81–90 of 794 posts
I'm always surprised how defensive people get in here about privacy when so many corporations have vastly more information about you than the government does.
The corporations aren't going to throw you in jail if you cross state lines to get an abortion. The US government is already doing this when they get that data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of us survived the internet when it was an even wilder west, IRC chats with strangers trying to learn perl, not putting your name and social security number into random websites. Being aware of predators. It's a very specific kind of power-hungry move fast and break things tech that refuses to accept responsibility of the fallout. Anonymity, the right to move privately and be private online is much bigger than…
It was a noncommercial wild west. You were up against some troll trying to get a reaction by linking you to goatse, not some trillion dollar international corporation with a literal army of addiction experts A/B testing how to maximize engagement.
HN has this guideline for comments: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says. If the same standard were applied for posts, this one would fail. I recognize that it is a popular perspective that these measures are essentially a war on anonymity, but that is not what they intend to fix, although it is quite possible that anonymity is a casualty of whatever war is at hand. I believ…
> the modern internet is a harmful experience for young minds Because of the goal of advertising revenue as the ultimate driver as to build an addictive permanent scroll of slop on tiktok or instagram, and the desire of social media companies to build walled gardens where someone's entire online experience stays in their "app.". As you say, this affects young and old alike.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worth noting that there's no security in a system that abusively collects your data. That goes for children as well.
Or guarantee that even if you provide such data to a nice, friendly, democratically run and ethically managed administration, that some future regime change to a completely different group of people won't result in catastrophic misuse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note how they always ignore parental controls, and skip straight to deanonymize everyone.
Tech people keep ignoring the fact that many people a) find the parental controls too hard to use and b) have no confidence that their kids won't find a way to circumvent them. If parents felt in control of technology they wouldn't be calling on governments to regulate it in the first place. I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups…
You may not be aware of this, but Meta has been actively spending millions of dollars to redirect the rage against their algorithms and addictive harms, especially against children, and one of their strategies to try and help avoid liability is to put the onus on the federal government to pass ID legislation, to literally make it easier for Meta and similar companies to age gate most content under simple blanket policies. The way that they are doing this is by funding otherwise very small "parents rights organizations" with money and connections they otherwise wouldn't have. What does Meta gain from this? Less liability and lower cost in content moderation. What do the parents rights groups get? "Check ID laws".
That's enough motivation for both groups, it's very simple.
Now where do you get into "conspiracy theory" territory? Well thetr are also other groups that want online ID for their own purposes, and they are more than happy to help fund these groups to get something they also want.
All of this is very easy to provide backing links for with a simple Google search, if you're interested.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tech people keep ignoring the fact that many people a) find the parental controls too hard to use and b) have no confidence that their kids won't find a way to circumvent them. If parents felt in control of technology they wouldn't be calling on governments to regulate it in the first place. I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups…
Parents can stop giving kids smartphones.
HN has this guideline for comments: > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says. If the same standard were applied for posts, this one would fail. I recognize that it is a popular perspective that these measures are essentially a war on anonymity, but that is not what they intend to fix, although it is quite possible that anonymity is a casualty of whatever war is at hand. I believ…
I disagree with you. Plans to eliminate anonymity have been discussed for years in elite circles, at Davos and similar events, and it’s most often framed in the context of social control (eliminating dissent or foreign influence). Larry Ellison on surveillance: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” This is not new and it’s not about kid…
It is more expensive today to maintain your privacy and anonymity than it is to surveil you. The collective surveillance grid makes it possible to track people's movements, whereabouts, their predilections, political views, personal images and more for a few cents every day. It's a bargain.
And in this new world, the eye watches everyone, all the time, forever. Most people, including people on HN, are still stuck in a human-first world. The new surveillance state isn't going to be thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.
And they will be used to watch you. Especially if you're attractive. Or, valuable. Or, blackmail-able. After all, NSA employees routinely abuse multi-billion dollar surveillance assets to stalk women. It's so common that the NSA calls it LOVEINT.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
In the world to come, people are going to wish they were being surveilled by the NSA. Because at least the NSA punishes these people. Occasionally.
When this kind of technology becomes this cheap and this pervasive, then the end of anonymity means unaccountable sheriff deputies stalking their former spouse and family. Or, prospective romantic interests.
https://www.firstalert4.com/2026/08/03/brentwood-officer-acc...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/cops-using-license-pl...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/rogue-officers-turned...
https://www.newsweek.com/flock-camera-police-arrests-1226378...
https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-rea...
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/26/us/flock-cameras-surveill...
With this new oracle, these people will be able to set up alerts for when their spouse is thinking of leaving them. To catch their child accessing support for abuse or something more ephemeral like being an atheist, having different political views or LGBT+.
Anyone who doesn't see the forest for the trees, or who embraces this because "parental controls are too hard to use" will doom themselves and future generations to a world that's materially worse than our hyper-surveilled present.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but at this rate I'm going to miss the days when it was just the NSA reading my emails (and they still do! Howdy!). I know the track record. But at least the NSA has some sense of institutional responsibility and control. Most institutions in your life, including your HOA don't.
https://ktvz.com/cnn-regional/2021/07/22/arnold-residents-ce...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a feeling we had a similar experience growing up. I generally agree, but also, we got QAnon/Alex Jones and such which have quite directly screwed up my country. So I don’t know, my opinion is often contradictory and fluid. I don’t know where I stand anymore. I believe in an “open internet,” but also, there’s people like Andrew Tate who have ruined the minds of people I care about. We can debate if these system…
One personal observation, the early commercial internet as it was transitioning from universities/research labs/certain high-tech firms into a mass market thing with millions of users, it had its share of nutjobs and crazy as well. But it was boutique, hand crafted , personal level crazy and it was for the most part disregarded because none of the whackjobs could collect a sufficient following or megaphone to spread…
There was a BBS in my area that ran on a small bank of 14.4 USR modems that had a gold mine of content like that. It was such a fun time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tech people keep ignoring the fact that many people a) find the parental controls too hard to use and b) have no confidence that their kids won't find a way to circumvent them. If parents felt in control of technology they wouldn't be calling on governments to regulate it in the first place. I know a lot of tech people like to assume that government wants to control everything and these parents are fake front groups…
Plenty of us survived the internet when it was an even wilder west, IRC chats with strangers trying to learn perl, not putting your name and social security number into random websites. Being aware of predators. It's a very specific kind of power-hungry move fast and break things tech that refuses to accept responsibility of the fallout. Anonymity, the right to move privately and be private online is much bigger than…