TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe

Perhaps what we're really saying is "Ban age verification that collects lots of personal information".

Or perhaps we could distil it down further to "Ban unnecessary collection and storage of PII". In which case, Congrats! You've arrived back at the GDPR :)

Which I think is a good thing, and should be strengthened further.

(Also the other response to "because most implementations are not going to be like that" is "why not?". People are already building such ecosystems.)

1. You end up being the bad guy, other parents don't restrict their kids internet usage etc. Some folks would argue to just not set up restrictions and trust them. But it's a slippery slope and puts kids in a weird position. They start out with innocent YouTube videos, but pretty quickly a web search or even a comment can lead them to strange places. They want to play games online, but then creeps abuse that all the time. Even if you trust them to not do anything "wrong", it's a lot to put on their shoulders.

2. If you want to put restrictions in place, even if you're an expert, the tools out there are pretty wonky. You can set up a child protection DNS, but most home routers don't make it easy (or even allow you) to set a different DNS server. And that's not particularly hard to circumvent. I suppose a proxy would be a more solid solution, but setting that up would be major yak shaving. Any "family safety" features (especially those from Microsoft) are ridiculously complicated and often quite buggy. Right now, I got the problem on my plate that I need to migrate one of my kid's accounts from a local Windows account to a Microsoft account (without them loosing all their stuff), because for local accounts, it seems the button to add the device is just missing? Naturally, the docs don't mention that, I had to do research to arrive at that hypothesis. The amount of yak shaving, setup and configuration you have to do for a reasonable setup is just nuts.

3. If you're not good with tech - I don't see how you have _any_ chance in hell to set up meaningful restrictions.

Some countries are banning social media - sure, that's one thing. But there's a _lot_ of weird places on the internet, kids will find something else. I for one would appreciate dedicated devices or modes for kids < 18. Would solve all this stuff in a heartbeat.

Are you saying that kids now buy their phones with pocket money without their parents knowing?

> It's obvious we're moving in a direction where we are going to get these restrictions in one way or another

It’s not obvious, it’s just sad. I still hope reason will prevail in this.

Yup, but the tools provided make that easy or hard.

But putting that emotive bit to one side, Megacorps have a vested interest in not being responsible to children. They need children's eye balls to drive advertising revenue. If that means sending them corrosive shit, then so be it.

Its a bigger issue than encryption, its editorial choice.

For some companies (eg facebook, google, tiktok) i would be mostly worried about the company itself being untrustworthy. For others I would be mostly worried about the company being vulnerable.