundamental right of theirs.

Never said or even implied that to be the case. I think I've been pretty clear that I see it as a threat to privacy, that I don't personally want it, and that I don't think it's the best (or even a particularly good) solution for the stated problems.

It's bizarre to me. You are putting all this effort towards advocating for new regulation that would require a change to how services operate. Simultaneously you argue against a less intrusive solution on the basis that no one currently does it. For some reason everyone can start checking IDs but sending a header is a bridge too far? It's inconsistent.

by fc417fc802

3/22/2026 at 3:33:54 PM

> They can just visit a site from a different country that doesn't respect our legal framework

That's called noncompliance. This is why a simpler framework is better: do you demonstrably serve content to children in this jurisdiction illegally? Then you'll incur fines and a warrant here. Better not have revenue or visit here. And we could put the same liability on advertisers funding it so there's just no financial incentive for anyone.

Bittorrent is trivial to block, other countries are easy to block on your router, and it would be simple enough to just say running an open proxy incurs liability for anything you front if you obscure the originating location or allow international traffic. Again the basic principle is "are you providing access to the general public with no gating to restricted material?" In any case, obscure Russian forums you can access through Tor are an afterthought compared to e.g. Reddit, which hosts both Roblox forums and porn today with no wall between them. There's no reason to allow that.

Note also that provider liability doesn't mean we can't also have filtering. Liability just creates the correct incentives for providers to help ensure the solution actually works. If liability with no prescription for a solution would lead to ID checks and not working with vendors to have working filters, that kind of reveals what we think would actually work.

As far as virtual cards go, do they not still require payment information? Surely business don't want to deal with anonymous purchases since that's begging for fraud? In any case, service provider liability is still compatible here. I didn't say they need to check ID. Neither does e.g. the Texas law. It says someone needs to verify age. They can use a commercial service for it. The virtual card provider or gift card retailer could provide that service and assume or share liability.

I'm not even necessarily advocating for a new regulation. I'm saying recognize public indecency/lewd behavior for what it is, and ban things like gambling in children's games. Recognize that public websites with no access gates are public spaces and act accordingly. And yes I consider checking ID for a handful of specific services to be less intrusive than everyone supporting some header. I don't consider the former to be intrusive at all really. The latter is basically impossible if for no other reason than there are already billions of devices that don't. It's a fantasy non solution that basically amounts to "do nothing".

by ndriscoll

3/22/2026 at 10:33:07 AM

I don't know why I'm the only person online willing to steelman this, but...

The early Internet users weren't people who subscribed to AOL to look at porn in the 90's. They were the people who were granted access to the ARPANET to work in the 80's. The Internet was an exclusive community back then. You had government employees, knowledge workers, and elite university students who had all passed institutional screening processes. You were only allowed to use the ARPANET if you were using it to do something useful and aligned. Therefore you could feel reasonably assured that anyone you talked to online was going to be better than the average person you'd find going outside and walking down the street. If you wanted to know who they were, you could just finger their username. If you wanted to know who owned a domain, you could whois it, get their name and then even write them mail or call them.

People have wanted that old Internet back for a long time. i.e. the one that existed before Eternal September. Those are the people who run your tech companies. The ones who remember what it was like. These people understand what people actually want isn't always the same thing as what they say they want. They understand why the only truly successful Internet spaces on the modern Internet are the ones like Facebook that got people to be non-anonymous. Another example is the best places to work that folks desperately want to get into are the companies like Google whose intranets are much more like the old Internet. These are really the only Internet spaces that normal people want to use. Because people want to interact with other people who are similar to them. Because people want to know who other people are. Otherwise we can't operate as the social creatures that evolution designed us to be. I don't think any civilization in history has operated its public square as a gigantic red light district where everyone is required to wear a mask. So why should we?

Overcoming the anonymous religion problem that somehow glommed onto the hacker and cyberpunk movements is more important and urgent now than it's ever been, because the Internet has been filling up with billions of AI agents. It's gonna be Eternal September in overdrive. Humanity is really facing a tradeoff where you'll have to have gatekeeping again and won't be allowed to conceal who you are, or you can be gaslit by machines forever in your own robot fantasy.

by jart

3/21/2026 at 9:51:50 PM

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.

by sillysaurusx

3/21/2026 at 10:28:12 PM

> 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.

by Kim_Bruning

3/21/2026 at 10:59:31 PM

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.

by closeparen

3/22/2026 at 12:56:26 AM

The law is irrelevant in that case but the actual situation is not. If people have never put their personal information online, the bad government can't get it from online. A new phone coming out during the time of the bad government, that says the government requires you to enter your name and address, will not be received as well as if it comes out during good government times.

by gzread

3/22/2026 at 1:46:50 AM

> will not be received as well as if it comes out during good government times.

What bearing does that have on anything.

by nandomrumber

3/22/2026 at 2:24:07 AM

Making the point that people tend to engage in short term thinking. The reception of the same law, product, or practice will be colored by the current government as opposed to potential future ones.

by fc417fc802

3/21/2026 at 11:43:16 PM

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).

by Kim_Bruning

3/22/2026 at 1:59:36 AM

Snowden’s experience doesn’t generalise to, well, anyone really.

by nandomrumber

3/22/2026 at 3:06:51 AM

Well, I wouldn't personally recommend single-handedly taking on the most powerful nation on earth, myself.

But turns out that if your opsec is decent, and even using mostly publicly available tools like Snowden did, you might survive even that.

In the nuanced case, normal people applying more normal opsec can handle more normal things, would seem to follow.

by Kim_Bruning

3/21/2026 at 10:45:51 PM

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.”

by closeparen

3/21/2026 at 11:39:40 PM

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.

by Kim_Bruning

3/22/2026 at 2:30:50 AM

It can remain legal to operate a security camera while being illegal to upload unencrypted footage to any third party. I'm not worried about individuals, only about big business and the government.

> This obtains even when using electronic tools and even when working in association with others.

I think it is reasonable to place limits on public "speech" (ex uploading videos of people) without interfering with private (in the case of electronics E2EE) communications.

by fc417fc802

3/22/2026 at 12:55:17 AM

There are many people rights people don't have and they're okay with that and even support not having the right to stab people, not having the right to steal from a store, not having the right to take nude pictures of children... What if this one is like that?

by gzread

3/21/2026 at 10:44:33 PM

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

by micromacrofoot

3/21/2026 at 9:20:41 PM

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)

by taurath

3/21/2026 at 9:31:20 PM

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.

by dmix

3/21/2026 at 9:35:35 PM

It should be prohibited outright. If you allow a loophole for corporations then they will just sell it as a service and we will never be free of it.

by throwaway173738

3/21/2026 at 9:36:45 PM

Companies create the environment - the government is supposed to be “small” - and it must remain small so the US “consumer” can be leeched from

by taurath

3/22/2026 at 1:05:22 AM

The US government is very far from small. That said, I'd be open to rules on the data broker industry though considering it's scale and how the foreign governments can buy/hack them bypassing all of Tiktok-esque national security handwaving.

by dmix

3/22/2026 at 2:37:04 AM

> Tiktok-esque national security handwaving.

Algorithmic feeds are propaganda tools. A foreign government being able to propagandize your citizens is a legitimate threat, not handwaving.

by fc417fc802

3/22/2026 at 7:09:34 AM

Think for a nanosecond about how exploitable that is. Imagine for a moment that a foreign nation had obtained proof that say ICE was engaged in sex trafficking and publishing it only for it to be blocked as 'destabilizing propaganda'.

If anybody says that propaganda is a valid reason for censorship I say, censor thyself first.

by Nasrudith

3/22/2026 at 1:00:50 PM

No one said anything about censorship. There are many things that would pose a threat if controlled by a foreign adversary. Communications platforms with algorithmic feeds are one of them.

by fc417fc802

3/22/2026 at 2:47:30 PM

"morals of the general public" helps lead to "more aggressive privacy laws"

by greenie_beans

3/21/2026 at 9:31:59 PM

By RSU, I'm assuming you mean this:

> Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) are a form of equity compensation where employers promise company shares, typically vesting over time, offering a way to align employee interests with company performance

by arcanemachiner

3/21/2026 at 9:38:34 PM

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.

by taurath

3/22/2026 at 5:23:25 AM

> It's too late and never about children,

And this is why these arguments never translate well to mainstream politics.

By declaring a-priori that it is not about the children, and leaping straight to a deeper, more sinister motive that you're sure is there, even if you're right that there are people behind the scenes agitating for these sinister reason, you ignore that a lot of the general public and a lot of the political class genuinely do see this as a child protection issue.

If you can't even concede this, then you're missing large parts of the picture and your attempts to resist it will be that much harder.

by Nursie

3/22/2026 at 7:11:14 AM

Fuck the idiotic general public then. It was never about the children and everybody knows it. The same people who won't pay half a percent more in property taxes to ensure every schoolkid can get three meals a day suddenly care enough to want to give up privacy for safety? Pull the other one, it has bells on it.

by Nasrudith

3/21/2026 at 10:56:46 PM

Has there even been a time when we really had privacy online ?

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.

by aucisson_masque

3/21/2026 at 9:55:51 PM

With respect, this take is a good example of all or nothing thinking. It’s not too late.

by catlifeonmars

3/21/2026 at 11:09:57 PM

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.

by NeutralCrane

3/22/2026 at 1:49:41 AM

If the government knew every single user on the internet's name, address, phone number and what they had for breakfast, it would not stop monsters like this, or even slow them down.

by chinabot

3/22/2026 at 4:21:36 PM

Okay but going off the details you provided this would've also happened if she were 18+? If not via Discord or Roblox, they'd find some other avenue to groom people, lure them in and kill them. 16 might not be an adult, but at least where I come from it's not exactly a child either.

There's always a chance of horrible shit happening, but we shouldn't put every single person under a microscope to ensure the one in a million doesn't occur.

by sensanaty

3/22/2026 at 7:51:25 AM

> 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.

Well, your example wouldn't be solved by age verification in any way. They could still legally access Roblox or a discord private chat (or even another private chat method) after this law.

So the example show how it is about irrational fear and not protection in any way.

And this is an tragic edge case, if you want to take this kind of edge case in consideration, you also have to take in consideration what the age verification would imply as tragic edge case.

by choo-t

3/22/2026 at 10:52:34 AM

I'm here wondering why it would make a difference whether the girl is under 18 or not. You could argue that the criminal has to cover up his crime by getting rid of the evidence (murder) because the girl wasn't 18 yet and therefore it makes sense to stop under 18 year old girls from using the platform because they are living evidence, but it actually sounds more like a problem caused by the law itself.

After all, dating apps are an even more extreme version of this. If you're attractive enough, you get to have many one night stands and many murder opportunities.

by imtringued

3/22/2026 at 2:55:57 AM

There will always be weird tail risks. The law should only get involved where there are widespread systemic problems.

People are occasionally hospitalized due to self, family, or friends handling food improperly. That doesn't warrant a legal intervention whereas dining establishments do.

> before someone inevitably says “where were the parents?” and wash their hands of the situation

Nope, that's exactly what I say. The law cannot reasonably replace responsible parenting if society is to remain a pleasant place to live.

by fc417fc802

3/22/2026 at 3:37:32 AM

I live in extremely fire prone areas.

Many of us are pretty damn okay at beating back the flame and controlling the flow of the worst of things away from homes, but nobody is perfect.

We don't expect every family and parent in these areas to have fire fighting skills, self evacuation is recommended.

Parents every where now find themselves surrounded by the delibrately laid gasoline of addictive social media and grooming risks et al. and it's infeasible to expect every parent be skilled in defensive cyber secuirty.

It's reasonable to expect communities to want simple barriers and means of protection, the existance of reasonable control and throttling options for parents.

by defrost

3/22/2026 at 4:22:42 AM

I agree with that however I'm puzzled by your comment because in the context that you're responding to I don't think I said anything that would imply otherwise. Being particularly skilled in "defensive cyber security" isn't a requirement to avoid grooming of your child in the general case - some combination of communication, supervision, and filtering is.

> It's reasonable to expect communities to want simple barriers and means of protection, the existance of reasonable control and throttling options for parents.

I agree 100%! However ID verification is not a reasonable (or even particularly effective) solution to that. I apologize if I've misconstrued your intended meaning but given the broader context that's what it seems like you're implying.

Realistically there's no way to prevent grooming other than keeping tabs on your child. The least labor intensive (but also most intrusive) way to do that is probably whitelist parental controls and watching for unauthorized devices. It is not even remotely realistic to expect a communication platform to detect that a child is speaking with an adult they don't know (as opposed to one they do) and also that it isn't a benign interaction (such as a gaming group or etc) and then somehow act on that information (how?) without manufacturing an absurd dystopia in the process.

When it comes to filtering I think it would be reasonable to impose a standard self categorization protocol on all website operators. That would make non-whitelist filtering much more reliable (a boon to parents, educators, and employers) without negatively impacting privacy or personal freedoms.

by fc417fc802

3/22/2026 at 5:48:46 AM

Okay, in the specific upthread context;

* there are very few urban population clump on the planet that don't face the threat of child grooming and exploitation, both before and after the digital device explosion.

* that threat vector significantly increased and morphed with the spread of personal digital devices for children; the threat comes no longer from potentially any personal with contact in real life, it has now expanded to include potentially the entire digital world and now can be automated via groomGPT

* A simple "where were the parents" response on a per parent basis is unfair in the sense that spotting grooming in a digital device world is a difficult challenge .. even a simple constrained playground with stock babytalk language construction can be socially backdoored (See: "I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny" )

* Concerned parents will look for solutions, communities, at local, state, and federal levels should devote resources to providing solutions in informed contexts and graduated levels.

* Unaware parents will exist, and will likely dominate the demographics, or not?

* Is the correct _default_ social policy here (answer varies by country and culture) to shield the less cyber aware from the worst of the worst with filters ... that the better informed can bypass or deselect?

I guess where we diverge on PoV is where the perimeter of swiss cheese protection should extend to.

by defrost

3/22/2026 at 12:58:18 AM

Discord & Roblox - no encryption, privacy, or anonymity on either of those platforms, by the way.

by AJ007

3/22/2026 at 2:01:24 AM

Still none of that necessitates the type of mandatory partial-ID verification being pushed by these laws.

Roblox can straightforwardly require ID verification on their own, of both the parent responsible for the account, as well as the children directly (request documentation from their school, birth certificate, etc. Yes, high touch to verify these documents. But we're talking protecting children here, right?)

If anything this type of legislation is about absolving them of the responsibility of doing so!. Imagine a company making their offering "for adults only", with de facto kid usage as parents relent and just let their kid use an older age on the computer.

by mindslight

3/22/2026 at 4:59:38 AM

I'm sure the same government that held the Epstein class responsible will get right on to making sure his proteges are brought to justice, we just need to give up more freedoms first.

by heavyset_go

3/21/2026 at 11:22:53 PM

[dead]

by weird_tentacles

3/21/2026 at 9:47:32 PM

For the government it may be surveillance. For the people funding these new laws, it is about advertising profits. See what I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471747

by SilverElfin

3/21/2026 at 10:03:26 PM

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.

by mattmanser

3/22/2026 at 12:04:04 AM

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.

by zingerlio

3/22/2026 at 12:58:52 AM

Some of them clearly are - the one in California.

by gzread

3/21/2026 at 11:24:56 PM

[dead]

by weird_tentacles

3/21/2026 at 10:24:09 PM

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.

by Keeeeeeeks

3/21/2026 at 10:36:05 PM

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.

by phendrenad2

3/21/2026 at 9:14:30 PM

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.

by jmcgough

3/21/2026 at 10:13:30 PM

Their real goals are even worse than that. Some of these groups have admitted they're also about suppressing LGBT+ content.

As the Heritage Foundation admitted:

> Keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids. No child should be conditioned to think that permanently damaging their healthy bodies to try to become something they can never be is even remotely a good idea.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/kids-online-safe...

by tangotaylor

3/21/2026 at 11:56:01 PM

>they're also about suppressing LGBT+ content

>> 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.

by gruez

3/22/2026 at 1:15:17 AM

Hi, I've been openly queer for over 20 years. Using trans people as a wedge to pry apart the entire LGBTQ community is a tale as old as time. This isn't theoretical or a slippery slope argument; it's recent history. It's effective because it sounds "reasonable" on its face, but it's a ploy.

Just one of the many, many, many reasons that trans rights are human rights.

by _moof

3/22/2026 at 2:58:51 AM

>This isn't theoretical or a slippery slope argument; it's recent history. It's effective because it sounds "reasonable" on its face, but it's a ploy.

It quite literally is the slippery slope argument. You just don't want to call it that because the term is almost always used in the context of a fallacy, and you think you're right. It's like "freedom fighters" vs "terrorists". Nobody calls themselves terrorists, even terrorists.

Moreover the "It's effective because it sounds "reasonable" on its face, but it's a ploy" argument works equally well for any side, eg. it's not hard to imagine someone on the right saying "today it's Jan 6th protesters and that might seem reasonable, but tomorrow it's anyone at unite the right protests, and when president AOC's in power it's anyone who's protesting against trans surgery for minors".

by gruez

3/22/2026 at 11:06:31 PM

Please engage with the substance of my comment:

I have personally witnessed this tactic being used by anti-LGBTQ bigots for decades.

by _moof

3/22/2026 at 2:25:21 AM

[dead]

by Spivak

3/22/2026 at 8:16:50 AM

> Isn't it a stretch to round off "trans content" to "LGBT+ content"?

Not really. Do you think the people attempting to ban trans content are otherwise fine with kids being gay/lesbian/etc? Do you think they view gay/lesbian identities as legitimate, rather than unnatural perversion? It’s the same rhetoric in my experience, we’re all just deviants making choices. It seems like casual uninvested people just got used to gays being in the public eye and anti-gay people lost the ability to get anyone to care about that position. Turns out they’re just normal people trying to live their lives.

> Immigrants being lynched is certainly a subset of "anti-immigration", but it's still misleading

I don’t think your analogy works unless you believe that transgender people are uniquely extreme compared to other identities. If true, I think that more shows your prejudice than anything. Maybe if enough trans people end up in the public eye, casual uninvested people will stop thinking negatively about trans people generally too. Maybe one day they’re realize we’re just people trying to live our lives.

by malwrar

3/22/2026 at 5:06:31 AM

Read this[1], law makers have made it very clear that they mean all LGBT content, and not just the content you feel like reducing it to.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/rep-finke-was-right-ag...

by heavyset_go

3/22/2026 at 1:01:15 AM

[flagged]

by gzread

3/21/2026 at 11:04:52 PM

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.

by abcde666777

3/21/2026 at 11:50:07 PM

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.

by simonask

3/22/2026 at 1:54:40 AM

The idea that none of them are trans for that reason is what sound insane to me. Are you not aware of how much humans absorb from the messaging in their environment?

And FYI, I've seen it happen with one of my own family members - someone who so far as I can tell isn't 'a man in a woman's body', but rather just someone who never fit in and was always a bit of a social outcast.

Their struggle was never their bloody gender, it was their struggle to find a way to fit into the world.

And that's what a lot of transitioning actually is. Because human psychology works such that when we're not fitting in, when we feel insecure and out of place, a subconscious pressure emerges to reinvent ourselves due to the current formula not working for us.

It's offensive to me that you'd make such claims whilst clearly so naive about it.

by abcde666777

3/22/2026 at 9:24:38 AM

I just think it's really dangerous to think you know better than another person about their internal struggles.

While you may think they are being affected by certain kinds of messaging, you also have to interrogate that you yourself are being affected by other kinds of messaging, shaping your view on how gender functions.

This is the exact same reasoning behind anti-gay laws around the world: That telling people it's OK to be gay will cause them to somehow "choose" to be gay, which to anyone who is actually either straight or gay is completely absurd - they couldn't change that aspect of themselves even if they wanted to.

by simonask

3/22/2026 at 12:16:07 AM

Is it really insane? In the detrans community, it's not uncommon for people to see their transition as ideologically led, see e.g. https://lacroicsz.substack.com/p/by-any-other-name.

by signalfour

3/22/2026 at 1:18:40 AM

OK, sure, there’s going to be confused and vulnerable people making mistakes. As I understand it, the detrans community is a tiny fraction of an already tiny fraction who ever in their life identified as trans.

This isn’t an actual risk to anybody, and I can’t believe I have to say that.

by simonask

3/22/2026 at 2:15:29 AM

It’s weird to say in the same comment “it happens but as far as I know it’s rare” and “this isn’t an actual risk to anybody.”

I do wonder how many would detransition if it wasn’t too embarrassing for them or because they’re effectively stuck that way if they did bottom surgery. Certainly I’m sure there are many more that quietly do it and not be a part of a community around it - I know of one person who did.

I’m sure there are many reasons people transition. For instance, there used to be a subreddit that collected (many) trans people commenting on how much them transitioning or being the other gender turned them on (Reddit being Reddit, it was banned). Some might do it because it feels like a way to get a new start. Some might do it because it’ll get them attention. Some, I’m sure, do it because they genuinely feel like they have the wrong body.

All of those could (of course) be affected by social interactions, with only the last one being positive. Unfortunately it would be really hard for us to ever know the true statistics, as that sort of thing is hard for even the person experiencing it to suss out.

by AuryGlenz

3/22/2026 at 9:07:46 AM

> It’s weird to say in the same comment “it happens but as far as I know it’s rare” and “this isn’t an actual risk to anybody.”

Orders of magnitude more people are maimed, disfigured, or outright killed by:

1. Guns.

2. Vehicles.

3. Alcohol.

Weirdly, suspiciously weirdly, the people that are vehemently for age-verification to protect potential trans-indoctrination victims from any risk of bodily harm are the very same people that are very much in favour of those three things. Or at least, show zero apparent interest in using age verification to block 2nd amendment nuts spreading their propaganda -- and I use the word very literally -- because the NRA is funded by Russia[1], or blocking young impressionable kids watching Nascar and being influenced to engage in dangerous speeding, or blocking alcohol advertising from ever being seen by a minor.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/09/27/764879242/nra-was-foreign-ass...

by jiggawatts

3/22/2026 at 4:27:37 PM

> I do wonder how many would detransition if it wasn’t too embarrassing for them

Well I wonder how many would transition in the first place if the culture (and law) allowed for gender fluidity without judgement or violence.

Also: not speaking for all queer people here, but if a person wants to detransition because they changed their mind/feel differently as they age/whatever the fuck reason, that’s fine!

by jjj123

3/22/2026 at 1:57:20 AM

Respectfully, not everyone shares this view.

by chinabot

3/22/2026 at 12:55:10 AM

Do you believe that children are more impressionable than adults? There is a community of detrans people who talk openly about how they became trans because they were influenced by peers and authority figures in their lives.

Go read some threads on the detrans subreddit.

by Dig1t

3/22/2026 at 1:01:41 AM

Maybe we shouldn't hide the information then, so they can make their own decisions. Imagine blocking all the information about "am I actually trans or just peer pressured?" but not blocking the peer pressure.

by gzread

3/22/2026 at 1:15:19 PM

Since you compare it to religious indoctrination: I wouldn't want my child to be indoctrinated into believing some religion, but I still want my children to learn about religion. Not because I think it's important, but because we live on a world where a lot of people DO consider that very important. We don't have to agree, but we should at least try to understand the people around us. The same way I don't think there is any harm in learning kids about trans people, and what might cause someone to decide something radical like trying to change their gender.

Can you explain what you mean with trans ideology? because AFAIK 'ideology' means a collection of beliefs or philosophies, and I don't really understand how that applies to a physiological condition, like it does in the case of religion.

by legacynl

3/21/2026 at 11:42:26 PM

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.

by WarmWash

3/21/2026 at 11:55:31 PM

Gender dysphoria can be medically studied, is not an ideology and is not a disorder. Hope this clears things up.

by poly2it

3/22/2026 at 2:00:42 AM

What we call gender dysphoria is really just a cluster of symptoms around people's sense of their identity.

But identity as a whole is a very murky thing - if you ask me it's largely an adaptive abstraction that our minds invent.

The purpose of said adaption is to adopt a role which functions within the tribe/society for purposes of survival.

I think we way over-simplify the whole thing by making it about gender and gender roles.

And it's that over-simplification that I would label as the ideology. Because that's what ideologies do: they take the complex ambiguities of the world and try to cram them into a simplistic box.

by abcde666777

3/23/2026 at 11:39:24 AM

And lobotomies are a legit cure as is all the other quackery that profession has provided as facts.

by account42

3/22/2026 at 12:20:03 AM

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.

by signalfour

3/22/2026 at 1:07:36 AM

Yes, you do not need to be dysphoric to be transgender, however. It is actually quite difficult to compare rates of gendery dysphoria to transgender identity, as transgender identity is inherently self-reported, but studies on gender dysphoria focus on diagnosed cases, not undiagnosed estimates. Therefore it is also not possible to assert that non-dysphoria is dominant among current transitioning people as you do.

by poly2it

3/21/2026 at 10:50:41 PM

Heritage's tweet in the screenshot in your link makes no reference to "L", "G", "B" nor "+". Just "T"

by gib444

3/21/2026 at 10:11:43 PM

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

by phyzix5761

3/21/2026 at 9:47:54 PM

Traffickers now use refugee programs as conduits for human trafficking.

by mc32

3/22/2026 at 4:17:19 AM

If that reduced trafficking, would it not be a worthwhile exchange?

by ip26

3/21/2026 at 10:03:08 PM

It’s meta this time.

by chaostheory

3/22/2026 at 7:47:43 AM

It never was about the children. It never was about age.

The goal has always been identification. And the goal of identification is control.

Never be fooled by the 'easy to evade' part. That is always just a first step to get you to care less to oppose the introduction. Once in place, the enforcement and compliance mechanisms rapidly change to the real system.

by PeterStuer

3/21/2026 at 10:47:14 PM

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.

by sfRattan

3/22/2026 at 1:04:56 AM

> filtering those devices' network requests at the network gateway, or filtering one hop up onto the provider's infrastructure

These things are not possible with any reliability, we spent two decades encrypting everything.

by gzread

3/22/2026 at 2:41:20 AM

I'm not imagining filtering based on the path. Even with https, hostname is visible before the handshake. And even when Encrypted Client Hello is widely implemented, it's also easy enough for network providers to drop any ECH packets from devices flagged as "for children" and signal to those devices that their handshake must reveal the hostname, at least to the router doing the filtering.

by sfRattan

3/23/2026 at 1:49:00 AM

What's the standard signal for "please disable CH encryption because your network wants to spy on you" and why would any device respect it?

by gzread

3/23/2026 at 4:32:12 AM

It's not: disable CH encryption because your network wants to spy on you.

It is: disable CH encryption because the owner of this device, to whom we are leasing connectivity, has set the "isChild" flag for this device to true in her account with us so that we can filter the Internet for this device.

There's no such standard signal right now. But I'd prefer such a signal strongly over code that I cannot control running on my own device to enforce legislation. If we're going to enforce these things somewhere, code on my devices is the last place I want that enforcement to happen.

> ...and why would any device respect it?

Because if they do not the ISP drops all further packets and the connection dies.

by sfRattan

3/22/2026 at 7:26:13 AM

Largely agree with this, though I'll throw in that the OS should provide a signal as well. I know for sure that iOS and Windows both have family modes that work pretty well, I suspect Android does as well.

If my kid takes their tablet to grandma and grandpas I want the preferences and signals to carry forward, even when connected to a network at household that is nominally only adults.

These technologies don't need to be bullet proof to be effective and they don't need to send more information than "treat all requests from device as being from under 8/13/18." The ills these age verification efforts are trying to address (and they are real problems) are from excessive, not casual or incidental use. Yes, there will be many kids that get around any reasonable control, but just making it less convenient will reduce harm.

I have various content controls on at my house. I'm the admin, I can turn them off whenever I want to. I almost never do, because 1) the block reminds me I should probably shouldn't be going to whatever site I'm going to and 2) for the most part, my experience is better with the "restricted" search engines/youtube/social media.

by topkai22

3/22/2026 at 7:50:39 AM

I'd say the solution here is to make child's device always connects back to the home network, and make sure the child's account on the device can't change network settings. We're almost there in terms of ease of use: tailscale and netbird are like 75% of the way to usable for anyone... But the last 25% is probably the hardest.

by sfRattan

3/21/2026 at 9:15:22 PM

It's always been internet access control, there is no child protection.

by cs02rm0

3/21/2026 at 9:14:10 PM

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

by jameskilton

3/22/2026 at 4:38:54 AM

The adult entertainment industry cared decades ago [0]. Their solution is simple: sites send the RTA meta tag if applicable, browsers in accounts configured by guardians as "children" look for it. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...

[1] https://www.rtalabel.org/

by ElectroBuffoon

3/21/2026 at 9:18:05 PM

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.

by mindslight

3/21/2026 at 11:50:35 PM

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.

by txrx0000

3/22/2026 at 1:08:09 AM

(This is a reply to the dead comment, which was not dead when I start writing this)

I don't know how long their specific proposal would take, but on a Unix or Unix-like system the California bill could be done in a week.

0. Make a directory somewhere, say /etc/age_check, and in that directory create four files: 0-13, 13-16, 16-18, 18+, owned by some system account with permissions 000.

1. This would be the hardest part. Modify whatever is used to interactively create new user accounts to ask for the user age if the account is a child's account, and than add an ACL entry for the appropriate /etc/age_check file that allows the child's account to read that file.

The California bill says you have to ask for and age or birthdate but the API you provide for apps to ask for age information just requires giving an age bracket, so I'm taking that as meaning I am not required to actually store the age. I only have to make the API work.

2. The API for checking age is to try to open the files in /etc/age_check. Whichever open succeeds gives you the user's age bracket.

by tzs

3/22/2026 at 12:16:26 AM

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.

by tzs

3/22/2026 at 12:24:06 AM

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.

edit: on second thought, realistically, the API solution is too brittle regardless of which way it goes. Because the API requires every service to implement it and that's not happening, whereas an app installation lock only requires one child-friendly OS to implement it, then parents can choose that OS.

by txrx0000

3/22/2026 at 3:14:37 AM

That's not my understanding. This is what the bill says: Provide a developer who has requested a signal with respect to a particular user with a digital signal via a reasonably consistent real-time application programming interface that identifies [the age group].

So the app requests a signal (like, calling an API), and the OS returns the signal (returning the age group).

Regarding API vs installation lock, TBH I don't think the law concerns that level of details. An OS or app-store installation lock that checks app ratings can be considered as a valid implementation.

by cvhc

3/22/2026 at 4:34:23 AM

The California law is horrible because it forces everyone to let tech companies and governments decide what's suitable for children, rather than let parents decide. It's telling parents to give every app their child's age and trust that the apps will do the right thing. It also legitimizes personal data collection (in this case, the user's age) for every app and service on the Internet that wants to know your age.

The password-based app installation lock I proposed in my original comment doesn't require any kind of age checking at all, so it naturally doesn't fit the California law. The device owner (in this case, the parent who buys the device for their child) gets to decide what apps can be installed on their child's phone on an app-by-app basis using a password set by the parent. The app store doesn't need to know, and the apps don't need to know.

by txrx0000

3/22/2026 at 5:00:04 AM

You have a point. Though I suspect that average parents are either too lazy or not tech literate enough.

I do want to note that this California law alone doesn't say anything about content restriction. I won't be surprised if there was/will be another bill to assign the responsibility (which may be more controversial). But the current law is only about the age gating mechanism. And on the positive side it removes the need for actual age verification (like using ID) which other regions still insist on.

by cvhc

3/22/2026 at 6:25:56 AM

The California law is the closest thing to what we do in the physical world but better. We already decided as a society to limit the purchase of pornography, gambling, alcohol, tobacco, prostitution, drugs, via age gates and require the merchant to be liable for that. We already find this reasonable as a society. The California law recognizes the tracking problems of requiring a verifiable id online and instead recognizes that parental self-assertion at the point of account creation is enough.

Since tracking children is generally illegal, you can also voluntarily lie and label yourself as a child when you don't want to access such content.

by BlackFly

3/22/2026 at 8:20:48 AM

We have decided as a society to age-gate the purchase of a very small selection of goods and services, but this did not require a law that says all merchants have the right to know your age. And in this case, it's not even just all merchants, but anyone that serves you any kind of information. The real world equivalent of this California bill would be more like: anyone you've ever talked to has the right to know your age.

A more reasonable approach would be for parents to keep tabs on (or for stricter parents, control) who their child is associating with and where they're going, and advise their child on who/what to stay away from if they're out alone. And of course that takes parenting effort. The digital equivalent of this are things like password-gating app installation in the OS and website-blocking in the WiFi router. But I will say, I don't think these kinds of analogies are good because the Internet is too different from the physical world.

And let's not underestimate the tracking power of a legally mandated data point: the age contains about 6 bits of information that can be used to identify your user account on the Internet across apps and websites, even if your inputted age is fake.

by txrx0000

3/22/2026 at 12:59:31 AM

Would the content rating be per HTML element and the browser would delete the elements with bad ratings from the DOM, or how would it work?

by gzread

3/22/2026 at 1:13:56 AM

I'd imagine it works like movie ratings. You don't filter movies from scene to scene. There's just one rating for an entire site or app.

But yeah I get the point, API based solutions are complicated and brittle because they require all services to implement it properly. In contrast a user-set app installation password in the OS settings is more effective and easier to implement.

by txrx0000

3/22/2026 at 1:33:44 AM

If a chronological social media feed contains both R and G rated elements how would you implement that?

by gzread

3/22/2026 at 2:10:49 AM

> the API requires every service to implement it and that's not happening

No it doesn't. A browser/appinstaller with parental/age controls enabled would fail as unavailable if there was no age rating on the website/app. This is exactly the solution we should be aiming for, as it keeps the incentives lined up instead of turning them upside down.

One big problem with the laws currently being pushed is that it leaves the decision for what sites are "appropriate" for kids completely in the lands of corporate attorneys. For example, Facebook will happily make an "under 18" site that uses LLMs to censor posts, but still contains all of the same dopamine drip mechanics. Whereas keeping the decision process of appropriate under the control of the end-device means parents could straightforwardly go beyond what corporate attorneys decide, and block Facebook regardless of the age rating.

I'm responding to another comment of yours here since HN loves the rate limit. In that comment you were talking about locked down bootloaders. But bootloaders are already thoroughly locked down, and most devices are still essentially usable. The current looming threat is remote attestation, which makes it so that websites (and other services) are able to prevent you from running software of your choice when interacting with them! The backwards legislation being currently pushed is all but guaranteed to end up in more demands for remote attestation, whereas the correct direction of information flow (sites/apps publish headers saying they're suitable for <18 etc) would not necessitate remote attestation.

by mindslight

3/22/2026 at 3:48:15 AM

I shouldn't have defended the API or age rating solution. It's just a trap in hindsight. That kind of solution must be rejected altogether even if it's the OS checking the app/website's age rating header, because we'd be giving the OS oligopoly (Apple, Google, Microsoft) way too much leverage, and in the long term they're going to make it so that you can only run their approved apps because unapproved apps didn't implement their age rating API. And there is no competing OS to fix that situation if those same companies keep the bootloader on their hardware locked. That still puts authority over children in the hands of governments and corporations rather than parents.

I stand by my original comment. No new laws are needed. All of the features outlined in 1), 2), and 3) should be user-controlled, and there's no need to send info over the air.

by txrx0000

3/22/2026 at 4:09:25 AM

You can still get hardware that you can install your own OS on. But you have to be deliberate about picking it out before a purchase, rather than hoping to unlock a random carrier phone down the line. For example my phone is a Pixel running Graphene. It has a locked down bootloader that could only be unlocked with the online consent of Google. While this most certainly chafes me (and if I could snap my fingers and make such schemes blink out of existence I would), I do have to admit that it really isn't that debilitating.

The unlocking process zaps the userdata partition. This security model would totally suffice for locking down a child's phone. If the child zaps their phone and erases everything on it, then the parent can handle that out of band.

For the general problem, I would say that there has been a longstanding market failure here, in that parental control software isn't widespread or straightforwardly usable across different websites. Your 3 points don't really address that. (2) has been doable on standard desktops forever, and (3) just pushes mobile devices back towards the capability of desktops (which on its own is laudable!). But standard desktops have had these capabilities for decades and still haven't evolved the kind of straightforward parental controls that most parents are demanding.

by mindslight

3/22/2026 at 6:25:05 AM

I don't think it's a market failure. The reality that password-gating software installation at the OS level can be done on most desktops but not most phones is the opposite sign of a market failure. Mobile OSes have increasingly stripped down capabilities in recent years precisely because of anti-competitive practices. The reason standard desktops have not evolved even better parental control features is not because they're not doing better than phones under a free market. They are already doing better in spite of the fact that most kids use desktops a lot less than they use phones. It's just that the absolute level of demand for parental control features has been low until recent years, and even this recent wave of demand is somewhat manufactured.

by txrx0000

3/22/2026 at 9:28:58 PM

You're focused on "password gating" for installing apps, but the largest subject here is websites. (also a nit: very few Linux systems are set up with noexec on home directories, I know "portable apps" exist for Windows, and I assume MacOS has similar dynamics)

> the absolute level of demand for parental control features has been low until recent years, and even this recent wave of demand is somewhat manufactured.

I don't agree with this. I think the demand has always been there and has been sort of discarded. I've personally done some of that discarding, in my younger days when the worry was of violent content but still on desktop/laptop computers where use was generally socially legible to parents. But these days we're dealing with pocket-sized devices that are no longer socially legible, plus malevolent commercial interests drawing kids in to get them hooked on dopamine drip loops.

But you seem to think the problem is solved, so tell me: what exactly are parents supposed to do here? I'm a new parent, we're still at the stage of watch videos with mama/dada, and play with the calculator app. The next step is probably curated sources of content/apps with general web browsing locked down (including self-curated things like perhaps a local copy of wikipedia). But then after that? What's the next level of expanding their scope look like, without them being subject to attack by corpos showing them ads/social media/weird slop shit/etc? Especially if they are going to have a SIM card such that I can't just filter most of this at the network level.

I haven't researched it all, and I'm sure there are some solutions. But I'm also more capable of seeking out bespoke solutions and actively choosing to use one, as opposed to the average person who wants things to "just work" and isn't going to delve too hard. Can't we agree that the pressure for this shitty legislation is coming from somewhere beyond merely Faceboot's money?

by mindslight

3/23/2026 at 1:23:02 AM

Ok, I'll give you my two cents, but you'll have to fill in the details on your own.

After curated local content, you could get an old desktop (and later a laptop too) and install a Linux distro of your choice on it, something reasonably modern. Put Minecraft on it, and show your child how to start a singleplayer world. Show them how to use the web browser, and add a curated list of sites in the bookmarks. Leave them to figure out the rest on their own. Withhold the sudo and BIOS passwords at the beginning, but give them the passwords when they're ready. I think for the sudo password, it's when they try to host their own Minecraft server for the first time, and BIOS password when they explicitly ask you for it (though these may never happen, depends on the kid, so set your own milestones). Configure the OS and programs as you see fit early on, but don't make changes secretly after they've had the computer for a few months. Block unwanted sites and limit access times with your WiFi router or OS firewall as you see fit. Eventually, they'll figure out how to get around or tear down the barriers you put up, and that's fine, just pretend you don't know or give them a vague hint if they do something too egregious like stealing the neighbor's WiFi. Gradually loosen your control as they get older. And if something breaks, let them watch how you fix it.

Don't give them a phone. Or even if you do, strip it down so that it can only be used for calls, but you can add apps over time. Don't buy them mobile data. Let them buy their own phone and mobile data when they're old enough to earn the money, and that's when your digital supervision ends.

Regarding a solution that "just works": when your child goes out to play, you're the guide that protects them and shows them around town. You know the roads, buildings, people and rules better than they do. There aren't any solutions that "just work" which exempt you from your job as a guide. Well, there are, but that just means someone else is watching your child for you. I think digital parenting is similar in this regard. Parents needs to understand the digital landscape well enough to guide and advise their kids. Solutions which don't strip away parental rights and responsibilities will require some effort to use.

by txrx0000

3/22/2026 at 12:17:27 AM

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.

by panzi

3/22/2026 at 12:36:04 AM

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.

edit: on second thought, there is a trap here. If hardware manufacturers lock down the bootloader, then we're basically still handing over parental authority to governments and companies in the long run. So I think for a start, we just implement a app-install password lock like sudo. It will be easier to implement than the API. The convenience API can come later when hardware manufacturers are banned from locking bootloaders.

by txrx0000

3/22/2026 at 1:00:46 AM

How would you make a website that can be over 18 or not, such as a social media feed? Would it become over 18 as soon as your following list contains a porn star (who may not have been one at the time you followed them), and then if you're under 18 you can't unfollow them because you can't load the page?

by gzread

3/23/2026 at 4:38:08 PM

More and more countries want to make social media >18, or at least >16 or something. :/

by panzi

3/22/2026 at 12:09:54 AM

[flagged]

by renewiltord

3/21/2026 at 10:04:28 PM

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

by vsgherzi

3/21/2026 at 9:18:54 PM

The entire purpose of this exercise is control. "Child protection" is just a ruse to get the stupids onboard.

by HardwareLust

3/22/2026 at 12:43:38 AM

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.

by novok

3/21/2026 at 10:12:27 PM

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.

by einpoklum

3/21/2026 at 11:08:28 PM

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.

seems like a good plan to me.

by a-dub

3/22/2026 at 12:01:36 AM

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.

by pembrook

3/22/2026 at 12:10:50 AM

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.

by a-dub

3/22/2026 at 1:04:10 AM

ZKPs don't buy anything, since an online service can sell them by the thousand and you're just trusting the client that it belongs to the actual user. You might as well just do "User-Age-Category: 18plus" then and save a headache.

by gzread

3/22/2026 at 3:46:42 PM

> 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

by a-dub

3/23/2026 at 1:50:05 AM

Yeah, so some guy is selling his zkps by the millions for a dollar each. Since they're zkps you can't find out who it was, and the system is pointless.

by gzread

3/23/2026 at 1:24:10 PM

no. you can pay verisign or google or the government of estonia or whatever for a digital id and they can issue you a zkp that is signed by them that attests whatever without giving up your identity.

by a-dub

3/22/2026 at 10:29:57 AM

This article seems to be mostly an AI reformulation of the standard retort in tech: "Protecting kids online should be the parents' responsibility, not ours!"

> Guardianship is something else. It is the contextual responsibility of parents, teachers, schools, and other trusted adults to decide what is appropriate for a child, when exceptions make sense, and how supervision should evolve over time. Moderation is partly technical. Guardianship is relational, local, and situated in specific contexts.

But there is no mention how this guardianship is supposed to work in practice if unsupervised internet access is pushed everywhere: Kids are expected to have their own devices (or will use one from a friend), school whatsapp groups are at the same time essential for communication and potentially dangerous. Even if a page filter is set on a phone, which pages exactly would you block or unblock?

by xg15

3/22/2026 at 3:06:02 PM

They don't get unsupervised internet access, there's always a supervising adult in between the child and the internet. For the child's devices it's the parent who has access to parental control software which will restrict access no matter where the device is, at the school it's the school, at the library it's the library, and for the friend's device it's that friend's parents. The answer for what pages do you block is that you use a service who does the work of categorizing pages for you. Every parental control software worth their salt will have this. It's basically the entire value proposition of paid filter software.

No matter the enforcement mechanism there is no way to defeat the "Shawn's parents are cool" problem because Shawn's parents will just give him their IDs to verify. And I know this because I'm for sure going to be that parent.

by Spivak

3/21/2026 at 10:11:05 PM

AI;DR

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.

by plasticeagle

3/21/2026 at 10:16:24 PM

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.

by dlcarrier

3/22/2026 at 12:33:11 AM

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.

by skybrian

3/22/2026 at 12:51:08 AM

How does that even begin to make sense?

I want to protect my child from X type of content -- one of many jobs of a parent, but I will trust all content to self report to be child inappropriate? "Inappropriate" is entirely subjective and can not be defined as some sort universal bool -- and that's before you get to the point of actively malicious actors like Meta and Tiktok actively exploiting children for their content farms generation and ad impression factories.

If the user owns and controls their computers -- as they should -- then that subjective content filtering layer belongs there, in the owners control. If its a child's, then the parent owns the device, not the child.

by AJ007

3/22/2026 at 1:01:18 AM

The idea is that society should have some common standards for what's inappropriate for children. For example, parents don't want their kids to buy cigarettes, but also, stores don't want to sell them cigarettes. When there's consensus on this, cooperation is possible. Parents have an easier time when they get cooperation from the rest of society.

But there isn't going to be consensus on everything, so content filters are still needed.

by skybrian

3/22/2026 at 5:22:16 AM

So simple, just get various Christian, Muslim, atheist, traditionalist and progressive, sane and insane parents to all agree on a common set of what is appropriate and inappropriate. And then enforce that on all of their children. Why didn’t I think of that? That should go great.

by iamnothere

3/22/2026 at 1:12:08 PM

It's the internet. There are no borders and there is no mandate to follow any consensus. Stores may not want to sell cigarettes to children, but e-stores safely hosted in some remote country do want to sell them nicotine pouches and vapes. With a protocol that makes age information always available to websites they could hide their intentions from adults while actively targeting children.

by popcornricecake

3/23/2026 at 2:42:30 PM

IMO you could have some mechanism by which websites could have content certified as child-safe if they agree to adhere to certain standards. (And thereby make them accessible to child-safe devices, which would otherwise default to blocking content which doesn't bear such a certificate.) Adult devices would not implement those restrictions and would therefore be unaffected.

by Ajedi32

3/22/2026 at 1:05:23 AM

> a simple protocol could let cooperating websites know when child locks are on, so they don't show inappropriate content.

Isn't that literally the California law?

by gzread

3/22/2026 at 1:13:40 AM

Not which law you mean, but I think there's a distinction between "disallows children under 16 from creating an account" (which apparently requires age verification) and "disallows creating or logging into a social media account from a device with a child lock on." (Which doesn't.)

by skybrian

3/22/2026 at 1:33:10 AM

The California law is the one where parents select how old their child is and apps must respect that as a child lock.

by gzread

3/23/2026 at 2:39:50 PM

Sort of, except OP also says:

> This doesn't mean every device needs to implement child locks

Which is the exact opposite of what the California law says, going so far as to mandate that open source embedded operating systems ask users for their age.

by Ajedi32

3/21/2026 at 9:33:55 PM

It’s not even a debate if these controls are problematic. The litmus test is to mentally substitute the age field for an ancestry field and place the system in 1930’s Germany.

Coincidently, that system was provided by IBM.

by cluckindan

3/22/2026 at 12:16:50 AM

'Preventing children from buying guns is Nazism!'

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.

by bluegatty

3/22/2026 at 10:28:06 AM

Nobody is arguing that gun shops shouldn’t check buyers’ ID. That’s a strawman.

The situation is more like we set up a new system of checkpoint booths on every highway at city limits, and anyone entering the city gets their ID checked, and that is justified by claiming that it’s so children can’t buy guns.

by cluckindan

3/22/2026 at 8:19:20 PM

References to 'nanny state' are the strawman.

Also - your analogy is wrong - we are not 'age verifying' the whole web, we're 'age verifying' things that ostensibly should be 'age verified'.

Let's just say - 'porn' - to keep it simple.

Porn is to be 'age verified' on the web literally like it is in the city shop.

You don't have to present your ID to read CNN.

They're not saying 'present your id to get into the city, but into the porn shop'

Youre screaming strawman's and presenting strawmans.

The issue is more nuanced then you've presented.

by bluegatty

3/22/2026 at 11:34:55 PM

You seem to have misunderstood the situation completely. The laws being passed in US states force OS level age and identity verification, shifting the responsibility away from individual websites.

by cluckindan

3/21/2026 at 9:17:08 PM

You must be crazy, who could possibly object to governments "protecting the children"?

by wewewedxfgdf

3/22/2026 at 3:46:35 AM

Anyone else open for internet v2? Like a completely new system, with everything that we enjoyed with the first one around the millenia: buggy webpages, slow downloads, crappy browsers, having to download plugins…

Lets do it again!

by reboot81

3/22/2026 at 5:29:48 AM

Autonomi seems like a good start

by 4k93n2

3/21/2026 at 9:47:32 PM

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.

by jjk166

3/21/2026 at 11:15:21 PM

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.

by wakawaka28

3/21/2026 at 11:46:35 PM

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.

by echelon

3/22/2026 at 12:10:20 AM

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.

I agree with Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

by scott_paul

3/22/2026 at 12:31:09 AM

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.

----

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 some 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 potentially dangerous as this one issue.

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.

by echelon

3/21/2026 at 11:52:13 PM

> 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.

by scotty79

3/22/2026 at 12:09:52 AM

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.

by rudhdb773b

3/22/2026 at 12:02:53 AM

The Epstein Island isn't just a fantasy playground for sickos.

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.

by echelon

3/22/2026 at 12:22:32 AM

The west runs on blackmail. If they can't find any dirt on you, you're not getting into power, and that's a fact.

by rdevilla

3/22/2026 at 12:31:37 AM

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"

by pembrook

3/21/2026 at 11:59:24 PM

Good luck, man. Nobody cared in 2012, and even less people care now. The west is lost. 1984 is already here.

by rdevilla

3/22/2026 at 12:06:22 AM

Don't give up!

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.

by echelon

3/22/2026 at 6:50:05 AM

The problem is that, as a constituency, we are and have always been a tiny minority. Call and vote all you want, it won't change a thing because most people just don't care - or at least don't care enough. And there aren't any good (as far as they are concerned) arguments to convince them otherwise.

by int_19h

3/22/2026 at 12:09:36 AM

Whatever you think the scale of surveillance is, I assure you it is 100x worse.

North America is rooted. There is no recovery plan.

by rdevilla

3/22/2026 at 12:12:27 AM

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.

by timschmidt

3/22/2026 at 12:16:21 AM

That tradition was carried into the modern era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

by rdevilla

3/22/2026 at 12:18:37 AM

I'm aware. And the GP you're responding to's username is echelon. I think they're aware as well.

by timschmidt

3/21/2026 at 9:58:47 PM

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.

by cyanydeez

3/21/2026 at 10:46:16 PM

It's mostly Meta lobbying for this, in every state. Sensationalizing and exaggerating does not help.

by mpalmer

3/21/2026 at 11:04:29 PM

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.

by hunterpayne

3/21/2026 at 11:11:02 PM

> I'm not sure it will work out that way.

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.

by gruez

3/22/2026 at 5:42:37 AM

This is like saying, well they passed a new 5% tax, and if they try further attempts at adding more taxes, they can point to the existing legislation and claim it's enough.

COPPA already exists and they're insisting that it's not enough.

by heavyset_go

3/21/2026 at 11:11:14 PM

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

by Scandiravian

3/21/2026 at 11:37:16 PM

>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?

by gruez

3/22/2026 at 7:29:58 AM

The age API is not a prerequisite for adding a location API.

You start with the age verification because "think of the children" is an easy sell, then a year from now, there'll suddenly be a massive worry about criminals using their phones for "crime-stuff", so we need to track where these people are - there's then already a system in-place for easily adding such a functionality

A year after that it'll be online fraud that is apparently rampant

My reason for this conclusion is that there's no good reason that age verification should live at the OS layer. It is technically cleaner and simpler to have it as an external service - just look at the amount of issues it's causing for Linux distributions

FB are not dumb - they know this hurts Linux distributions, but they're an ad business and they need PII to sell those ads

by Scandiravian

3/22/2026 at 12:19:48 AM

They would be no longer responsible for doing it.

My kid had classmates as young as 8 using it. Facebook knows this.

by Spooky23

3/22/2026 at 12:20:28 AM

Think of how many quadrillions of hours under-18 spend online. Ads for verified 18+ are more profitable.

by peyton

3/22/2026 at 1:46:42 PM

> I think the execs think its some sort of 4D chess move to put liabilities onto their competitors.

No, they're pulling up the ladder. Meta is fine losing the app store battle because it can easily afford regulation requiring first-party compliance, and no startup could.

by mpalmer

3/21/2026 at 10:18:15 PM

>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?

by gruez

3/21/2026 at 10:35:13 PM

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

by catapart

3/21/2026 at 10:54:51 PM

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Amendment_(Socia...

by gruez

3/21/2026 at 11:04:20 PM

This has been on Labor’s agenda, in various forms for many years.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-09/government-abandons-p...

by bigfatkitten

3/21/2026 at 11:21:50 PM

That doesn't change the conclusion, unless you're trying to imply the entire party is full of pedophiles.

by gruez

3/22/2026 at 2:48:23 AM

My point is that this has been consistent with their policy for the last couple of decades, and that the recent round of scandals have nothing to do with it.

by bigfatkitten

3/21/2026 at 11:53:52 PM

At this point the burden of proof is on the party. Benefit of the doubt has ran out.

by scotty79

3/22/2026 at 12:03:40 AM

>Benefit of the doubt has ran out

...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"?

by gruez

3/21/2026 at 11:00:49 PM

These laws were passed almost exclusively by the party of self-proclaimed free speech warriors led by Epstein's best friend.

    State             | Effective Date | Legislature Control
    ------------------+----------------+----------------------
    Alabama           | Oct 1, 2024    | Republican
    Arizona           | Sep 26, 2025   | Republican
    Arkansas          | Jul 31, 2023   | Republican
    California        | Jan 1, 2027    | Democratic
    Florida           | Jan 1, 2025    | Republican
    Georgia           | Jul 1, 2025    | Republican
    Idaho             | Jul 1, 2024    | Republican
    Indiana           | Aug 16, 2024   | Republican
    Kansas            | Jul 1, 2024    | Republican
    Kentucky          | Jul 15, 2024   | Republican
    Louisiana         | Jan 1, 2023    | Republican
    Mississippi       | Jul 1, 2023    | Republican
    Missouri          | Nov 30, 2025   | Republican
    Montana           | Jan 1, 2024    | Republican
    Nebraska          | Jul 18, 2024   | Nonpartisan (unicameral)
    North Carolina    | Jan 1, 2024    | Republican
    North Dakota      | Aug 1, 2025    | Republican
    Ohio              | Sep 30, 2025   | Republican
    Oklahoma          | Nov 1, 2024    | Republican
    South Carolina    | Jan 1, 2025    | Republican
    South Dakota      | Jul 1, 2025    | Republican
    Tennessee         | Jan 13, 2025   | Republican
    Texas             | Sep 19, 2023   | Republican
    Utah              | May 3, 2023    | Republican
    Virginia          | Jul 1, 2023    | Divided
    Wyoming           | Jul 1, 2025    | Republican

by smallmancontrov

3/21/2026 at 11:25:38 PM

It's curious that you've omitted California (Democrats) and Colorado (Democrats) from your list.

by tredre3

3/21/2026 at 11:38:54 PM

I thought the Colorado bill died.

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!

by smallmancontrov

3/22/2026 at 5:49:22 AM

And Illinois and New York.

by kbelder

3/21/2026 at 11:46:00 PM

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCOPE_Act

by gruez

3/21/2026 at 11:17:27 PM

[flagged]

by wakawaka28

3/21/2026 at 11:19:26 PM

25 states isn't cherry-picking :) geeeeeeeeeeez!

by bdangubic

3/21/2026 at 11:21:09 PM

I think/hope they were being sarcastic.

by rkomorn

3/21/2026 at 11:23:57 PM

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.

by wakawaka28

3/21/2026 at 11:21:38 PM

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.

by wakawaka28

3/21/2026 at 11:50:10 PM

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.

by cvhc

3/22/2026 at 4:27:37 AM

If that is true about the California case, it is basically a fluke. Lobbyists don't have total control of the legislation after all. It sounds almost benign when posed that way, but it is the wrong solution either way. The better solution is to tell people to install filtering software to block content that they don't want. Then you don't have to worry about compliance of individual sites, personal information, or any of it. This filtering strategy also makes sense for privacy and handling the subjective nature of what is age-appropriate or offensive.

by wakawaka28

3/21/2026 at 11:31:15 PM

Zuckerberg?

https://mashable.com/article/tech-ceos-epstein-files-musk-ga...

by wa7dj229de6

3/22/2026 at 12:09:22 AM

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.

by maweaver

3/21/2026 at 10:27:41 PM

> shadowy cabal of pedophiles elites

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.

by girvo

3/21/2026 at 10:42:22 PM

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

by Tarq0n

3/21/2026 at 11:10:27 PM

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.

by foltik

3/22/2026 at 12:00:46 AM

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.

by scotty79

3/22/2026 at 12:17:06 AM

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.

by DaSHacka

3/21/2026 at 11:07:11 PM

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.

by smallmancontrov

3/21/2026 at 11:22:55 PM

[flagged]

by anonym29

3/21/2026 at 11:32:40 PM

Couple small corrections:

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.

by smallmancontrov

3/21/2026 at 11:36:14 PM

I never accused Hillary or Biden of being implicated in the Epstein files. Those aren't corrections, those are non-sequitirs.

Bonus: at no point did I refute Trump being a pedophile or being in the Epstein files.

by anonym29

3/21/2026 at 11:40:28 PM

>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?

by gruez

3/21/2026 at 10:37:06 PM

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

by pipes

3/21/2026 at 11:41:32 PM

Qanon is absolutely a baseless conspiracy theory.

The overall idea that far too many of those in power politically and economically are involved in CSA isn't though, it seems.

by girvo

3/22/2026 at 2:37:57 AM

The threshold for "far too many" is like, a single digit number. It's an extremely weak claim. Even if those in power were half as likely to be involved as the average adult, that would still be far too many.

by Dylan16807

3/21/2026 at 10:53:52 PM

>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. "

>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"?

by gruez

3/21/2026 at 11:28:12 PM

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.

by gosub100

3/22/2026 at 12:11:32 AM

>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.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/6/fact-check-did-democ...

by gruez

3/22/2026 at 12:19:45 AM

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.

by gosub100

3/22/2026 at 2:31:04 AM

>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?

What claim about Trump? That's he's a pedophile? Based on the rest of your comment it seems like the goalposts are subtly getting moved from "Trump raped kids" to "Trump committed sexual crimes".

by gruez

3/21/2026 at 11:18:46 PM

You sure are giving them quite the benefit of the doubt. Why?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/see-the-alleged-tr...

by foltik

3/21/2026 at 11:28:40 PM

>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.

by gruez

3/22/2026 at 2:26:12 AM

[flagged]

by foltik

3/22/2026 at 2:40:23 AM

Sounds like you don't have any arguments, if you have to resort to thinly veiled personal attacks.

by gruez

3/22/2026 at 3:32:38 AM

Sounds like you don’t have any arguments, besides “I don’t believe the evidence.”

Or maybe “the evidence isn’t THAT bad.”

Or maybe “but someone else is bad too!”

by foltik

3/21/2026 at 11:14:15 PM

> You conveniently omit the fact that they broke up 5 years before he was first convicted.

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.

by theshackleford

3/21/2026 at 11:34:41 PM

>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.

by gruez

3/22/2026 at 1:10:18 AM

> You're making some leaps logic here here.

No, you’re just shifting the goalposts.

The original claim was “The president of the United States was friends with the supposed leader of a pedophile ring.”

Your response to that was to imply that over time, they had a falling out. To which my point was, so what? It doesn’t materially change the original claim you challenged.

A falling out in NO way changes that the original statement was correct, the current president of the United States, Donald J Trump, was good friends with the alleged leader of a large scale pedophile network.

> If someone's outed as a pedophile, everyone who's friends with him should be assumed to be a pedophile?

If a given friend had their own history of acting like a creepy sex pest when it comes to young women, had a known and close relationship with the alleged leader of a pedophile network AND knew about “the girls”, would I assume them also to be a pedophile? At a minimum, I may in fact conclude that the odds they are also a pedophile are significantly higher than that of the average individual. Birds of a feather and all…

It’s not to say they are of course and it may in fact be as simple as they are nothing more than a creepy sex pest with a bad taste in friends, but NOT a pedophile. I gotta be honest but, me personally, I’d rather be neither.

by theshackleford

3/22/2026 at 2:39:07 AM

>To which my point was, so what? It doesn’t materially change the original claim you challenged. [...]

It changes the claim in the same way that "he ran over a kid" isn't "materially changed" by the addition of the detail that the kid jumped in front of the car and he had no time to stop. The original statement is still technically true, but it's a massive omission to leave the latter part out. That's doubly true if you're invoking that fact in the context of trying to imply the person did other crimes.

by gruez

3/22/2026 at 1:40:33 AM

And more importantly, resisted releasing the files as hard as he could.

by GeorgeWBasic

3/21/2026 at 10:42:48 PM

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

by micromacrofoot

3/21/2026 at 10:25:17 PM

Those are just stupid.

by afh1

3/21/2026 at 10:46:22 PM

> 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.

by aga98mtl

3/21/2026 at 11:02:52 PM

>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.

by gruez

3/21/2026 at 10:33:51 PM

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.

by smallmancontrov

3/21/2026 at 11:27:53 PM

Which island?

by Velocifyer

3/21/2026 at 11:29:17 PM

Little St. James

by jadamson

3/21/2026 at 11:52:45 PM

Epstein's most likely.

by nssnsjsjsjs

3/21/2026 at 11:28:57 PM

[dead]

by wetpaws

3/21/2026 at 11:30:51 PM

Quite mind boggling to me that a nanny state can exhurt such a large amount of global control.

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.

by rustyhancock

3/22/2026 at 12:20:34 AM

Where do all these people come from?

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.

by bluegatty

3/22/2026 at 12:33:52 AM

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.

by k33n

3/23/2026 at 3:44:51 PM

It's never a disruption. It's just a reimplementation of an existing thing. Disruption is just synonymous with you wanting a piece of the pie.

by butlike

3/22/2026 at 11:53:00 AM

I object to the use of the verb "turn into" in this title. It assumes any of this was ever genuinely about child protection, and it absolutely isn't and never was.

by wesselbindt

3/21/2026 at 9:16:52 PM

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.

by squarefoot

3/21/2026 at 9:54:42 PM

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.

by varispeed

3/21/2026 at 10:11:05 PM

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.

by kepeko

3/21/2026 at 10:14:48 PM

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.

by andai

3/22/2026 at 1:08:30 AM

You can’t determine age from a face scan. And it’s trivial to hold up a photo of an older person. Seriously if a website wants an image of your government ID or facial image, maybe ask yourself if you really need to access that site.

There WILL be breaches and those drivers license scans will get loose in the world sooner or later. Fully agree that this is all about access control. No thank you.

by AvAn12

3/22/2026 at 2:29:13 AM

Like the evergreen comic, "How would you like this wrapped?" by John Janik

For decades policymakers have been trying to sell us the same surveillance state they accuse their adversaries of having, wrapped as either security or protecting children.

https://i.redd.it/ifb8agngc7dy.jpg

by jchook

3/22/2026 at 12:37:40 AM

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.

by jacquesm

3/22/2026 at 1:07:34 AM

It is all about advertising profits. See what I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471747

But what do we do about it? Look at social media comments on this topic. There’s huge support for these age verification laws. Parents chime in about how their kids were affected by social media and how badly this is needed, instead of taking responsibility for raising their kids properly. That article by the Pinterest CEO calling for these laws is naively seen as some sort of sacrifice of profits for the good of everyone’s kids. And no one talks about privacy or the effects on speech.

And all these well funded nonprofits pushing these dishonest bills onto legislators have time and resources. Feels like the privacy friendly people are losing the battle.

by SilverElfin

3/21/2026 at 9:15:33 PM

It was never about children...

by baal80spam

3/21/2026 at 11:47:46 PM

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

by 1vuio0pswjnm7

3/22/2026 at 12:00:59 AM

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.

by cdrnsf

3/21/2026 at 10:17:22 PM

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.

by Diffusion3166

3/21/2026 at 11:34:15 PM

> 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.

by tzs

3/22/2026 at 4:37:00 AM

Gullible to believe its about kids - especially when there's a million options to limit the internet on devices already.

IMAGINE A WAR.

Now - wouldn't a government LOVE to know who's saying what? Rather than shutting down the entire $$$$$ corporate internet.

Money concerns as usual.

by SarahC_

3/22/2026 at 6:37:14 AM

Unfortunately they won't be stopped, so we have to look for the solution ourselves:

- Linux distros without age verification (which excludes distros with systemd)

- decentralized/distributed microblogging: Nostr, Bluesky, Mastodon

- decentralized social news sites: Lemmy

- GrapheneOS

by gasull

3/22/2026 at 12:32:31 AM

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?

by braiamp

3/22/2026 at 1:06:11 AM

In this world where we are committed to not making laws affecting the freedom of an adult in any way, even to be forced to consent to things.

by gzread

3/22/2026 at 12:24:20 AM

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.

by 1970-01-01

3/22/2026 at 3:18:09 AM

This happening and it can’t be stopped. There is bipartisan consensus, so hard to come by otherwise, because both parties share the same corporate interests. Deal with it.

by mrcwinn

3/21/2026 at 10:58:01 PM

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?

by kgwxd

3/21/2026 at 9:27:52 PM

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...

by borissk

3/21/2026 at 11:08:18 PM

The more people that use something the more it inevitably trends toward average mediocrity.

A lot of these trajectories aren't really for us - the techy folk.

by abcde666777

3/21/2026 at 11:17:40 PM

Well age verification works so well to keep alcohol, tobacco and weed beyond the reach of minors so....

by Beestie

3/22/2026 at 12:55:07 AM

Here we see the danger of the lay perception that multi-media screens are the same as chemical drugs. They are not. Not even close.

by superkuh

3/22/2026 at 9:35:56 AM

I wonder if setting my OS age to let’s say 10 would protect me from ads…

by polyamid23

3/22/2026 at 2:47:50 AM

You all saw the Epstein scandal, right? If you saw one cockroach this randomly, then you know there are thousand hiding. Maybe that's why Epstein is un-lived.

So I found it very ionic that, to quote on quote "protect" child from online harms, they asks you to upload the photo ID of you and your child to, guess what, real potential pedophiles.

Of course they're going to claim your information is totally safe... just like Bill Gates told his wife it's safe to have sex with him after his STD infestation.

Sure, I don't really know how the companies will actually handle your personal photos, but there's a history where a tech CEO made an attractiveness comparison website using photo obtained from their user uploads without user agreeing. So go figure.

The best way to protect your child is to tech them how to use Internet for their own benefit, and only allow them to create accounts after they've learned how to use Internet correctly. The companies and governments will NEVER do that for you, they'll only steal and steal even more.

by nirui

3/22/2026 at 7:01:45 AM

> They come from recommendation systems, dark patterns, addictive metrics, and business models that reward amplification without responsibility.

That rings extremely true to me, the issue you run into is that liberals and conservatives don't believe the government has any role in the commercial relationship between adults. This means any limits you want to impose on the "free market" has to be directed at protecting children, since those are the only people you're allowed to protect.

We already have many laws to safeguard children, the problems being that children have been taught to self declare as adults, and parents can't stop that without some help from the technology.

by delusional

3/21/2026 at 11:27:05 PM

Just ban children from using the internet.

by ginko

3/22/2026 at 7:52:56 AM

They are doing crazy things to not do the one single thing that had to be done years ago - make Facebook, Instagram and Co. pay hard for the damage they brought on our kids and society. 90% of the crap our kids are exposed to comes from there. Not sure what's left to tackle, once you remove these websites from the picture - videogames? News??

Oh right, the kids...

by mk89

3/21/2026 at 11:19:38 PM

The moment "think of the children!" enters the chat is when suspicions should be heightened.

by pstuart

3/22/2026 at 10:37:32 AM

100% of the time they want to “protect children” it’s never about that, because if it were, they would do something also to feed them and prevent them from being shot by guns. If the same people pushing for age verifications for all children are not also pushing to feed all hungry children, then I simply do not trust them, at all.

by ModernMech

3/21/2026 at 10:37:44 PM

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

by dzogchen

3/21/2026 at 11:47:53 PM

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.

by tzs

3/22/2026 at 2:05:24 PM

It is just awful and the entire composition does not make sense. Why is there a globe in the sky? Why is the text ‘open access’ there which is a completely different topic?

No thought or skill went into that image besides the prompt that the author wrote in 10 seconds. It signals that the author probably didn’t put any effort in the article as well.

by dzogchen

3/21/2026 at 10:48:12 PM

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

by mamami

3/21/2026 at 10:45:42 PM

Too late

- Australia

by bfivyvysj

3/21/2026 at 10:19:40 PM

parents need to do their job and raise their children, and moderate their content.

by cat-turner

3/21/2026 at 11:07:00 PM

Because of course it's so easy. You obviously have never visited a site your parents would have disapproved of

by mamami

3/22/2026 at 7:21:59 AM

You should never have had sex if you wanted to avoid doing anything hard.

by Nasrudith

3/21/2026 at 10:27:57 PM

Whose great-grandparents are you going to blame?

by Ylpertnodi

3/22/2026 at 3:23:56 AM

ban porn altogether

by funnybookbinder

3/21/2026 at 11:02:31 PM

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.

by TomGarden

3/21/2026 at 10:17:39 PM

Arguments about erosion of privacy miss the point: that is exactly what they want.

by windowliker

3/21/2026 at 9:43:08 PM

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.

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.

by SilverElfin

3/22/2026 at 11:33:18 AM

Protesting only means something if you're taking on risks.

The same could be said about enterprise, investment, war, etc.

It's the people who won't take risks that schemers try to exclude.

This is the real reason why no one will ever remember your name kid.

by jart

3/22/2026 at 1:20:26 AM

[dead]

by WWilliam

3/22/2026 at 12:30:03 PM

[dead]

by LynettaPir2144

3/22/2026 at 10:17:30 AM

[dead]

by jaromilrojo

3/22/2026 at 12:11:16 AM

[dead]

by donpark

3/21/2026 at 9:47:03 PM

[flagged]

by holyhnhell

3/21/2026 at 9:49:31 PM

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

by amarant

3/22/2026 at 1:52:45 AM

Imagine if it was possible to ban people who spam instead of only being able to ban the IP of a spammer.

by charcircuit

3/22/2026 at 2:52:03 AM

So IAC is magically removing slop AND spam from the internet? It's still not clear how? Are we always broadcasting our government issued identity documents to every website we visit? I don't think that's gonna work out the way you think it's gonna work out

by amarant

3/22/2026 at 5:03:52 AM

No, but it means that you have the chance to moderate it since every user is tied to a real life person.

>Are we always broadcasting our government issued identity documents to every website we visit?

South Korea and China already have this where when registering an account you provide an id number.

by charcircuit

3/21/2026 at 10:05:24 PM

Lol no

by kogasa240p

3/21/2026 at 11:04:22 PM

If you think u can control a kids imagination to circumvent these controls then you are part of the problem

by psyclobe