Apologies if this isn’t the right place to ask this, but I thought actual developers with a deep understanding of how technology actually works would be the people to ask!
If you were tasked with setting up a safe and secure way to do this, how would you do it differently than what the UK government is proposing? How could it be done such that I wouldn’t have to worry about my privacy and the threat of government suppression? Is it even theoretically possible to accomplish such a task at such a scale?
Cheers!
EDIT: Just to be clear: I’m not in favour of age verification laws. But they’re on their way regardless. My question is purely about the implementation and technology of the thing, rather than the ethics or efficacy of it. Can this seemingly-inevitable privacy hellscape be done in a non-hellscapish way?
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That’d only work if legal sex acts were the worst thing a kid could find online. As someone who went spelunking online as a kid. I assure you theyre not.
And the Roblox issue is hardly that of exposure to normal human biology.
That said this stuff should be up to parents, and instead of verification requirements, we should have parental control requirements (as in, the tools for it should exist).
On a lot of devices, I couldn’t make them safe to hand to a kid without coding the tools myself.
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Parental control software existing is a terrible idea?
There is insufficient incentive for games like Roblox to provide effective controls for parents to manage their childrens accounts.
That should change.
I was raised by loving and trustworthy parents. It didn’t save me from curiosity leading me to things I was far, far too young to see. No amount of love and care can fix that.
No. You let them learn to swim in he shallows to prepare them. Blind trust is like throwing them into the deep end and seeing if they figure it out before drowning.
Having a supportive, loving and trustworthy environmnet didn’t stop me from wanting to kill myself.
I figured out how to swim, eventually. But I should not have had to.
Are you seriusly suggesting that nothing bad will happen to children as long as their parents just care enough?
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Only if you never lift the restrictions, and coddle instead of raise them.
A parent buying their kid their first beer is a show of trust, and confidence in having prepared them. That they weren’t allowed before isn’t some paranoia about turning them into an alcoholist. It’s about preparation and maturity.
It is a display that shows that the parent feels their child is ready and responsible enough for the ability to decide themselves to be granted to them.
A parent enforcing a rule before that is not some violation.
Only, for the internet, the tools and know-how to do so are rare or non-existent.
My parents did this with tons of things as me and my siblings grew up. Each time trusting us with a new piece of responsibility, when they felt we were ready.
What kind of parent doesn’t decide their childrens bedtime until they can sanely maintain their sleep schedule themselves?
It was a big day when I was granted the ability to go to visit friends without asking permission first.
Parental control and guidance is essential for the stage-by-stage raising of a child into adulthood. Both online and offline, only tools and practices around the former practically don’t exist.
Each parent is also on a deadline. When someone turns 18, all rules come off whether you’re ready or not.
As a parent, you should aim for your kid to be making as many decisions themselves as possible by then.
And did you seriously just try to use dismissing my trauma as a point, instead of a logical retort?
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None of your business.
I don’t need you approval that my past is “real enough” to be allowed to argue my point.
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hardcore christians disagree
Hardcore Christians are just pedophiles and trauma victims.
yep, everybody knows that already
This isn’t true.
The internet has been around since the late 90s at the earliest…that’s when some kids started freely accessing adult content.
When I was a kid…(and I grew up unsupervised and poor with one working parent - I was free range)…porn mags were like the holy grail. I literally didn’t see one until I was about 14 and I found one in somebodies forest fort. So think about that…not only could I not find a porn mag…but the person that had one had to go hiking to “use” it.
I mean…we also had homophobic molester gym teachers teaching us health class…
There’s got to be a workable happy medium between no access and no information - and everything always all the time to the max.
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You said teens. I didn’t know you meant 18. Even if it wasn’t your topic…surely kids having access to hardcore porn, fetish scenarios, etcetc before they have access to sex ed isn’t optimal.
Yeah…things are better, sex ed wise, then they were in the 80s. Miles better. That’s a great thing - but as I said above, sex-ed can’t keep up with what children are being exposed to. We’re not talking about Playboys and R-Rated movies here.
You didn’t really get my point, no. My point was that some children are being bombarded with sexual information from all angles, and it’s having unintended consequences. We essentially opened a new all-encompassing type of media and barely tried to regulate it.
The question isn’t whether having access to hardcore porn is harmful. The question is the relative degree of harm.
When a web service can reliably distinguish between adult and child, it can specifically target content to either. Netflix can provide age-appropriate content to its users. That’s great.
Groomers can specifically target members of their desired audience. That’s not so great. That’s bad. That’s really, really bad. That’s much worse than kids finding hardcore pornography. And that degree of targeting is only possible with widespread age verification laws.
There’s no question that certain types of adult content, not restricted to hardcore porn is harmful…we know it is.
It’s not “we deal with groomers OR we deal with harmful adult content…OR we only regulate popular streaming sites. We can do all of the above. We certainly don’t just throw up our hands and say “it’s not profitable to protect our children” (not what you’re saying, but rather what’s happening).
The way regulators are currently dealing with age-gating - say, in Australia - isn’t what we need to do. That certainly empowers groomers because there’s zero expertise or thought out into it: it’s an ISP-friendly virtue signal that attempts to preserve profits while making Boomers feel like something is happening.
I don’t have the answer…but I DO know there are a ton of answers that include actually attempting to study and regulate all addictive content, including adult content - ie content at the hosting level and requiring that providers and purveyors regulate their content with actual humans. We can never “win” the war if the status quo is automated moderation and profits above protection.
No, we cannot. At a societal level, we can’t do any of it.
Protecting a child from content on the internet requires a massive invasion of the child’s privacy. That degree of privacy invasion should not be granted to society in general. It should not be granted to the operators of a pornography site. It should certainly not be granted to the groomers.
The only place where that degree of privacy invasion is reasonable and acceptable is between parent and child. If you want to protect the children, you give parents the tools to regulate content. You don’t provide those privacy-invading tools to the content providers and you certainly don’t expect them to take a parental role over your kids, let alone your neighbors and yourself.
Well, we can protect them as societies and villages and we do.
This notion that somehow groomers are neutralized if we abandon any attempt at protecting children at large is absurd…talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water. Imagine a world where we just ignore the source of the issue…the groomers would have a hay day. “Sorry kid…you should have had better parents”.
Putting it all on the parents just means that a small portion of rich and savvy parents will be able to “protect” their kids, usually with draconian practices that put kids far more at risk. Pardon me…but you don’t know what you’re talking about.
No, here in reality we should continue to institute and advocate for effective measures.
No. I never suggested that. My argument is that using age verification makes it easier for groomers. That is a harm that arises from age verification. The harm to children from age verification greatly exceeds the benefit to children.
Correct. And I described how we can do that: By providing parents with the means to do it. Not pornographers. Not groomers. Not society in general. Providing these means to anyone except the parents is an unacceptable invasion into the privacy. Even to the parents, these measure deprive the child of a certain degree of privacy, but children have no broad expectation of privacy from their parents. It’s OK for parents to invade their child’s privacy; it is not OK for anyone else.
I’m not “putting” it on the parents: It’s already on the parents. That responsibility should stay with the parents, because nobody else is qualified to wield it. Pornographers, groomers, politicians, and you will not invade the privacy of my children, and I should not be empowered to invade your child’s privacy either.
A small portion of parents use draconian practices that put far more kids at risk? What the hell are you even talking about?
Age verification is not an “effective measure”. The only person who needs to know the user’s age is the parents.
With “age verification”, we are supposed to place our trust in the pornographer and the groomer. Most of them aren’t even in the same legal jurisdiction and are immune to criminal prosecution or civil judgment. Yet, we are supposed to grant them the power to invade our childrens’ privacy, as well as our own. That is by no means an “effective” measure.
An effective measure would be creating a free, publicly available blacklist of adult content, and any number of free apps to implement that blacklist to block content on the child’s device. Which we already have. Hundreds of them. They are extremely effective at protecting children, without invading their privacy or enabling grooming.
No, it’s not desirable, but it’s coming nonetheless. I was just curious if it’s even possible to do it in a way that doesn’t harm everyone.