Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control • Hacker News Board

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#261

Post by chinabot » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 1:57 AM UTC

simonask wrote: post #242

signalfour wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

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.

Respectfully, not everyone shares this view.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#262

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 1:58 AM UTC

tqi wrote: post #17

bilekas wrote: post #9

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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#263

Post by nandomrumber » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 1:59 AM UTC

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #142

closeparen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 gov…

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

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#264

Post by abcde666777 » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 2:00 AM UTC

poly2it wrote: post #155

abcde666777 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#265

Post by mindslight » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 2:01 AM UTC

NeutralCrane wrote: post #96

bilekas wrote: post #9

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.

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 oth…

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.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#266

Post by j16sdiz » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 2:02 AM UTC

novok wrote: post #202

simonask wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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, app…

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.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#267

Post by drdeca » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 2:08 AM UTC

gzread wrote: post #210

scotty79 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#268

Post by kdheiwns » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 2:09 AM UTC

simonask wrote: post #136

yalogin wrote: post #102

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 wi…

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…

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.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#269

Post by totetsu » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 2:09 AM UTC

yalogin wrote: post #102

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 wi…

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”.

Re: Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control

#270

Post by mindslight » Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 2:10 AM UTC

txrx0000 wrote: post #191

tzs wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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. e…

> 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.