[HN Gopher] Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Co...
___________________________________________________________________
Do Not Turn Child Protection into Internet Access Control
Author : smartmic
Score : 240 points
Date : 2026-03-21 20:32 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.dyne.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.dyne.org)
| jameskilton wrote:
| That's the trick, it's always been about control. No-one in such
| positions actually cares about the children.
| mindslight wrote:
| I think the truth is closer to them being tightly bound to one
| another over their shared "love" of children. Epstein bouncing
| around the academic community was the tip of an iceberg.
| Imagine the reputation laundering that goes on with all of
| these "for the children" NGOs.
| jmcgough wrote:
| What's sad is how effective this is. Religious groups figured out
| a few years ago that anti-porn groups accomplish nothing, but if
| you start an anti-trafficking group you can restrict porn access.
| mc32 wrote:
| Traffickers now use refugee programs as conduits for human
| trafficking.
| chaostheory wrote:
| It's meta this time.
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| Which religious groups specifically are pushing for this and
| where? I want to know so I can call them out when I see it.
| tangotaylor wrote:
| Their real goals are even worse than that. Some of these groups
| have admitted they're also about suppressing LGBT+ content.
|
| As the Heritage Foundation admitted:
|
| > Keeping trans content away from children is protecting kids.
| No child should be conditioned to think that permanently
| damaging their healthy bodies to try to become something they
| can never be is even remotely a good idea.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/07/kids-online-safe...
| gib444 wrote:
| Heritage's tweet in the screenshot in your link makes no
| reference to "L", "G", "B" nor "+". Just "T"
| cs02rm0 wrote:
| It's always been internet access control, there is no child
| protection.
| baal80spam wrote:
| It was never about children...
| squarefoot wrote:
| Access control and pervasive surveillance has been the plan since
| day one; child protection is the leverage. Also, I don't expect
| people who repeatedly hide the contents of certain files to care
| about children.
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| You must be crazy, who could possibly object to governments
| "protecting the children"?
| bilekas wrote:
| 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.
| taurath wrote:
| Too many people making too much money - to be honest, people
| really should blame tech for it, all it takes is RSUs to look
| the other way. Morally most of the US is running far away from
| tech and the surveillance state but here it's still okay to
| work for monsters and self justify building population control
| systems and ad networks (often one and the same)
| dmix wrote:
| The solution is always to constrain every level of government
| with more aggressive privacy laws. As long as they are
| allowed to do it then some private contractors will take the
| money to help make it ... or government will make their own
| in house tech teams. Relying on the morals of the general
| public to limit state surveillance is not a good strategy,
| but it is of course good when companies take a stand and the
| tech community creates tools to push back.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| It should be prohibited outright. If you allow a loophole
| for corporations then they will just sell it as a service
| and we will never be free of it.
| taurath wrote:
| Companies create the environment - the government is
| supposed to be "small" - and it must remain small so the US
| "consumer" can be leeched from
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| By RSU, I'm assuming you mean this:
|
| > Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) are a form of equity
| compensation where employers promise company shares,
| typically vesting over time, offering a way to align employee
| interests with company performance
| taurath wrote:
| Yes - you buy the house in the bay, and companies will lock
| you in with the vesting schedule. Just another 3, 4 years
| and you'll be rich enough to afford a second one, or retire
| early. Some people can self justify what they do, or
| pretend because they work in a "nicer" part of a company
| than the core revenue part that it's all okay that what
| pays their checks is mass behavior manipulation. I don't
| like ads or social coercion, at all.
| smartmic wrote:
| It's only too late when we stop fighting back and accept it as
| a given. Don't underestimate civil disobedience and the hacker
| spirit.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| This. Fatigue and despair are by far the most effective way
| to control a population. You don't need to convince people
| you're doing the right thing, you just have to convince them
| that it's too late.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I do underestimate the hacker spirit. HN's response to Client
| Side Scanning was disheartening, barely anyone could condemn
| Apple despite the obvious red-line being crossed:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28068741
|
| And once you step outside HN, forget it. You can save
| yourself, but there are thousands of people that _do_ respond
| to the "think of the children!" nonsense and will call you a
| creep for objecting to it. It's game over now, you will fight
| against this for the rest of your life.
| bilekas wrote:
| While I agree with you, my worry is that younger generations
| have been conditioned to just expect privacy invasions, and I
| hear the same "Well I have nothing to hide" more and more
| with my younger family at least.
| girvo wrote:
| > and I hear the same "Well I have nothing to hide" more
| and more with my younger family at least.
|
| Which is funny as thats what I heard from my older family
| growing up. Except it's a lie and they have plenty to hide!
| drnick1 wrote:
| Absolutely, but this can only happen if we refuse to run
| nonfree software on our machines. Even if the maintainers of
| a Linux distro decided to somehow implement some anti user
| feature like age attestation, it would be trivial to patch
| that out from the source or to remove it from a running
| system with root access. The real danger here is devices that
| are not fully owned by the user, such as iPhones.
| tqi wrote:
| 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.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I'm not sure it's possible to have different priorities
| without being stupid or ignorant of history. Once you concede
| a certain right, such as a right to privacy, you rarely if
| ever get it back. Most people seem not to care about this,
| despite ample evidence that it's something worth caring
| about. Stupid is the obvious term for it, though obtuse could
| work as well.
|
| Of course, I don't blame them. They haven't lived in a
| context where they need to care. All of the reasons they've
| heard to care have come from stories of people who lived
| before them. But ignoring warnings for no good reason is
| still dumb.
|
| A better thing to engage with is whether we can meaningfully
| change the situation. It might still be possible, but it
| requires an effective immune response from everybody on this
| particular topic. I'm not sure we can, but it's worth trying
| to.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| > They haven't lived in a context where they need to care.
|
| You might believe you don't need opsec, and then new laws
| are passed, or your national supreme court overturns the
| case that gave you your rights, or someone invades; and now
| suddenly you're wanted for anything from overstaying a
| visa, outright murder, or simply existing.
|
| USA, right now, peoples lives are being destroyed because
| the wrong people got their data. Lethal consequences exist
| in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Iran.
|
| Certain professions per definition: Journalists, Lawyers,
| Intelligence, Military.
|
| Certain Ethnicities. (Jewish, Somali) ; Faiths...
|
| It doesn't need to be quite this dramatic though. But you
| might accidentally have broken some laws and don't even
| know about it yet. Caught a fish? Released a fish? Give the
| wrong child a bowl of soup [1]. Open the door, refuse to
| open the door. Signed a register; didn't sign a register.
| The list of actual examples is endless. The less people
| know about you, the less they can prosecute.
|
| [1] A flaw in the Dutch Asylum Emergency Measures Act
| (2025) that would have criminalized offering even a bowl of
| soup to an undocumented person. The Council of State
| confirmed this reading. A follow-up bill was needed to fix
| it.
| closeparen wrote:
| I have the right to my own senses, my own observations, my
| own memories. I have the right to photograph what I can see
| with my eyes, and to write down what I can remember. Unless
| enjoined by a specific duty of care (doctor/patient,
| attorney/client, security clearance, etc) I have the right
| to discuss my memories with others. This obtains even when
| using electronic tools and even when working in association
| with others.
|
| I don't intend to give up or accept limitations on these
| rights because you consider yourself to have "privacy
| rights" or ownership interests in my records, my memories,
| my perceptions, or the reality in front of me. I find the
| notion of the government or another person interfering in
| this process, the perception and recollection of reality,
| to be creepy and totalitarian by itself.
|
| In 1984, it is not only that the government is aware of
| Winston, but that it routinely tampers with or destroys
| evidence of the past & demands to control the perception of
| the present. I do not think we should let a government do
| that, even for a good reason like "protect your privacy"
| any more than we should let it destroy general purpose
| computing "for the children."
| Levitz wrote:
| And what would those values and priorities be? Because it
| doesn't seem to me that they align with what they actually
| do.
|
| For example, it seems to me there is a whole lot of worry
| around megacorporations, often related to capitalism and the
| inequalities it brings.
|
| In that context, if you don't place privacy as a priority,
| how are you not either stupid or ignorant? Is my premise just
| wrong?
| ndriscoll wrote:
| You can be in favor of privacy while simultaneously
| thinking porn, gambling, and advertisers shouldn't be
| targeting children. The age verification bills I've read
| have steep penalties for retaining information, so that
| seems fine since that's literally more protection than you
| get in person.
|
| It's really more just concluding that those corporations
| should be liable for their behavior. It also has nothing to
| do with "the Internet" which is largely unaffected.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| they are saddled with more problems that they can reasonably
| care about and broader issues like privacy drop off of their
| radars because they've never had it
| SilverElfin wrote:
| For the government it may be surveillance. For the people
| funding these new laws, it is about advertising profits. See
| what I said at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47471747
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| With respect, this take is a good example of all or nothing
| thinking. It's not too late.
| mattmanser wrote:
| Go watch the newest Louis Theroux, into the manosphere.
|
| At points Louis and whatever absolute scumbag he's with walk
| around the streets while the guy is filming his own content.
|
| There are kids, literally 11/12 year olds, walking up to these
| predatory, evil, scammers on the street going "oh my god it's
| MC" or whatever their name is. Multiple times.
|
| And he hardly gets to spend any time with these men because
| they clock pretty quickly they're not going to come off well.
|
| In the space of like 3 days, Louis caught on camera at least
| 10/20 young kids recognizing these toxic people from videos
| they had watched. Even the ones who'd been banned from most
| platforms, because their videos get reshared under different
| accounts and insta/tiktok/facebook aren't bothering to catch
| these reshares.
|
| It really is about the kids.
|
| And it all comes down to these people convincing young men to
| spend money on scam courses or invest in scam brokerages by
| getting them to join telegram group chats. And suddenly it's
| really clear to me why telegram's under scrutiny.
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Has there even been a time when we really had privacy online ?
|
| It didn't take long for the CIA to sniff everything on
| everyone, early 2000's.
|
| Maybe you're referring to the 90's but at that time the
| internet wasn't really that popular, it was a niche thing.
| HardwareLust wrote:
| The entire purpose of this exercise is control. "Child
| protection" is just a ruse to get the stupids onboard.
| borissk wrote:
| The big tech is going to be one of the big winners from Internet
| Access Control. This will give them a more reliable way to link a
| user account to an actual human being - a link that can be
| monetized in a variety of ways. All kind of political regimes can
| use such regulations to enhance their control of the population.
| And the loosers are going to be the Internet users and small
| companies.
|
| The unfortunate true is IAC is coming to most countries in the
| world, no matter how much the Hacker News audience hates it...
| cluckindan wrote:
| It's not even a debate if these controls are problematic. The
| litmus test is to mentally substitute the age field for an
| ancestry field and place the system in 1930's Germany.
|
| Coincidently, that system was provided by IBM.
| SilverElfin wrote:
| I read in some other discussions that this is about social media
| companies being able to increase their profits and nothing else.
| But the social media companies lobbying for these laws are
| shamelessly making it look like some kind of protect the children
| thing. It is all pushing more ads annd getting more users.
|
| The way it works: today, social media companies cannot advertise
| to children under 13 under COPPA. So these companies have to do
| their best to guess the user's age, and if it is possibly a
| child, they can't advertise and have to lose those profits even
| though MAYBE the user is an adult. Now they can shift the legal
| compliance costs and liability to the operating system provider
| or phone manufacturer and not be responsible for the user's
| identity. And then they can advertise much more at that point,
| without being conservative. This also lets them have a different
| experience for minors that doesn't advertise to them, but targets
| them carefully to keep them as users until they are older, so
| they start to become a source of advertising profits later.
|
| It's well known that Meta is behind a lot of funding for
| nonprofits pushing these laws under a "protect the children"
| thing. But now even Pinterest's CEO is shamelessly saying parents
| don't have a responsibility to manage their own kids, and is
| supporting all of this. See https://www.gadgetreview.com/reddit-
| user-uncovers-who-is-beh... and
| https://time.com/article/2026/03/19/pinterest-ceo-government...
|
| Evangelist/theocratic conservatives welcome these laws because
| they view it as enabling and validating age-based restrictions
| for other things. For example, Project 2025 called for a ban on
| porn. And separately, the Heritage Foundation pushed age-
| verification for porn websites, and has openly admitted it is a
| defacto porn ban. That should have been ruled unconstitutional on
| free speech grounds, but the current SCOTUS upheld it
| unfortunately. They'll next use age-based verification for all
| sorts of content - maybe for LGBTQ stuff, maybe for something
| else.
|
| In the end, everyone else will lose. If you have to prove your
| identity to anyone, there is a high chance this information can
| be accessed and surveilled by the government. There is a high
| chance at some point, no matter what they claim, your identity
| data will be hacked and sold. And of course if you can be
| identified online, then anything you say or do can be traced back
| to you, and that can be used against you by the government.
| Suddenly, being a protester in these chaotic times will become a
| lot more risky.
| holyhnhell wrote:
| I'm okay with internet access control if it means less AI slop
| like this shit. Bring it on. I'll be there when it happens.
| amarant wrote:
| Why would IAC lead to less slop? What's the mechanism here?
| kogasa240p wrote:
| Lol no
| jjk166 wrote:
| The people pushing for "child protection" went to the island.
| It's not even about control, it's about shifting liability away
| from platforms so they can further gut moderation, reducing their
| expenses and getting away with doing nothing to stop the actual
| bad actors.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| I mean sure; but look at it from their POV, controlling the
| medium is the message right from 1984. Like LLMs, you can't
| learn about doing evil things without seeing how they benefit
| yourself.
| gruez wrote:
| >The people pushing for "child protection" went to the island.
|
| What does this even mean aside from a thinly veiled accusation
| that such efforts are being pushed by a shadowy cabal of
| pedophiles elites? I'm sure you can find some overlap between
| people who want to push age verification laws and people who
| went to the island, but what about everyone else pushing for
| the law but who didn't go?
| afh1 wrote:
| Those are just stupid.
| girvo wrote:
| > shadowy cabal of pedophiles elites
|
| Its a shame that this used to just be a conspiracy theory one
| could mostly ignore, but we simply can't pretend that there
| _isn 't_ rampant CSA by those in power, because we've had
| proof of it despite their best efforts. Without wanting to
| get into politics, the leader of the United States _right
| now_ was friends with the supposed ring-leader...
|
| > but what about everyone else pushing for the law but who
| didn't go?
|
| Useful idiots, perhaps? Wanting to protect their own power
| and gain more?
|
| It's certainly not actually about protecting children. Never
| has been.
| pipes wrote:
| I might be misreading you, but are you saying that the
| whole Qanon thing isn't a baseless conspiracy theory?
| Tarq0n wrote:
| I don't like the "those in power" framing because it
| implies that they all participated and that such a
| homogenous group even exists.
| gruez wrote:
| >we simply can't pretend that there isn't rampant CSA by
| those in power, because we've had proof of it despite their
| best efforts
|
| What's "rampant"? The news coverage provides no shortage of
| people, but ringing off 100 (or whatever) people that are
| in the files doesn't say much, even if we make the
| questionable assumption that inclusion in files implies
| guilt. I'm sure that everyone would prefer the amount of
| pedophiles that are in power to 0, but if it's the same
| rate as the general population that can hardly be
| considered "rampant", or a "conspiracy". Given some neutral
| inclusion criteria (eg. members of legislative bodies), is
| there any evidence they have disproportionate amount of
| pedophiles?
|
| >the leader of the United States right now was friends with
| the supposed ring-leader...
|
| You conveniently omit the fact that they broke up 5 years
| before he was first convicted. From wikipedia:
|
| "Trump had a falling out with Epstein around 2004 and
| ceased contact. After Epstein was said to have sexually
| harassed a teenage daughter of another Mar-a-Lago member in
| 2007, Trump banned him from the club. "
|
| >Useful idiots, perhaps?
|
| So basically
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness?
|
| > Wanting to protect their own power and gain more?
|
| How does adding age verification help in that? Are they
| blackmailed by the shadowy cabal? Are they just doing what
| the voters/lobbyists want? If so, what makes invocation of
| this reasoning more suitable than for any other political
| issue? Is everything from tax policy to noise ordinances
| just something pushed by pedophile elites, helped by useful
| idiots and people who want to "protect their own power and
| gain more"?
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| I don't know the precise combination of stupidity vs evil
| that compelled the "think of the children" crowd to choose
| the single most publicly implicated man in the Epstein
| scandal as their champion and elect him over someone who
| wasn't and hasn't been implicated at all in the slightest,
| but they did. Either way, they receive the culpability for
| doing so and we should expect their future decision making to
| be equally compromised.
| catapart wrote:
| Like who? Name some names of people pushing for this, and we
| can dissect their motivation.
| gruez wrote:
| How about the first country to ban social media for kids,
| Australia[1]? So far as I can tell the PM/party leader was
| not in the files. Of course, if you make your inclusion
| criteria absurdly wide (eg. anyone who voted or advocated
| for age based restrictions in any shape or form), you'll
| probably find some pedophiles or even epstien island
| visitors from sheer luck alone.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Safety_Amendment_(
| Socia...
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| you mean the guys who are working alongside a bunch of
| pedophiles and doing little about it?
| aga98mtl wrote:
| > but what about everyone else pushing for the law but who
| didn't go?
|
| Who exactly is influential & organized enough across many
| western countries to push legislation that no one is asking
| for? Notice that epstein said he worked for [withheld] in
| some of his emails.
| mpalmer wrote:
| It's mostly Meta lobbying for this, in every state.
| Sensationalizing and exaggerating does not help.
| varispeed wrote:
| The people who want to control internet access use children to
| achieve their means. Why these creeps get to power? Normally
| people thinking too much about children would be casted out of
| society at best.
| vsgherzi wrote:
| Y E S. I'm tired of hearing about child proofing the internet. We
| need a solution that's not enforcing age or id verification on
| the os or internet itself like meta is pushing. We need better
| solutions and we should fight draconian enforcement with extreme
| prejudice
| kepeko wrote:
| Maybe the positive is that access control might break the
| illusion of privacy.
|
| Okay it's quite private in the sense that we don't know our
| friends browsing history but we know somebody, somewhere is
| collecting data and selling it to their 100 partners.
|
| Do you think there might ever be a moment when someone decides,
| legally or not, dump enormous amount of info, in a way that
| allows people to see what google searches other people did or
| browsing history etc? A moment when people's embarrassing secrets
| come into light.
| andai wrote:
| Saw a mini documentary once, which was filmed in China, that
| showed how easy it was to buy this data. Many apps spy on
| location and sells it to brokers. In the documentary, they
| showed a common practice: people buying their romantic
| partner's location history to make sure they haven't been doing
| anything naughty.
| plasticeagle wrote:
| AI;DR
|
| It's too late in any case, the Internet as we know it will eat
| itself. It will be destroyed by AI, and AI agents from without.
| And it will be destroyed from within by stupid laws such as the
| ones under "discussion" in this AI-edited and AI-illustrated
| nothingpiece.
|
| By which I not mean the infrastructure. I mean the current crop
| of social media websites. The infrastructure will remain, and
| perhaps something better will come along to use that
| infrastructure.
| einpoklum wrote:
| But the whole point of bringing up child protection was to
| restrict Internet access, to police Internet content and to
| legitimize mass surveillance.
|
| Or do we really believe that states which condone support, fund
| and sometimes engage in the mass killings children are motivated
| by genuine moral concern for the young?
|
| -----
|
| Still, there is somewhat of a silver lining: Perhaps this will
| encourage young people, and people who value their privacy, to
| avoid those "social networks" in favor of places where there is
| no age verification, 2FA with a physical phone number, etc. etc.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| For the US, the worst of it started in 2019, when the held
| YouTube liable for all content that a child might access.
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_and_privacy#COPPA_sett...)
| That's what pushed all of the content networks to lobby for the
| liability to go somewhere else.
| Diffusion3166 wrote:
| Given that it seems Meta is commissioning these laws, I wonder if
| a viral open source license that explicitly fails to grant Meta a
| license to use or modify the software would effectively deter
| future lobbying for regulations which are especially difficult
| for the open source community to comply with.
| windowliker wrote:
| Arguments about erosion of privacy miss the point: that is
| exactly what they want.
| cat-turner wrote:
| parents need to do their job and raise their children, and
| moderate their content.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Whose great-grandparents are you going to blame?
| Keeeeeeeks wrote:
| A theory that's floating around is that since frontier models are
| so good at sounding like humans, companies paying for ads are
| arguing that Dead Internet Theory -> ad costs should go down.
|
| Therefore, the push to ID everyone using the internet (even down
| to the hardware) is a way to prove that ads are being served to
| real humans in their target demographic.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| It makes a lot of sense, too. Previously, governments wanted
| everyone to have to swipe their driver's license before
| accessing the internet. But now, businesses want it too. And
| that makes all the difference in a world built on capitalism.
| dzogchen wrote:
| Am I the only one that simply disregards everything that follows
| an AI slop image?
| bfivyvysj wrote:
| Too late
|
| - Australia
| hei-lima wrote:
| I was a kid with unrestricted, unsupervised internet access, and
| it definitely affected many things in my life. If I happen to
| have a child in the future, they won't go through that.
|
| The Brazilian government passed a law requiring age verification
| for every site categorized as 16+. It can't be self-declared, so
| companies usually resort to facial scans and ID verification. I
| DO NOT want photos of our Brazilian children going to foreign
| agents who are PROVEN to profit from and do God-knows-what with
| our biometric data. And the funniest part? The same law says
| 'regulation shall not, under any circumstances, authorize or
| result in the implementation of mass surveillance mechanisms,'
| but also mandates that these measures must be 'AUDITABLE.' In
| other words, someone needs access to that data. It's all so
| stupid and incoherent.
|
| People who are less tech-literate FIERCELY support the measure,
| and whenever someone opposes it, they claim that person supports
| digital child abuse...
|
| Anyway... the responsibility of protection should come from the
| parents, not from companies that profit off your biometric data.
| sfRattan wrote:
| It's irksome that these laws and bills in multiple countries are
| trying to put limits on the general purpose computer. It's the
| wrong solution and arguably put forward in bad faith.
|
| If you want access control, _the appropriate point for regulation
| is with ISPs and cellular providers, and the appropriate mode of
| regulation is recquiring these companies to provide choice and
| education for families, and awareness of liability_.
|
| Require ISPs and cellular network providers to offer a standard
| set of controls to their customers informing the common person
| (in common language) who is using those connections and what they
| are doing with them. For ISPs, this looks like an option for a
| router with robust access controls, designating some devices
| (based on MAC address) as belonging to children and _filtering
| those devices ' network requests at the network gateway_. For
| cellular providers, it looks like an app available to parents'
| devices and similar filtering for devices designated as belonging
| to children (based on IMEI).
|
| When a family signs up for Internet service, either at-home
| access or cellular data, the provider must give both parents a
| presentation about these tools, _and about the liability the
| parents face for allowing their children unfettered,
| unsupervised, latchkey access to adult content_ , no different
| than allowing children to drink alcohol.
|
| I don't think achieving that setup is likely, but it's
| fundamentally the right way to solve this problem, and parents
| are pushing for a solution one way or another. I don't love it,
| but if it's coming almost inevitably we should at least push to
| do it right.
| mamami wrote:
| You don't understand, the children need to be exposed to Nick
| Fuentes, Andrew Tate, and algorithmically generated suicidal
| ideation from Facebook. It's crucial for their development,
| actually
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