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Yet platforms should be accountable for the harms they create (in some way it has to be regulated)
Harms to adults. No children should be on the platforms, and it's up to the parents to regulate it.
Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools
231–240 of 386 posts
Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are obviously not a parent. I lock down devices, lock down my network, then the public school gives my kid a laptop with access to nearly everything I’ve tried to filter. Even if I can successfully monitor it at home, the device is in their possession and out of my control as a parent for 6-8 hours a day. The government is literally bypassing our family rules and my ability to protect my children in the way I see…
If your kids are accessing things they know they shouldn’t, and you know they’re doing it anyway, is that it? We’re at an impasse? I really don’t want to tell anyone how to parent, but I’ll say that if I did what you described I would have been punished and/or grounded, because I knew the rules, and I knew I was breaking them.
What you're describing, combined with the sort of state provided access being described, seems like it would incentivize the child learning how to lie and hide things more effectively. It's absurd that the school would facilitate such broad and directionless access to the internet outside of the parent's supervision. It's directly undermining them.
Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parents have the tools already here in the UK. ISPs come with adult content disabled by default and someone has to opt in to it. Every major OS (Windows, Mac, iOS, android) ships with device level parental controls. Games consoles enforce these based on birth date. ISPs here also provide free network level filtering on top of that. All of this only matters if the parents don’t bypass them when asked. If a kid is dete…
> Every major OS (Windows, Mac, iOS, android) ships with device level parental controls. Games consoles enforce these based on birth date. These are unfortunately rather half-baked and should be improved. Which is exactly what could be mandated instead of invading everyone's privacy.
Honestly though - they’re enough to “protect the kids”. Any kid that’s smart enough to get around them is going to be snart enough to get around a VPN ban.
You are right though - the fact that those controls exist and are in place and the UK government isn’t enforcing that Apple Microsoft and Google provide better tools (which would actually achieve the aim) tells you that what they actually want is what they’re asking for - a VPN backdoor.
Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are obviously not a parent. I lock down devices, lock down my network, then the public school gives my kid a laptop with access to nearly everything I’ve tried to filter. Even if I can successfully monitor it at home, the device is in their possession and out of my control as a parent for 6-8 hours a day. The government is literally bypassing our family rules and my ability to protect my children in the way I see…
are the school laptops locked down at all? work laptops are locked down at most corporations and that’s for adults!
They are but middle school and high school kids are more creative, have less to lose, and have no concept of long term consequences compared to employees. School district IT is no match for kids with unlimited time, creativity, and access. Bypasses spread faster than memes. AI chatbots are blocked, one of my son’s friends ran a local proxy to his unblocked domain and other kids get local network access to AI. Installers blocked? Get a hacked game loader that looks like an approved binary.
You have a class with 30 kids with gaming (or social media or or porn) devices and a teacher whose just as internet addicted behind their own computer at the front expecting the kids to work on their own through the lesson while they do who knows what.
How much YouTube do you think you can you watch in a a high school PE class? About 50 minutes at today’s public schools. The teacher doesn’t care, the principal doesn’t care, the superintendent doesn’t care, and the school board doesn’t care. As long as the PE teacher’s baseball team does well, who cares, right? (Hi Scottsdale Unified School District! I’m talking about you!)
Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would hardly define allowing your child access to the internet as neglect. Like anything else, like crossing the street for example, there are dangers that can be mitigated against by education by parents and schools. The government is vastly overreaching in this and quite frankly if one argues that this is a good thing, then where to draw the line? Will we want to see government legislation for every possible perm…
Imagine having unrestricted access to meth. For the vast majority of the population, they’d continue to be productive members of society. For some, limited use might help them function better. But for a few, it would completely decimate their lives and impact the lives of many around them. They have absolutely no ability to manage their use, and oh, yeah, they’re also children. Some will experience a significant down…
Worth pointing out that there are people (such as myself) opposed to the current drug regulations who will be put off by your meth example. The key detail is the part where it's being provided to children - in this case with the help of the school!
People will debate all day what should and shouldn't be regulated for adults but it seems the vast majority agree on shielding children from having potentially harmful things actively pushed onto them by strangers.
Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
The part I don’t totally understand with the age verification laws is that as I understand it, the websites need to implement the age verification. It seems like the bad actors just won’t do that, and we could’ve made compliance easier for the good actors by just requiring something like the Restricted to Adults label as a meta tag. https://www.rtalabel.org/
Exactly. We need a standardized method for meta tags that accommodates arbitrary user (or rather service operator) defined categories. We also need a broad push to force all websites to adopt said tags so that parental controls can work effectively. Government enforcement of particular categories is one option there (but not the only one, browsers could just start refusing to load any site that doesn't send the tag).
I think you'll find that trying to neatly bin the internet into neatly defined categories is something of a fool's errand. I guess the canonical example is centuries old fine art that shows a bit of nipple.
what about whitelists? this never comes up anymore. I can load profiles from the 'child safety council' if that's what I want, and should expect to cover some of the overhead in evaluating all the submitted links. particularly in an educational setting, part of the problem is kids playing games and hanging out on social instead of working.
it seems a lot more tractable than trying to classify everything and get everyone to play along. let 1000 different filters bloom.
what's fundamentally wrong with that approach?
Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools
#2371984 was meant to be a warning, not the UK’s digital infrastructure roadmap
Reality has become indistinguishable from satire.
Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your kids are accessing things they know they shouldn’t, and you know they’re doing it anyway, is that it? We’re at an impasse? I really don’t want to tell anyone how to parent, but I’ll say that if I did what you described I would have been punished and/or grounded, because I knew the rules, and I knew I was breaking them.
Unfortunately, that’s not how addiction works. It’s hard to punish addiction out of anyone. Different kids have different nature and nurture, and for some kids, consequences don’t matter. I would have judged parent’s in this situation before becoming one. It’s humbling and builds empathy. What do you do when punishment doesn’t work? When therapy doesn’t work? When strict control doesn’t work? When there is no remorse…
ok, probably age verification and strict access control from the state solve your problem.. for some time.
But what will you do when this one will grow? There will be no restrictions - not from you, not from the state. Does restriction really solved the root problem?
Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm against any kind of age verification legislation, but this is a really bad argument. It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly." In theory, one could implement age verification by negligent parent imprisonment, in practice, I don't think that would work, and definitely not in all cases. If we accept the premise that children having unfettered access to the int…
These systems won’t work any better than identification requirements for alcohol and tobacco or anything else. Maybe you didn’t know anyone who drank or smoked when you were a teenager but they are pretty widespread even when parents aren’t negligent. Systems like the proposed ones will be even easier for kids to find a way around. I’m somewhat in favour of these foolish attempts at control because they always drive…
I agree that the recent craze about internet ID checks are foolish but your example falls on its face. ID checks to purchase goods at a physical location are actually quite effective. They don't achieve perfect compliance but that's not a fatal flaw (or even necessarily any flaw at all despite what people might say).
Re: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Mozilla have picked a battle that will kill off Firefox, I am now not longer interested in recommending or using it Presumably your support is for a browser developed by Google instead, as they are clearly not interested in surveillance or being in your children’s life?
Firefox forks are available, and will probably last long than Mozilla.
And exist because of the amount of work Mozilla does in keeping the browser up to date.