Comment by bilekas
16 days ago
When will it be normalized to be able to say "Parents should just be doing their job" before we decide to ruin everything online for everyone else.
Although I know it's not really about protecting the kids. I wonder if the politicians are exempt from this too as they were chat control.
> The scanning would apply to all EU citizens, except EU politicians. They might exempt themselves from the law under “professional secrecy” rules.
https://nextcloud.com/blog/how-the-eu-chat-control-law-is-a-...
What about my "PERSONAL SECRECY" ?
The amount of time and energy that I have to put in to keep my 3 individual kids safe online while still allowing some access is mind-blowingly high. It shouldn’t be as hard as it is. It’s so hard, in fact, 99.9% of parents give up on it. I’m not one to do that but I’ve strongly considered it many times.
Parental controls are fractured across every platform, they can’t enforce everything in one place, domain filtering isn’t practical, some sites (like YouTube) are needed for schoolwork and they include adult content intermingled with no sane way to bifurcate those. It’s also impossible to disable the forced short-form video push onto toddlers and teens.
There is a simple and better way to do this, which is device-wide age status attestation. That is, the whole device or user account has a 'minor' flag set, and passes it on to software, and so on.
Governments are not pushing for this because this is not about protecting children, it is about removing privacy and increasing control.
User agent flags? Those are some of the easiest to spoof. Wouldn't last 10 minutes.
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This only addresses one axis of your concern, but if they are accessing YouTube via desktop browser (or Firefox on Android!), the "Youtube-shorts block" extension gets rid of the Shorts UI. You can still watch Shorts, it will just display them in the normal video UI without infinite scrolling. It's a huge quality of life boost.
Although obviously this does nothing for those using the mobile or TV apps.
Even though it's a bit easy to disable, you can use the "Unhook" extension to turn off Shorts.
It will take a 15 year old less than 5 minutes to figure out how to disable it.
I sympathize with this a lot. What you’re describing really is exhausting, and it shouldn’t be this hard.
My take is that parental controls fail because they’re trying to solve a social and psychological problem at the technical layer. No amount of filters or settings can keep up with the internet, and kids are better at routing around them than we like to admit.
What’s worked better for us is treating this like other hard topics. We talk to our kids directly about social media, disturbing content, and strangers online, the same way we talk to them about drugs or sex.
We’re explicit about why some things aren’t allowed, what kinds of content exist out there beyond just sex, and that if something upsetting happens, telling us is always the right move and won’t cost them our trust or love.
That doesn’t remove all risk, but it shifts the burden from constant surveillance to shared understanding. To me that feels more realistic than trying to centrally control an environment that isn’t controllable.
We do that too of course. It’s not even the content that really bothers me. What bothers me is the targeted capitalization of kids’ attention. The instant gratification content model is changing behaviors for an entire connected generation in a way the world has never seen before. The real reason parental controls don’t exist is because it’s counter to what makes money for megacorps.
No corporation wants your kids to use their platforms less. Zero incentive for them to fix this. Parents are at war with corporations.
We must hold the line.
I have a friend who is a social worker. Hearing stories from them, I think people severely overestimate the level of involvement that many parents have with their kids. Social workers who are checking in on middle school kids at the hospital with burn marks on their arms or elementary school kids who showed up under the influence of cannabis aren’t also going to have time to enforce online safety.
If this is what it means for a parent to “do their job” then what do you propose happens to parents who are unwilling or unable to police their kids’ Discord account?
For this reason, I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of low-trust social media. They can’t tell if a user is a child or even a human. People will move to things like group chats because they don’t rely on sending your ID to a verification service in the Philippines.
Parents are just burnt out, I think. Online spaces have become so consolidated and enshittified that it’s seriously a choice between basically keeping them offline - which is a very socially isolating thing to be these days - and letting a small number of faux-accountable monopolies ranging from Discord to Google and Meta call the shots. It’s kind of a no-win situation.
I’d love to have my kids in relatively small, intimate online spaces where I can’t necessarily assume they will be perfect (nor do I want them to be - they deserve to have some room to learn to navigate problems for themselves) but I can at least assume they won’t be overwhelmed by the impossibility of successfully navigating life in a globalized fishbowl. But if there’s one thing late stage capitalism abhor, it’s a self-contained community of real humans from which the powers that be can’t extract “value”.
And those burnt out parents are the “good” parents who are even trying. There’s a huge cohort of parents that let iPads parent their kid, unsupervised all day. And that’s not illegal.
> Parents are just burnt out, I think.
I'm sorry but I don't buy this. We have been parenting forever, parents get burnt out. That doesn't mean you just ignore what your kids are doing.
It's your responsibility to be their guardians, not the government.
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Any idea that is based on "If everyone just..." is wishful thinking. Describe the mechanism by which you convince everyone to just do something.
Sure, but the ID solution is an "if everyone just gives up their privacy / anonymity / sensitive data" and the mechanism is by denial of service
In fact its worse. Every site must also implement this security check. Or everyone must agree to just use sites and services that follow this policy. Otherwise anyone can just use another, often 'less safe' website.
I'm not advocating for that either, I'm only pointing out that "if everyone just" is a collective action problem that is a non-solution because it doesn't describe the mechanism by which everyone does something.
Your example confuses the locus of control. The platform is making the choice and relies on user inaction rather than action. Users as a whole basically always descend gradients, and if they like / are addicted to the service, they'll descend with enough momentum to carry them over one-time friction like an ID check. The null hypothesis is they continue using the service. For it to be an "if everyone just" answer, it would be "if everyone just decided to stop using these extremely sticky services" because that is the de facto choice they are presented with. And it similarly suffers from an "if everyone just" lack of plausible mechanism.
The point of calling out non-solutions masquerading as solutions is to keep people's energy focused on possible but unstated solutions, rather than spending time blaming people for behavior largely determined by myriad immovable circumstances.
Pass a law that requires devices and software to support a per-device or per user account 'child' or 'minor' flag. The flag must be lockable with a password or another account. Pass a law that mandates that websites and content handle the flag appropriately, whether that means denying service or limiting access.
This would protect children while only minimally infringing on privacy.
The mechanism by which we make everyone 'just' is laws. The laws that are being passed are telling of the actual goals.
Apt username. I already have to deal with non-functional wifi because of frequency band restrictions. And instead of buying physical media (or streaming), I have to "pirate" content because of DRM.
Any hardware or software that disobeys the user is useless for the user. It just becomes a tool for power grabs.
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I too think this is likely the only workable solution. My bias is the OS/ecosystem layer is the right place to handle access to the digital world.
However as digital access becomes more and more essential to doing anything in life, this makes the layer even more load bearing, so I wish to see a legal framework for privacy/security as well as appeals process for the painful edge cases where people get locked out for whatever reason. That problem is even harder.
Saying parents should be doing their jobs will lose you votes, that's why. Anything that implies personal responsibility is political suicide.
Are parents also supposed to be blamed if society as a whole would let thrive streets with permanent civil war, drug barrons, organized child prostitution networks and so on?
Of course parents must take care of their children. And of themselves. But they are only fragile humans and can bear only that much of a load in a day. Certainly there are people that drawn in negligent or even mistreating behaviors. That's not a valid reason to blame individual in general and abstract the societal constraints they all have to deal with. That's actually nothing special to parents.
Passing off responsibility to parents is already the status quo. Hardly political suicide.
Saying that companies should face some level of responsibility for their products is the dangerous move. That’s part of why the Internet has barely been regulated.
Parents need to have personal responsibility, but corporations get to use section 230 to absolve themselves of any. Game seems rigged.
> Parents need to have personal responsibility, but corporations get to use section 230 to absolve themselves of any. Game seems rigged.
This is not at all what section 230 does. All section 230 does is get rid of lawsuits that wouldn't be able to satisfy standing of a first amendment lawsuit or similar. Section 230 has to be one of the most misunderstood and confused laws known in the modern day. Absolutely nowhere in the text of the law does it say or imply that an interactive computer service, or the operator of such service, gets total immunity for anything and everything they do. Yet this myth is constantly perpetuated.
As soon as politicians are also included in these acts, then you could see a shift in their opinions.
> When will it be normalized to be able to say "Parents should just be doing their job"
you can say this, but it is not enforced, so this part of discussion is not really productive.
The UK/US haven't even spent widely on internet addiction education or built widescale programs like they did for drugs or even speech therapy. Jumping immediately to banning and gatekeeping everything on the internet is silly and naive. The world won't be a better place because we fear other kids parenting skills, it will be highly locked down and these ID checks/bans will hit every part of the internet.
Parents can’t do this. Kids need to be kept off this as a monolith otherwise they just get left out and become outcasts.
What's ruined by this? Honestly asking
It's giving my identification to a no face company, that I don't know will handle the data correctly. And if they don't I have absolutely no recourse.
Also, why should I need to identify myself at all ? I used to use IRC for the better part of my life, I still do infact. So to have to Identify myself by sending my ID to a random company is insulting to me.
You don't have to ID after this, you just won't be able to access NSFW discord servers.
Then don’t give it to them. Stop using the platforms that require this.
That article is making quite a stretch from "the laws have exceptions for intelligence agencies, police, and the military" to "EU politicians will use those exceptions for themselves". It does this with zero evidence.