It's just terrifying to think of an internet that goes from open & usable, to requiring only approved government devices & systems. Within a very brief time.
It would prove that many, many parents are incapable of being the responsible adults they should be and will just cave to their kids tantrums about their phone being unlocked so they can watch tiktoks for (sometimes more than) 8 hours a day.
Everyone in the UK is now using a vpn for everything because of these "won't somebody please think of the children" smucks. Now let's see if they make good on their end and lock their child's phone...
And when they are mandated, like in Brazil, we HN commenters hate that even more, because apparently in Brazil it's illegal to sell a phone without locked bootloader, or an OS that can run software from outside of an app store, because the user might install an OS or an app that doesn't comply with the child-lock law.
I don't think anybody is actually opposed to parental controls being mandated to ship in commercial operating systems, as long as it doesn't restrict the freedoms of adults to completely disable them or to install software that removes them or doesn't have them. The problem is when these features are forced on adults and restrict devices or computers 'just in case'.
Firstly traffic can be tagged by ISPs/cell phone companies, at the bill payer's behest (whose name and age has already been verified). Secondly, smartphone OSes can tag traffic at the behest of parental controls (which already exist).
Anything that hurts Meta's business is arguably a potential step toward more "anonymous" internet access. Anything that helps to stop the process of indoctrination of future generations into and the normalisation of what Meta does is a step toward more anonymous internet access as it allows expectations of privacy to rise to previous levels
Companies like Meta have worked to systematically destroy anonymous internet use. Anonymity directly conflicts with Meta's "business model" of data collection, surveillance and serving users up as ad targets
Meta and "anonymous internet access" are mutually exclusive. Meta doesn't collect data about and show ads to "anonymous" internet users. It forces users to create "accounts" and "sign in" with clients that run surveillance-related code on the users' computers without the user's input. It builds profiles of internet users (ad targets), even ones that do not use Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, e.g., through the use of tracking pixels on the open web
Apple's and Google's operating systems also try to profile users. The companies encourage users to create "accounts" and "sign in". The operating systems intentionally provide a purpose-built machanism to target users with ads. If used as encouraged by the compaanies, these operating systems are incompatible with "anonymous internet access". The user is not anonymous to the companies, and the companies invite advertisers to use the computer user's internet bandwidth to deliver ads
It was not always like this; I owned Apple computers when there was no such thing as an Apple "account" and Apple's computers did not attempt to automatically "phone home" when powered on. Expectations of "anonymous" internet access amongst new internet users have greatly diminished thanks to Meta, Google and Apple
1 - https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
This isn't the first time overprotective parents have caused problems for everyone else. The US drug war (and the mass incarceration of poor and black people) was started mostly by organizations of parents who thought marijuana was going to kill their kids. The movie rating system introduced censorship into movies which limited artistic freedom. Game rating systems limited what games could be sold on store shelves, so most games had to be carefully censored and had limited story lines and content. Ratings on music forced major retailers to drop any music which had an 'explicit' label, making it harder for artists with 'adult' lyrics to get exposure or earn a living. Book bans are largely organized by parents' groups, a significant number of the books they want banned being LGBTQ+ books, so kids aren't exposed to the fact that homosexuality is normal. And of course you can't possibly have an app in a monopolistic App Store that has any kind of adult content; heaven forbid an actual adult wants to use an adult app.
Parents and 'Child Safety' are toxic af and we shouldn't put up with it.
It will not save any children. It will destroy privacy, destroy free speech, and give lots of money to whatever corporation wins the bid for supplying the tech.
And of course, when that corporation gets hacked and all the personally identifiable information is put on the dark web, nobody will be held accountable.
So he can either go down with the ship or bend with the wind. And Zuckerberg always knows how the wind blows.
I doubt that, but with people using Cell Phone Apps and sites like Facebook/Twitter, people are giving up their anonymity on purpose. You can still be anonymous if you want to.
And as for verification at the OS level, good luck with that.
Maybe this is why we need protocols over platforms? But like, kids shouldn’t be able to sign a ToS until they’re 18.
I have little sympathy for anything that limits people’s access to these biggest platforms. I’m also largely cynical to the idea that anyone’s doing any free speeching on meta or Twitter in the first place. If counter culture gets driven back to IRC, or gasp meatspace, then all the better.
To you and I it's made to appear that these things happen without warning. I assure you that's not at all how these things actually occur. If this truly caught out Meta by surprise then they should fire their CEO for general incompetence.
Nor is "passing the buck" a fair characterization of the article author's criticism; he clearly does not think that Apple or Meta should be in the business of age verification.
Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing
Jan 10, 2012
https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
The article does reflect the issue at the time (the media mafia's boogeyman "piracy") and the thought that to prevent piracy, users must be restricted from access to "general purpose computers".
There were not apps that all of your friends in school used, and if you didn't use them you wouldn't be cool, but also the apps would push you or cause you to unwittingly share photos publicly while publishing your photos/videos globally to adults who for some reason use their app longer when they look at videos of kids.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding how things work here, I don't use Facebook or Instagram. I've never even seen Tiktok. I've never used LinkedIn. But when I read these stories about what is going on with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta it sounds like they were doing a lot of things they shouldn't be doing in a commercial context, period. If you aren't 18 you should still be able to talk to your friends without being spied on, but you sure as hell shouldn't be getting connected to random people adult or otherwise from all over the world because it's increasing the usage time of those adults on some app.
I think protocols are the way to go and will be what dominate in the post-AI era. Fuck the ads, the constantly changing UIs, the bait and switch, and now just add photo verification to the list. No thanks.
Some families did not. Mine did not! But that was a decision that was up to individual families.
I don’t see why these decisions should be up to anyone but individual families. Period. If your kids are mature enough for unsupervised computer use, or if you don’t see it as a problem, that’s up to you as a parent. Same as if you feel comfortable taking your kids skeet shooting or rock climbing.
I can't speak for other parents, but some standards for parental controls—the presence of which and adherence to might be enforced by law, if need be, and need probably would be since none of this is stuff vendors couldn't have figured out on their own long ago if they cared to—we could leverage would be goddamn nice and is all I'd really want.
Especially as devices get more locked-down and it becomes hard to control stuff at the network level if you don't have root on the devices themselves, like... man, it's such a time-suck, and I'm 100% sure I'd be having to choose between "I guess we just don't have the Internet in this house" and "fuck it, I give up, go stumble on gore videos I guess" if I weren't a lot better at this stuff than the median parent. I feel for them, this stuff is entirely hopeless for 'em.
Like, my kids have Chromebooks from school. They pretty much have to bring them home. So now I have this extra physical item I can't administrate that I must police at night if I don't want them to stay up all night on trash-tier web games or something. So I'll block the devices at the network level at night, right? Easy fix! Nope, the fucking things rotate MAC addresses as an anti-tracking measure I guess. We have zero need for that feature (the number of times they're gonna use the things outside school and home over their whole school careers is going to be very small) but I'm not admin on those devices, so, stuck with it. So there's an extra hurdle to making that happen.
Repeat some other incredible frustration for every single thing. Oh look, AppleTV has a simple rating interface so I can at least make sure nothing too bad can get through if I mess something up. Great. Oh except almost nothing on the device except Apple's own software respects the setting, at all, just ignores it. You have to go dick around with every single service on there to lock them down, then hope it sticks through updates and other nonsense. Awesome, great feature that's actually totally useless because nobody cares about the users. Sigh.
Your options are go full-luddite, give up and leave them to the Internet gods, or take on this load of work and stress that our parents did not have.
Skeet shooting isn’t in every pocket, school, library, Best Buy kiosk. Etc. Maybe if the phones were open source and I truly had the capability to control access this would make sense but the currently available tools are obviously toothless in a way meant to ensure that your u feel like your in control.
I’m not really scared about what my kids might do or see. If the internet was still countercultural and not everything was fucking force fed to you by gigantic billionaire mega corps it would be fine. But there should be some friction.
The failings of individual families have far reaching consequences beyond their own homes, especially in non collectivist societies that mostly put themselves above all others.
I thought youtube kids was sketchy as hell until I discovered the current state of “educational” online games.
Previously, your local dirty movie theater might ask for ID before selling you tickets to Debbie Does Dallas and they might even keep a copy on file for later reference. Assuming that the underpaid usher didn't just glance at the DOB, that copy likely goes into a filing cabinet in the back of the building. That's not necessarily safe, but the opportunity for that being stolen and sold is minuscule compared to today. Even if it were on a computer database somewhere, the internet of 30-40 years ago, inasmuch as it existed, was not the behemoth that it is today.
Maybe we should just end advertising targeting anyone under 18. I wonder if by removing the financial incentive the problem would mostly sort itself out.
I'm not sure it's a total solution but it'd likely help, and there are plenty of other reasons to do it.
1.) Because it always seems to have an outsized impact on adults. Then the predators get away with it because the platforms DGAF (for example, Discord has had a MASSIVE problem with illegality for YEARS, with boatloads of reports and evidence that was blatantly ignored, and yet NOW they need your ID?) And any gate design that COULD work without PII won't be implemented because data is too juicy.
> Maybe this is why we need protocols over platforms?
> If counter culture gets driven back to IRC, or gasp meatspace, then all the better.
2.) Yes on both counts. But protocols need to be decentralized, massively scalable, available across every platform including phones, and normie-grade easy-to-use (not everybody, and it's getting better now, but lots of devs tend to give up here, like it's a binary choice between a lobotomized barely-functioning bloated Fisher-Price app and a fully-functioning lean app with awful UI. Shockingly difficult, as I discovered trying to program, but both possible and necessary.) But as for meatspace...
> we went from a world where most everything was intermediated by parents
3.) If anything, the world is intermediated by parents like never before.[1] Not everywhere, not everybody, but enough freedom of movement and gathering has been lost by children and teens that it is killing meatspace. This CANNOT be ignored if you want to address online problems. The internet, awful as it can be, is the only "free" place left to roam for many.
I remember when I was younger there was consternation about people believing AOL was the internet. Now we’ve basically all settled into the walled garden.
I really don’t know that there’s any more baby to throw out with the bath water.
The thing is, any speech controls imposed on Facebook and Twitter will probably be imposed on all services - including IRC.
And while Facebook and Twitter are capable of compliance and have bottomless pockets to implement it, IRC isn't and doesn't.
You’re basically saying that non-collectivist societies should become collectivist. No thanks!
Here’s the story of the acquisition that killed the company:
https://www.filfre.net/2025/04/the-end-of-sierra-as-we-knew-...
That site probably has the story of the educational software consolidation somewhere.
The thing that is a problem for the author is age verification on devices.
Facebook supposedly does not allow users under 13, but does nothing to enforce that rule. Instead of coming up with a way to enforce their own rule, Zuckerberg comes up with the idea of apple and google doing it for them because "they are in a better position".
That is Zuckerbergs idea. That's the idea the author objects with, but instead of putting the blame on Meta for trying to pass of enforcement of their own rules to the devices. The author inexplicably puts the blame on the plaintiff for merely starting the conversation.
Whether the plaintiff is wrong or right is not important. The issue is that when meta was told you should really enforce your own rules they said actually we would rather apple and google were forced to do it.
It's about externalities meta is trying to move the cost of age verification to Apple and Google to the detriment of everyones privacy, and the author is for some reason upset with some 20 year old girl for rocking the boat, instead of the trillion dollar company that does want to enforce their own terms of use.
* CPS gets called?
* cops harass them again?
* the malls and many other places kick them out
* (at least for most of the USA) zoning laws and public transit issues are all fixed?
You cannot let individual families, even individual kids/teens, shoulder this burden alone. If your local malls, cops, and nosy neighbors have already clearly shown that they DO NOT want free-range kids in practice, would you risk the breakup of your family and bankruptcy from legal fees alone? (Assuming there's no community support, because a functional community wouldn't have this problem.) Kudos if so, but most people won't risk it if the chance of success is too low.
Curiously, people doxx themselves. That is like the entire business model of plaintir, collect all the information people volunteer about themselves and others publicly, for free, to anyone that cares to look.
We seem to be at the bit where people liked having their cake and eating it too, until they had to pay for it. This is the part where the bill comes due.
And that is fucking _nothing_ compared to the massive, eye-watering amount of information people fucking pay to give away to an LLM company. sama must laugh himself to sleep every night.
There are plenty of reasons to be anonymous online. There's plenty of reasons not to be. I kind of wish that the government would launch a series of public political debate forums that required real ID, not that I think they would actually be valuable places for debate, but the technical challenges would be worthwhile to solve and the ability to publicly register debate positions would be incredibly useful for nailing politicians down.
The problem comes when the government tries to regulate one form or another, because strongly authenticated, pseudonymous, and anonymous forums all have their place in debate, and there's reasons for both public and private entities to host all three.
You’re aware and made a choice, that’s good. Most people are not aware and have not elected to make this choice. This is a heavily-conversed topic on this and many other sites.
I’m also surprised that “family monitoring” stalkerware companies like Life360 haven’t expanded into this market.
That'd probably be enough (plus something for school devices in particular to let parents set stricter settings during non-school hours, without having full admin rights on the devices) to do a ton of good, but it's not a startup, it's a protocol and maybe a law.
The startup version would probably try to capture that as some kind of one-stop-shop web portal.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, just decent.
It's so huge that it has been built into every operating system for years
Requires parents to be invested and unlike the OP (appreciate you btw) many parents are not.
No money/use in it unless people actually care enough to invest personal effort into it (which they don't, hence forcing solutions that fuck everybody over, like UK requiring id for adult websites).
Doesn't matter what you do as a parent so long as kids are allowed smartphones at school.
You can set up perfect filtering for your own kids, but that won't help when some other kid brings in a device loaded up with the most shocking content they could find on some unfiltered home connection.