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| ▲ | lII1lIlI11ll 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > This is not "offloading parenting of your child to the government" it is acknowledging that a certain action can be far easier to take (getting a child off social media) if the government puts in laws to support those actions. Compromising my privacy in order to allow you to omit having some tough but needed conversations with your child (i.e. _parenting_) regarding harms of social media is not a sacrifice I'm willing to make. Homer Simpson was supposed to be a parody on a bad father, not a role model with his "You're the government's problem now!". > Are laws against violence a way of off-loading physical protection to the government? Of course they are! I support government protecting me from violence in some capacity, although I don't support "chat control"-like laws since the cost/benefit doesn't seem to be favorable. | | |
| ▲ | 5upplied_demand 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > to allow you to omit having some tough but needed conversations with your child regarding harms of social media As any parent knows, if you tell your kids that something is harmful, they will stop immediately. No questions asked. I've never met a child who did something their parents told them not to do, have you? > I support government protecting me from violence in some capacity So, you do like big government telling people what they can and can't do, as long as you feel it directly helps you. That said, laws against violence don't protect you from violence, the laws kick in after the fact. > I don't support "chat control"-like laws since the cost/benefit doesn't seem to be favorable. Possibly because you don't have kids and thus maybe not a full understanding of the cost/benefit? Perhaps, instead of lecturing actual parents about what parenting is like, you could ask questions about the cost/benefit you claim to be interested in. | | |
| ▲ | lII1lIlI11ll 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > As any parent knows, if you tell your kids that something is harmful, they will stop immediately. No questions asked. I've never met a child who did something their parents told them not to do, have you? You can configure parental controls or take away the phone. > So, you do like big government telling people what they can and can't do, as long as you feel it directly helps you. Yes, of course! > That said, laws against violence don't protect you from violence, the laws kick in after the fact. They protect me by discouraging other people from committing violence on me, obviously. > Possibly because you don't have kids and thus maybe not a full understanding of the cost/benefit? Perhaps, instead of lecturing actual parents about what parenting is like, you could ask questions about the cost/benefit you claim to be interested in. Cost/benefit for me, not for Homer Simpson-esque dads. You already took responsibility on yourself by becoming a parent, now please do the hard part (the parenting). | | |
| ▲ | 5upplied_demand 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > You can configure parental controls or take away the phone. Your first suggestion was silly, so now you have pivoted to telling me another way to parent. All the while have zero experience of your own. Did you know that social media is accessible on devices other than personal phones? Kids use computers and tablets at school (as early as 1st grade) with access to the internet. > Yes, of course! Which is my entire point. Parents, on the other hand, have to worry about people other than themselves. > They protect me by discouraging other people from committing violence on me, obviously. Now you are outsourcing your personal protection to the government. I have to pay extra because you can't defend yourself. You took on the responsibility of protecting yourself by being born. > Cost/benefit for me We get it, you don't care about anyone else. Things that help you are good, things that inconvenience you are a product of other people's errors. Nothing more really needs to be said. |
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| ▲ | johnisgood a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean, it does invite the Government to your household, just like marriage (which is a legal contract) invites the Government into your bedroom. I oppose both. Parents are supposed to be parenting, without the help of the Government. You do not want your kid to spend their time on Facebook or Instagram? Do something about it yourself, as a parent. I understand that tech-illiterate people may be at a disadvantage here, but we are on HN and I am pretty sure we are able to: Set up a Raspberry Pi (or any other SBC, or even an old x86 box) running Pi-hole with custom blocklists, configure DNS-level filtering with time-based access rules, or implement iptables/nftables rules on your router to enforce schedules. You can use hostapd with separate SSIDs for children with different firewall rules, set up a transparent proxy with squid + SquidGuard for content filtering and time restrictions, or configure your router's DHCP to assign specific DNS servers per MAC address with dnsmasq managing time windows. If you want more granular control, there's pfSense or OPNsense with packages like pfBlockerNG-devel for domain blocking and traffic shaping, or you could write a simple cron job that modifies your firewall rules based on time of day. These are all straightforward solutions that don't require government-mandated age verification systems with their inevitable privacy nightmares and implementation overreach. The technical capability exists; the question is whether parents are willing to invest a few hours to implement it rather than demanding legislation to do their job for them. | | |
| ▲ | 5upplied_demand a day ago | parent [-] | | > Parents are supposed to be parenting, without the help of the Government. Why wouldn't we want the government to support parenting in similar ways the Government support's retirement, personal security, entrepreneurship, education, health, and other societally important activities? > These are all straightforward solutions that don't require government-mandated age verification systems with their inevitable privacy nightmares and implementation overreach. Yes, they are. They all also stop being effective as soon as a child is outside of your wifi network, which was my entire point. > whether parents are willing to invest a few hours to implement it rather than demanding legislation to do their job for them. Framing it this way doesn't really help your point. It proves that you don't understand what parents are actually dealing with. It is the same response that people on HN have when a non-developer writes a technical article in NYT. | | |
| ▲ | johnisgood 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | This issue affects the privacy of all individuals, not just a narrow subset of users. Mandatory identification and age-verification requirements are against privacy, justified under the familiar refrain of "think of the children". The critical question is how far society is willing to go in accepting pervasive surveillance and data collection under this rationale. Not long ago, we expressed concern and even disdain toward such practices when observing them in countries like China. Today, however, the gap between those systems and our own is narrowing to an uncomfortable degree. FWIW there are technically sound, privacy-preserving solutions to achieve this goal. Zero-knowledge proofs, for example, can verify eligibility or age without disclosing identity or personal data. These solutions are well understood and feasible. Yet they are consistently excluded from policy discussions and implementations. This omission suggests that the underlying objective is not genuine child protection, nor meaningful respect for individual privacy, but rather increased control and data accumulation. > They all also stop being effective as soon as a child is outside of your wifi network, which was my entire point. True, these solutions do not work outside your Wi-Fi, but the point is that government-mandated age verification compromises privacy for limited benefit. I believe parental guidance (and the guidance of their teachers, ideally) and household controls are more effective. In any case, the broader point is that there is no technical silver bullet. Parents will always need to combine education, guidance, and trust-building with any tools, rather than relying on government mandates that compromise privacy. |
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