I’m puzzled by the limited opposition from businesses regarding government attempts to access encrypted communications. Granting governments easy access—which inevitably leads to uncontrolled monitoring—compromises a company’s most valuable asset: its privacy. This would effectively hand over the keys to their operations, exposing them to security breaches, stifling growth potential, limiting access to competitive markets, and ultimately, jeopardizing company ownership. Corrupt officials could exploit this access to manipulate markets, facilitate insider trading, sabotage business plans, and even plant fabricated evidence within company communications and systems, leading to potential takeover and imprisonment of owners.
In my experience, companies care about things that affect them but not their competitors. But government shenanigans tend to affect all companies equally, and so does not affect market share, and is therefore mostly ignored by companies.
Here is just one solution that helps parents, and respects everyone's privacy:
Zero knowledge proofs.
Allow any organization that already legitimately verifies ages (i.e. credit card company, driver's license issuer, ...) to provide a cryptographic key to their clients, that they can use to anonymously verifiably assert they are 18+ to any adult sites they visit.
This solution (1) gives sites no user information except 18+ verification, and (2) gives key providers no information about sites clients visit.
This is what zero knowledge proofs are for.
Everyone wins:
• Parents jobs get easier.
• Children are less likely to encounter adult material.
• Everyone's privacy is protected.
• Adult sites can verify 18+ ages, without driving users away.
Not solving/mitigating endemic child access to adult sites is (1) a great disservice to parents and children, and (2) makes the success of draconian surveillance legislation MORE likely.
(If you have a critique of this solution, please frame it as an issue to resolve, not a categorical swipe at crafting solutions. The cynical prevalence of the latter is so damaging to these debates.)
Reality check: Children have many and useful opportunities to use devices in all kinds of situations away from parents.
Useful situations. On devices parents don't control.
Expecting parents to follow their children around 24/7, in case they access some adult site from a public or friend's device they don't control is beyond ridiculous.
Privacy protecting, anonymous validation of 18+ status solves the problem, in a way that doesn't require unrealistic "parenting" behavior, protects everyone's privacy, and is even helpful to responsible adult sites.
Condescendingly telling parents to "parent" in a way that is virtually impossible, instead of helping, is just rolling out the red carpet for alternate non-anonymous age verification legislation.
Zero knowledge tech, like end-to-end encryption, protects privacy.
Children will always be able to use devices or accounts borrowed or bought from adults, regardless of how the initial verification is carried out. Not to mention that the verification key / token / device might also be borrowed or when copied or transferred, depending on how it's implemented.
I think a device level setting is actually quite pragmatic.
I am having trouble understanding how anyone is unaware that children have pervasive and useful access to devices outside of their parent's sphere on a daily basis.
Or why anyone would discourage use of cryptographically hard privacy protecting solutions.
This is the perfect opportunity to take zero knowledge proofs mainstream, like end-to-end encryption, as a solution for myriads of current privacy leaking services and infrastructure.
The alternative to cryptographically protected privacy, is sites increasingly collecting people's identifiable information and associating their identities with access/behavior logs. Information that can never be assumed to stay private.
Let’s start with friend’s devices. Children have lots of devices and lots of friends.
Friend’s phones, home computers and devices of other family members.
Unattended PCs and laptops at school. According to a music teacher who has literally had to clean her work computer after it was used for erotic viewing by students when the music room in a temp building wasn’t otherwise in use.
Web browsers on game consoles, e-readers, VR headsets, smart TVs, tablets, …
Now throw in constant device turnover, software updates, including settings panel changes, and settings values that get reverted, across the board.
I am not sure why you wanted my opinion. That’s less of an opinion and more of a list of what counts as ordinary for the last decade or so.
So if we secure personal devices of children, with simple, standardized "child-owned" marker, we're basically back to 80s/90s, where children could occasionally get access to adult material via friends or irresponsible adults.
In my opinion that's more than enough, especially when you compare it to requiring everyone to identify themselves. It may be ZPK on the tin, but likely it will be close-source, corporation owned implementation, which will have holes. Then in a few years we will learn that Meta exploited them for years to sell your soul for ad money.
Btw - students occasionally steal teacher's cars. Should we block engine start with ID check too?
> In my opinion that's more than enough, especially when you compare it to requiring everyone to identify themselves.
The solution I proposed was the opposite of people identifying themselves.
Zero knowledge proofs. Enabling trusted verification without revealing identity is exactly what cryptographers designed them for.
We should be using them everywhere. Like end-to-end encryption they provide massive privacy, security, and trust (I.e. ability to verify intended disclosure) improvements.
Or we can complain about parents, the ones who care enough to ask for better help, while legislatures keep passing identity revealing anti-privacy rules. That seems to be the direction many are taking here. Complain, condescendingly, don’t solve anything. Repeat.
I have a categorical swipe to make, sadly this is a human problem, and attempts to solve it using technology are doomed to fail or to be increasingly complex and require endless modifications.
Your solution sounds good and should work fine, and be easy to implement, which is perfect! But people will soon wonder what all the elderly people that are living in retirement homes without internet access are doing on porn sites watching mostly the overwatch and fortnite cosplay themed videos...
I am having trouble understanding how that is a swipe.
If you are pointing out that the technical solution I proposed isn't perfect, that children may steal their older family members identities, I agree.
As noted, imperfection is a common, unhelpful argument, against improvement. However, identifying imperfections is constructive, if the point is to continue to solve problems. (Kids stealing identities isn't great for many reasons.)
I can't prove that there are no technical solutions to this kind of problems, but it certainly feels like so (to me).
It's like electronic voting, you can have the best cryptography hardware and software in the world, if the end user does not understand at least on a surface level how it works, it will be vulnerable against manipulation. You can certainly keep the same system and educate all users, but that's a whole other class of problem.
Well we can build out privacy preserving standards, with cryptography that already exists. (You can go to Wikipedia or many other places to verify for yourself what kinds of things cryptography can do.)
Or we can continue to have our identities and activities logged by more and more actors. And our online and even offline experiences “personalized” for us for ends that are not friendly. Now add AI, which is only in its early stages, actively participating in our surveillance and manipulation.
Privacy holes are serious security holes.
Ironic or not, zero knowledge proofs allow people to volunteer exactly the information needed for an interaction and no more.
Isn’t that the ideal? Maximize both freedom and trust? With existing tech.
Flip the parental concern upside down. Let’s take the side of genuinely responsible adult sites. Isn’t their ideal to be able to verify that visitors are adults, without surveiling them? Avoiding becoming a resource and target for other actors? A target for lawsuits if they are hacked or leak information.
Lots of adult sites are already unhappy for being put in that role in a growing number of regions.
But as design criteria go, that is certainly a sensible one to include.
Just a random first idea, the key effectively auto updates, I.e it’s a time varying key chain. I can think of several ways to do that, so the time varying nature can’t be replicated by someone else without the same originating account. But couldn’t say if any were good or not. It is something to design carefully, as all cryptographic systems need to be.
Other criteria would be easy revocation by the original key holder. Keys that are created from any multiple number of independent accounts, blind to each other, that the key recipient chooses.
Before anyone who hasn’t read the actual link reacts to its current title and gets swept up by the single thread that’s dominated the entirety of this submission, it’s an interview.
Alexander Linton of the Session Technology Foundation on building decentralized messaging and why platform-wide content moderation is impractical on encrypted platforms.
Not familiar with him or the platform. But sounds like an interesting exchange.
Make sure that it's impossible for my online actions to be traced to my identity, and then I don't need privacy, because there is no association that needs to be hidden and protected.
I see this distinction mentioned from time to time and it doesn't make sense to me. IMO, your actions not being tracable to your identity is privacy. In this framing, anonymity is part of privacy. You desire anonymity because of the privacy it gives you. Which is not to say that anonymity is always required for privacy though it tends to strengthen it.
Similarly, sometimes people say there's a tradeoff between security and privacy, which doesn't make sense since privacy (confidentiality) is one dimension of information security.
If you still disagree, could you attempt at defining privacy and anonymity and how you can prioritize meaningful anonymity without caring about privacy?
There are two sense of "privacy". Actual privacy, which of course is subsumed under anonymity, and the fake "privacy" that everyone is telling you they have a policy about and are assuring, while they track you and collect personal information.
Food for thought: Rather than nitpick on people who apparently use the word in earnest in its actual meaning and thereby conceding that those policies are actually "taking your privacy seriously", rendering the word void of meaning, we educate and take it back?
Saying "Make sure that it's impossible for my online actions to be traced to my identity, and then I don't need privacy" is in a way giving up on privacy alltogether.
Probably a push back against the commercialization of the term privacy to now mean "we get your data and share it widely for money making purposes, but here are the terms so you have privacy."
"Privacy policy" is definitely one of the most prominent Newspeak terms around today. The full term should read "how we'll violate your privacy policy".
The longer you rely on anonymity for your privacy, and keep leaving tidbits about yourself out there, the more likely it becomes that anyone interested in breaking that anonymity can do so.
Sounds like you might be talking about some strawman anonymity whereby the user takes some feeble steps on their own, in the face of systems that doing everything they can to rob them of anonymity.
For years, technical people insisted it was the parent’s job to monitor Internet safety. Parents, especially with the advent of social media, hardcore pornography, and every childhood friend having a device, correctly said this was unreasonable and impossible.
Technical people had a chance for two decades to solve this problem on their terms. Instead we collectively decided that anyone articulating this point of view must be a morally panicked maniac, and that this is a problem with “no reasonable solutions” that we would tolerate. Now we don’t get to dictate the terms, because everyone has had enough, and nobody has patience left for kids watching BDSM on their friend’s phones at 12.
Because of our industry’s refusal to take those concerns seriously, we lost our voice, we lost the grounds of sounding reasonable, and the floodgates are now open - for everything. Nobody is listening anymore to our point of view and arguably correctly so.
Why does a 12 year old have a smartphone that's connected to the internet?
When I was 12 our computer was in the living room and shared by everyone. It could access porn but you had to wait till you were the only one in the home.
There's a pretty simple solution here if you don't already see it and I'm not sure why it isn't more acceptable. It solves all the problems you mention. You don't want kids being sucked into social media? Sucked into porn? Constantly staring at their screens?
Have you ever considered not giving your kids smartphones?
Or have you decided the benefits are worth the costs?
Let's be honest here, even with strong government intervention this is always a cat and mouse game. The play of "no smartphone" is going to be far stronger than anything the government can ever do. Why is this not an option?
“No smartphone” is a boundary, and U.S. parents are often raised not to set boundaries under threat of mental, emotional, and/or physical abuse. So it makes perfect sense that we have now-parents completely unable to define and discuss boundaries with their children. Far better to capitulate in the face of an uncertain and not life-threatening risk than to allow their child to ever think that boundaries are healthy, etc. For the unfamiliar, here is a good starting point for understanding the generational cognitive dissonance in play: https://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/contradicto...
Even the most Laissez-faire of parenting has boundaries; no reasonable adult is allowing their teenager to experiment with heroin or giving their 12 year old permission to drive their car down the freeway. The problem is that smartphone access isn't seen in the same category of danger that recreational opiates and unlicensed driving are in.
> “Reasonable” is a lynchpin bearing an awful lot of load here.
No it's not. I could imagine sentences where it would be, but not this sentence. Here, watch me replace the word:
"99% of adults are not allowing their teenager to to experiment with heroin or giving their 12 year old permission to drive their car down the freeway."
Even if most people aren't ""reasonable"", they are whatever adjective that sentence describes.
“Over half of U.S. adults surveyed said that it’s very inappropriate, somewhat appropriate, or were uncertain whether it’s appropriate for their child to set boundaries for their interactions” is a reasonable-sounding statement, too; it’s plausible, applies to children of all ages (below or beyond age 25!), and is demonstrably an aspect of culture represented by media and other ephemera.
The position itself is, of course, completely unreasonable — boundaries are never inappropriate to consider (and to contrast with the parent’s boundaries about immediate versus deferred conversations in unsafe circumstances, the child’s age and cognitive ability to assess risk, and so on), no matter how uncomfortable it is to teach a child about boundaries by honoring one they’ve presented one! — but that intolerance is presented in such a reasonable guise, with a tone of majority support to quash any brief qualms, that it causes many to overlook its true nature.
That sentence was the only part of the argument using the idea of something being "reasonable".
Whether you agree or disagree with their general stance, the word "reasonable" isn't load bearing.
In particular they didn't say that limiting cell phones was reasonable, or requires parents to be reasonable. They just wanted an example of parents enforcing boundaries.
The only load-bearing part of that sentence is the idea that parents do enforce those boundaries. Which they do. It's irrelevant if they are doing it because they're "reasonable".
TL;DR: I do know what the discussion is about. But your comment wasn't about the general discussion, it was about the quality of a specific point, and I'm defending that specific point.
It's a pretty generalized phenomena too. Few people actually think about the assumptions their arguments rely upon. It makes actual discussions difficult to have and leads to more arguing than problem solving
It's starting to change in places, including in the US.
The reality is it's not the smartphone, but the slot machine type software running on it.
There's more than enough science that placing this kind of content in front of humans before their prefrontal cortex is fully formed at age 25-26 leads them to leaning on the pre-frontal context of the adults around them, and missing that, whatever they're spending the most time with that's then possibly raising them.
Screens at lower resolutions and quality didn't seem to be as much of an issue compared to the hyper saturated motion with sound effects that are consciously chosen to keep eyeballs.
Like anything, digital can be used for good, or bad, and in lieu of good, the other can to happen and become more of a default.
I agree but it is much harder to stop people from building slot machines than to stop children from using them. Even easier than telling people to stop using them.
And hey, maybe if we actually take some autonomy and remove that market from actors who don't want to build the things the market is requesting then they'll actually build the things the market is requesting... it's easy to say we want something but no one listens when we still buy the thing we say we hate. Maybe it's addiction but it's still hard to fight against. (Though we could still do better by accommodating those who are trying to break the network effects. You can complain how hard it is to get off Facebook but if you're not going to make the minuscule extra effort to accommodate those who do leave then how can you expect the ground to be laid for you to?)
At the end of the day though, with kids, the OP's argument fails because it either assumes smartphones are an inevitability or that the benefits outweigh the costs. It's a bad argument.
I remain sympathetic to parents who don't know where to start in terms of understanding technology and computers. It is a big topic. But I am entirely unsympathetic to parents who throw up their hands and make no effort.
At this point, any parent saying, "I just don't understand technology," or, "I just don't have the time to mind my childrens' computer use or monitor their Internet access," is morally equivalent to saying, "I just don't understand traffic safety," and, "I just don't have the time to teach my children the rules of the road or how to cross the street," while living in a big, bustling city.
It is lazy, entitled, and negligent. The world is full of networked computers and, barring some new massive Carrington event, is never going back to the way it was before.
Many parents think their kids are safe when they are inside the home, without realizing they are letting in the entire world, including things worse than they ever imagined into their homes, through the devices.
In the past, the general disconnection of the world and information had a natural insulation factor. Probably less so today.
Rather than admonish adults, it's actually quite common that many people in many professions don't know how to purchase, or implement software in their day to day work, let alone at home.
Maybe, this is is an aspect of digital literacy that has been lacking - we know that the consumer habit loop that smartphones go after is not always about digital health, or the user's digital literacy, it's about capturing their attention.
Parents actually seem to want the same kind of quality curation not just with the internet, but all areas of their children's lives.
The free for all they may have grown up with 20-40 years ago is simply not the same any more online, or offline.
In that way, even trying to make an effort sometimes isn't enough I'd say. Ignorance is one thing, but maybe it could seem like negligence to others.
Would there be some possible solutions or approaches you or others could offer here to help parents build the skills that lead to not giving up? Sincerely curious where folks see the starting point of these skills.
>Ignorance is one thing, but maybe it could seem like negligence to others.
In person I've found the difference to be usually very clear. It's why I distinguish between the sympathic attitude of "I don't know where to start" and the contemptible reaction that "therefore I will act as if nothing is wrong, or write it off as someone else's fault."
>Would there be some possible solutions or approaches you or others could offer here to help parents build the skills that lead to not giving up? Sincerely curious where folks see the starting point of these skills.
It's a hard problem. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, and almost as much time talking to relatives with children. I have come to no happy, easy answers.
Carey Parker's Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons is a good starting point to Security and Privacy, but not really how computers work. There are various books I remember from childhood about how computers work, but I don't really remember the process of coming to understand computers distinctly because it was both early and continuous over a long period.
I think the best we'll do as a species is one-to-three computer people per extended family. And I think the key will be teaching those people how to be of service to their families. But there's not really an existing framework for a "computer court wizard" in each family nor for what maxims and/or proscriptions such a person might teach computer illiterate family members in order to use computers safely and protect the family's children from the worst of dark algorithms, surveillance, and abuse/predators online.
TV channels used to get managed. Magazines used to get managed.
There is a lot more volume now, obviously.
Tools like Circle can provide some level of family level DNS which can help.
Something that stands out is also helping parents get a handle on their own consumption and habits to be able to better teach kids on what to look out for.
The conceptual frontier of a world of networked computers is uncharted, and we are in the well along into that dark frontier now. I don't think TV or magazines are a good point of comparison, nor anything from the analog world of yesterday.
Analog mass media couldn't dynamically adapt itself to individual viewer proclivities in order to attract attention. Parents can understand that children shouldn't watch TV at night because society has agreed to constrain more mature programming to when children are mostly asleep. We can understand not to leave a Playboy magazine lying around in reach of children or, better, not to have such things in a family home at all. But digital media defies more than convention... It defies all points of reference a human computer-layperson might have in the analog world that could help to understand it fully.
Try to explain to someone on the street the sorts of things that are and are not possible with computers and networks, and why various things fall into one or the other category. Watch their eyes glaze over. Absent points of reference and useful context it's almost anticomprehensible.
>Something that stands out is also helping parents get a handle on their own consumption and habits to be able to better teach kids on what to look out for.
Strongly agree. I've always shied away from algorithmically managed feeds and dark patterns. It felt instinctual to me but I think those instincts were born from coming to understand computers at a young age. Humanity at large has basically zero instincts for the digital world... Yet. Square one may be feeling the difference when you cut slopfeed content and targeted advertising out of your life. Square two may be new, computer-age fables to cultivate those instincts among those who aren't (and largely won't ever be) deeply computer literate. The sort of parables every single American grew up deciphering in McGuffey readers, once upon a time, but concerning things like, "a person can pretend to be anyone online, and that can cause trouble," or, "the boy who gave away his secrets could never get them back."
This frames the issue in a fundamentally incorrect way.
Since the dawn of pseudoanonymous communication, politicians have been trying to get their nasty little claws into it. See Clipper Chip in the 90's. They've tried many avenues to deanonymize and centralize. Going after the parents is just their latest - they've discovered they could use convincing language like this to trick a bunch of people who previously had no reason to care about The Internet to now suddenly "realize" oh gosh it's scary out there, what can we do to help.
Unfortunately their latest tactic is working. They figured out how to recruit a (possibly) well-intentioned bloc into supporting efforts that undermine privacy in an irreversible way.
> Because of our industry’s refusal to take those concerns seriously, we lost our voice,
Fighting against demands to censor, unmask, and neuter the closest thing we've got to a global platform of freedom is a valiant effort. Not entertaining these bureaucrats isn't some moral failing of our industry, in the same sense that ignoring a persistent busker on the street entitles him to your money after some uninvolved observer has arbitrarily decided he's made the same demand enough that somehow it's starting to make sense because the victim hasn't yelled at him with a good enough argument against it.
In other words: yep, still the parents' job, yep, internet was still there when I grew up, yep, I turned out fine, yep, politicians have been trying to take away our privacy for 30 years (and unfortunately, they're finding more creative and convincing ways to disguise it). Hint: it's never about the kids
Well yes it is. It is about both the cover problem (child safety), and the ulterior motive (surveillance, control).
And not taking the reasonably concerning cover problem seriously, by finding sensible solutions, both leaves it festering unsolved in its own right, and growing in usefulness as a cover problem.
When people are operating at two levels, you can't leave either unaddressed.
That plays into the hands of those using subterfuge.
The power grab is riding on reasonable concerns about children. So its worth improving safety for children for two reasons: (1) reducing parents reasonable concerns and making parenting in the modern age a bit easier, and to (2) take that issue off the table (or meaningfully reduce the leverage it supplies), for the power grabbers.
Ironically, the fact that the underhanded motives lie beneath a reasonable concern, makes solving the reasonable concern in a healthy way even more critical.
Here is just one solution that helps parents, and respects everyone's privacy: Zero knowledge proofs.
Which allow anyone who is verified by anyone already (i.e. credit card company, ...) to get a cryptographic key from that organization, that they can use to anonymously verifiably assert they are 18+ to sites, (1) without giving sites any other information, and (2) without their key source getting any information on what sites they visit.
Treating users like adults and allowing them full control over setting system capability and app launch restrictions on devices (and even implementing fully optional, widely blocking restrictions as "parental safety options") was the industry taking it seriously. You considering the freedom of choice to the user as disastrous and the lack of heavily restricted lockdowns by default as "refusal to take concerns seriously" is just a reflection on your attitudes about other people, not any real argument for improving privacy or safety. You ARE a morally panicked maniac if your only grossly offensive things you want to keep pretending are horrifying examples have absolutely nothing to do with the invasion of privacy of children and more to do with puritanical outrage on children accessing adult material.
> implementing fully optional, widely blocking restrictions as "parental safety options") was the industry taking it seriously
The myriad of settings, accessed differently on every site or service, that everyone needs to be aware of, and actively fight dysfunctional defaults and frequent "helpful" resets after updates, are not the solution parents or anyone else are looking for.
Why are the defaults set to favor the company, in a way that makes them real customer/user-targeted security holes that people have to play endless wack-a-mole to secure themselves?
That is industry taking plausible deniability and the monetizing potential of parasitical behavior at scale "seriously" indeed.
Yes, a parents attention is a limited and valuable resource. It is a parents job to monitor the environment for dangers to their children. Not to neuter the entire adult world to make it pseudosafe for kids.
Junk food and processed sugar creates dietary based ADHD kids.
One's information diet also changes how the brain develops, that's not a pseudo threat.
I sense some trepidation around not having unfettered access to swim in the whole ocean as a child with more and more sharks and angel fish floating around.
The environment to monitor is increasingly digital, not just in person. See my note above about parents who think their kids are safe at home, when they're letting the entire unfiltered world into their kids devices, eyes, minds without context.
The reality is those parents have tried nothing and are all out of ideas, or, in the vast majority of cases, simply don't care.
This is not at all about children by the way, because all millenials have grown while consuming porn and social media, and haven't turned into degenerates. It is 100% an excuse to spy on citizens, and nothing else.
If it's simple to begin with doing this, or things to try specifically that can build any parents skills and competencies in this area, mind sharing that?
While we’re posting honest opinions that run against the consensus on this site:
In my view, freedom of speech is a natural right that no government can take away. But no such guarantee exists that you can do so anonymously.
Now before you immediately flame me to death, please read a bit further:
We already have a hodgepodge of laws in basically every jurisdiction around logging IP addresses, cooperating with law enforcement when there’s a warrant, being able to track down who is (say) organizing violence, posting csam, etc. Like it or not, the government is entitled to search and seizure if there is a warrant signed by a judge to do so, and if you run an online service where can people can post things publicly, you better damn well keep logs of who’s posting things and you better cooperate if a law enforcement officer with a warrant asks you to.
So what I propose is that we streamline all of this. At age 16 you get a digital ID that works something like a FIDO chip that can be used to prove your identity to a government authentication server. Sub in/out whatever tech you want, it can be a passkey (blech), something resembling a yubikey, etc. You get them at your local post office, where you can actually prove your identity in person. There’s post offices everywhere, and they’re already meant to serve everyone in the country.
But critically, this key isn’t used to auth to any sites except a government-run signin service. The service itself would be a modified form of OAuth/OIDC that preserves privacy from the site you’re making an account on. They don’t know who you are, they just get a signed payload from the government signin site saying “this is a user over the age of 16”, and via a pre-established relationship between the website in question and the government auth site, a UUID is minted for that legal person. It will be the same UUID for that website for the same person, so you can’t just pretend you’re multiple people when you create multiple accounts.
With this system, and using Reddit as an example site that may leverage this:
- Reddit can’t know who you actually are, they only get a UUID and a signed payload indicating you’re over 16 (or whatever other set of properties are legally salient for the account.) In the event of a breach, all you’d get is a list of Reddit-specific UUID’s. You’d have to also hack the government auth service to know who these people actually are.
- The government doesn’t know who owns your username on Reddit, they only know the list of citizens that have Reddit accounts at all.
- In the event of a crime with a warrant, the government can compel Reddit to inform them which UUID corresponds to some account. Reddit continues to not know who the account belongs to.
- Every site using this system gets a completely different UUID for the same legal person and has no ability to correlate them
- Every legal person using this system has no idea what their UUID is for any site
- Every site using this doesn’t have to worry at all about proving identity. They get working auth for every legal person in $country, streamlining signups and onboarding, and doesn’t have to worry about asking the user to prove they’re over 16.
- You still get pseudo-anonymity in that you can use an alias (as many as the site allows, too), the site can remain blissfully ignorant as to who you really are, as well as everyone who reads your posts, etc.
- The government can find out who owns an account, but only with a warrant. They don’t have a list of account/UUID mappings anywhere.
This system is probably the most closely aligned to how I would do things if I was somehow “in charge”… you have a right to pseudo-anonymity, but you don’t have a right to cover your tracks so thoroughly that the government can’t track you down with a proper warrant.
With such a system, saying “social media is for ages 16 and up” is a simple checkbox in the signup flow. Done.
You can argue all day about whether a government should be able to uncloak your accounts with a warrant, but to me that question is already settled: yes, they absolutely can do that, they do so today all the time. Except today we have messy data breaches where everyone’s identity gets leaked because every site has to reinvent their own form of proving your legal identity (in the case of Facebook/etc) or simply proving you’re a certain age (uploading ID, etc.). I’d take a centralized government-run approach to what we have today any day.
You could ask “but should government be in the business of electronic authentication and identity?” And my answer is: “YES.” It’s basically the primary function of a working government! We trust them to issue passports for chrissake. To me this is basic table stakes in the 21st century. If we did government all over again, having the government provide a service to prove online identity is basically right up there with “collects tax revenue.”
Now, in the current government up to the challenge of doing this, and not fucking it up? Yeeesh, probably not. You got me there. But one can dream…
> Now, in the current government up to the challenge of doing this, and not fucking it up? Yeeesh, probably not. You got me there. But one can dream…
The question should be about whether any future government would be up to the challenge of not fucking it up, as the system would stay in place and only grow in size. That's why privacy-invading infrastructure like this should be kept to a minimum.
> Parents, especially with the advent of social media, hardcore pornography, and every childhood friend having a device, correctly said this was unreasonable and impossible.
It is neither unreasonable or impossible. No need to hand the kids a device that can access the open internet. If parents do, restrict or deny gadget time. Stick to a Nintendo or console.
Learned helplessness and codependency on internet is part of the sales pitch of big tech, salesmen in general. They push self doubt and sell their solution.
Fill the time showing kids how to rotate tires and change oil. Show them how to make pizza crust.
Learned helplessness is a feature of capitalism. Not immutable feature of physical existence.
It's still moralist pearl-clutching in service of totalitarian horseshit no matter how you'd like to justify it.
I don't even think you're strictly 100% incorrect here. That said, I refuse to entertain the "think of the children" horseshit when parents happily park their kid in front of an iPad for hours a day because it shuts them up, not with kink content they shouldn't see, but with AI/algorithmically generated garbage, or for that matter, human generated garbage, that rots their brains far more than any gimp costume ever could.
For fucks sake, 12 kids in America die PER DAY due to mass shootings, and we can't even pass common sense gun regulations that the vast majority of gun owners are completely fine with. We don't give a fuck about our kids here. This has from jump, and continues to be, astro-turfed puritan whining not merely to pornography of whatever preferred kind of the moment, but to the existence of queer people as a whole.
It IS parents' fucking responsibility, and maybe that is an onerous burden, but instead of even attempting to meet it, the majority of parents have abdicated it. And it isn't porn fucking their kids up, it's non-stop screen exposure leaving them with no attention span and no ability to simply BE BORED.
There is probably nothing that is safe for a toddler to have displayed on a screen 6 inches from their face for an hour+ a day, either for their physical or mental development. Adults suffer as well, but at least by their own agency.
Also to point out, if a 10 year old walks in to the street and is hit by a car, their parent gets charged now (in some US jurisdictions.) The idea that the adult is not responsible for the child does not correspond with US law. Maybe it's different in Europe.
A secondary issue is tech companies on-boarding children to having public social media profiles (and their parents posting the child's entire lives on their own) -- which is completely asinine and appalling. That bridge was breached years ago and somehow no one complained loud enough. Certainly a mistake.
Well, gang members go out looking for trouble, for one thing. For another, they would just as well use knives, bats, chains, hatchets, or any other terrible implement to commit crime. Banning guns just makes it difficult or impossible for non-gang members to defend themselves.
Fucking AI summaries. Correct you are, 12-per-day is the combo shot of all gun deaths in children in totality, which includes much more banal things like unsecured firearms in the home.
That being said, my point remains: the #1 threat to children in this country is guns, wielded by classmates, road-ragers, gang members, or stored improperly. We still have no meaningful gun regulation in huge areas, and no public will to see it done. And this kind of insipid bullshit is what we're doing instead.
If you look it up, the most gun crimes occur in Democrat-run gun-grabber areas that have the most gun laws. Disarming people is an unacceptable solution for many reasons. It also doesn't work. The best solution to gun crime is to arm the law-abiding.
> If you look it up, the most gun crimes occur in Democrat-run gun-grabber areas that have the most gun laws.
Highly populated areas tend to be Democrat-run. People commit crimes so places with more people = more crimes. More gun crimes cause people to push for more gun laws. Gun laws limited to cities (or even states) have limited impact when it's trivial to get guns from neighboring areas without those laws. Gun laws with limited impact can still be helpful.
It's not as if we don't know for a fact that legislation works (since it works for many many other counties) but a patchwork system of laws that only applies to some areas and not others is bound to perform worse than federal systems. Even federal systems need to be smart and actually managed and enforced correctly to work well.
> Disarming people is an unacceptable solution for many reasons.
Disarming people is an acceptable solution for many reasons. We already do it to all kinds of people in many circumstances. It's just a question of when/how much is appropriate for which circumstances.
> The best solution to gun crime is to arm the law-abiding.
Only if you're a gun/ammo manufacturer. Real world evidence has shown over and over that the best solution is laws placing legal regulations on firearms. We can point to nation after nation whose gun problems are drastically lower than ours because of the laws they enacted.
On the other hand, there exists only fantasy world evidence that giving every man woman and child a gun would solve the problem. Arguably it's already been tried in the US and the result was complete failure.
>Highly populated areas tend to be Democrat-run. People commit crimes so places with more people = more crimes. More gun crimes cause people to push for more gun laws.
Are you suggesting that there are no red cities? The only sense in which this is true is that more laws = more crimes lol.
>It's not as if we don't know for a fact that legislation works (since it works for many many other counties) but a patchwork system of laws that only applies to some areas and not others is bound to perform worse than federal systems. Even federal systems need to be smart and actually managed and enforced correctly to work well.
The federal gun laws are dumb and unconstitutional. I could be on board with disarming children, violent criminals, and nutcases. Anyone else should be able to own a gun if they want to, through a convenient process. That is to say, the current federal laws are at the limit of where I want them to be, if not beyond.
I don't care about other countries. They let themselves be disarmed, and they will ultimately suffer tyranny as a result.
>On the other hand, there exists only fantasy world evidence that giving every man woman and child a gun would solve the problem. Arguably it's already been tried in the US and the result was complete failure.
It's a fact that guns curb certain kinds of crime. The mere possibility that a thug might not survive an encounter with granny means he will think long and hard before making a move on her. The fact that normal people might lose their shit keeps politicians in line. Give up your rights, and evil will follow.
> They let themselves be disarmed, and they will ultimately suffer tyranny as a result.
There's plenty of tyranny in the USA today and guns have done nothing to stop it. There are countless videos on youtube right now of government tyranny in America, how many videos have you seen of tyranny by the State being stopped because someone pulled out a gun or opened fire?
I'm not saying that rhetorically, if you've got a bunch of youtube videos of people shooting police or politicians engaged in tyranny which successfully stopped that tyranny from taking place please respond with links. I'd be genuinely interested in seeing them.
> The mere possibility that a thug might not survive an encounter with granny means he will think long and hard
This is demonstrably false. Everywhere in the US there is a possibility that grannies can have a gun, but nowhere, even the places where there is concealed carry and a large number of gun owners, has crime been stopped as a result. Muggings still happen. Beatings still happen. Rapes still happen. Thugs don't "think long and hard" period. Guns don't make a difference. Gang members in particular aren't scared of guns. They have guns too. They've been shot, or been shot at, many times. They've watched their friends be killed by gunfire. None of that stops them.
> The fact that normal people might lose their shit keeps politicians in line.
Where do you live where your politicians are kept in line at all, or by anything except maybe fear of not being reelected? Again, there are countless examples of politicians out of line all over this country. The number of guns/gun owners has zero impact on government corruption. It's everywhere.
> Give up your rights, and evil will follow.
I, like most Americans, don't want to abolish the 2nd amendment, but like with all of our rights, there are reasonable restrictions and limits that can be placed on it which would still allow people to defend their homes and hunt and shoot while still bringing gun deaths closer to what we see in other counties.
>There's plenty of tyranny in the USA today and guns have done nothing to stop it.
Guns stop crime which is a form of tyranny. As for government tyranny, you are not going to be able to fight a heavily armed tyrant without guns. We didn't win independence from the British via debate. Guns are a factor in reigning in deranged politicians. That is why they want to disarm everyone.
>This is demonstrably false. Everywhere in the US there is a possibility that grannies can have a gun, but nowhere, even the places where there is concealed carry and a large number of gun owners, has crime been stopped as a result.
Crime has been reduced by gun ownership.
>Thugs don't "think long and hard" period. Guns don't make a difference. Gang members in particular aren't scared of guns. They have guns too. They've been shot, or been shot at, many times. They've watched their friends be killed by gunfire. None of that stops them.
They do fear guns. They have guns because they are effective for self-defense, even for criminals. Hard-boiled criminals fear guns. Even if you find some that are so calloused and/or stupid that they don't fear guns, the guns will protect you from those criminals anyway. The gun does not care what its target thinks of it.
>Where do you live where your politicians are kept in line at all, or by anything except maybe fear of not being reelected?
Like I said, it is a factor. The people who want to take our guns are heavily guarded by men with guns. Take the hint.
>I, like most Americans, don't want to abolish the 2nd amendment, but like with all of our rights, there are reasonable restrictions and limits that can be placed on it which would still allow people to defend their homes and hunt and shoot while still bringing gun deaths closer to what we see in other counties.
We already have background checks on every legal gun purchase and extra unconstitutional laws restricting many types of firearms. There is a de-facto and illegal national gun registry.
For all the benefits we get from government, it remains the biggest domestic menace to all of us and we must take steps to not allow ourselves to be defenseless against the state. How do you think genocides happen? The second amendment is not for hunting, or for warding off low-level thugs, though it might be useful for those purposes. It is there to give normal people a real chance to reign in evil in government. A standing professional army would not win against a well-armed majority standing up for their own rights. Even if they did win, it would be a Pyrrhic victory.
I haven't read that but "gun death rate" is not the same as "gun crime rate"... Of course I expect guns to be used more in areas where they are available. Many legitimate self-defense cases are imperfect as well, and technically count as crime for BS reasons. Gun suicide rates probably would be higher with more guns owned by the public.
In summary, I don't think you are right and I would still support broad gun ownership rights even if you were correct about per capita. I am more worried about the public not having guns than having guns.
OK. There isn't any arguing with anyone who doesn't have a problem with the idea that someone else's right not to be murdered is less important than their unlimited gun ownership rights, which is the only conclusion I can draw from what you are saying. So I will leave you to the hell of your own making, I guess.
Guns prevent murder. There's not much you can do besides using a gun to defend yourself against physically superior individuals or groups of people. Banning guns does not prevent murder, it just changes the methods. If you are worried about being murdered, you should probably get a gun lol.
Assuming that the number is real, 12 children dying every day from guns is the opposite of VERY low. It's insane. What is your limit? How many child corpses do you think need to be put into the ground every day before the government should pass the kind of laws most Americans are asking them to?
Unlike how most Americans want something done about guns, they don't want to be tracked. There is a lot of opposition to it once people are made aware of the issue. Censorship is pretty unpopular too, although while the majority tends to oppose it, it's far more popular with people in the US than is should be.
>How many child corpses do you think need to be put into the ground every day before the government should pass the kind of laws most Americans are asking them to?
There are already plenty of gun laws. "Most Americans" are only in favor of more laws to the extent they don't understand what is already in place, except for those that want a blanket ban on guns. There are many millions of legal gun owners in the US, and you should be thankful for that.
Out of many millions of people, 12 per day is a rounding error. You'd probably save more lives by launching a campaign telling kids to tie their shoes or lay off the soda, for real. How many bodies are worth our freedom? Millions die in wars, for far worse reasons than a few hundred as a natural consequence of being free. It is very hard to quantify the benefits of owning a gun because only crimes are reported.
Also, what gun grabbers don't understand (or choose to ignore) is that the people who are murdered by their peers with a gun could just as easily be murdered with a knife, or a brick. They might not be able to do it so quick, but a deranged person can go John Wick on your ass with a sharpened pencil. If you walk alone without a gun, you also have no way to defend yourself against a gang of several thugs. But with a gun, even grandma has a fighting chance of escaping nearly any crime.
> Out of many millions of people, 12 per day is a rounding error. You'd probably save more lives by launching a campaign telling kids to tie their shoes or lay off the soda, for real.
If I told you that I kidnapped 12 kids every single day and fed them into a woodchipper would that be acceptable to you because it's "just a rounding error" or because "You'd save more lives telling kids to tie their shoes than by stopping me"? Any number of children I threw into that woodchipper would be an unacceptable number of children and of course actions should be taken to stop or at the very least reduce those deaths. It's no different with gun deaths.
> Also, what gun grabbers don't understand (or choose to ignore) is that the people who are murdered by their peers with a gun could just as easily be murdered with a knife, or a brick.
Once again, the facts don't support your argument. We know that mass-stabbers don't kill as many people as mass-shooters. It's obvious why that is, you even said it yourself: Sharpened pencils and bricks are slow and far less effective at killing than guns. There's a reason why the militaries of the world arm their troops with guns and not just bricks and knives. People with bricks and sharpened pencils (which become very hard to hold on to while covered in blood by the way) are far easier to disarm safely. It is much much harder to kill with those everyday objects than with guns.
Obviously psychopaths will still find ways of killing people. Keeping the most deadly weapons out of their hands, or making it more difficult for them to get those weapons will reduce the number of deaths they can inflict on us which is something everyone should want.
>If I told you that I kidnapped 12 kids every single day and fed them into a woodchipper would that be acceptable to you
In all aspects of life, risk is involved. Would you ban cars because some children are hurt by them? Would you ban playground equipment on those grounds? Keep kids in cages because they might get kidnapped if they go to the corner store?
I can't put an exact number on it, but the potential victimhood of children and others does not invalidate our basic rights to self-governance and self-defense. Even if you could ascribe violence to guns solely (you can't really) there are many benefits to keeping the right to own guns. If safety comes at the cost of freedom, it's not worth it.
>We know that mass-stabbers don't kill as many people as mass-shooters.
The stats on such things are unreliable. Many gang shootings are registered as mass shootings.
>People with bricks and sharpened pencils (which become very hard to hold on to while covered in blood by the way) are far easier to disarm safely. It is much much harder to kill with those everyday objects than with guns.
When it comes to murder, all of these methods are effective. Guns may be the worst because they draw attention. On the other hand, would-be victims are much safer when armed.
>Obviously psychopaths will still find ways of killing people. Keeping the most deadly weapons out of their hands, or making it more difficult for them to get those weapons will reduce the number of deaths they can inflict on us which is something everyone should want.
Again, we have laws that require background checks for buying guns. I'm in favor of that, or at least not strongly opposed. But I do not in any way support banning guns for ordinary law-abiding citizens.
I guess, but there's a philosophy that goes something along the lines of: Government is not the answer to every problem. It's a very divisive issue, clearly. Technical people were never going to solve the problem of kids having access to adult materials online because tech people are only interested in making gobs of money, not in dealing with delicate social issues. Government isn't going to fix anything, either, mind you, because the moment the crackdowns begin, the technologists will walk right in with a solution. Maybe we'll finally have the distributed, peer-to-peer network we always thought we were getting but instead got centrally controlled nodes featuring mass surveillance.
I stopped worrying about it as a parent. My kids want to look at porn? Let them. If they want to see horrible, violent shit that gives them nightmares and they can't un-see it, let them. They'll either figure it out or they will be lifetime children looking for big daddy government to solve all their stupid problems for them and society will collapse.
I don't know whats more damaging - watching some beheading video when 12 or having controlling parents that do not leave you any autonomy even in the digital space.
Personally i prefer the beheading video as its not far from whats already on TV.
I’m puzzled by the limited opposition from businesses regarding government attempts to access encrypted communications. Granting governments easy access—which inevitably leads to uncontrolled monitoring—compromises a company’s most valuable asset: its privacy. This would effectively hand over the keys to their operations, exposing them to security breaches, stifling growth potential, limiting access to competitive markets, and ultimately, jeopardizing company ownership. Corrupt officials could exploit this access to manipulate markets, facilitate insider trading, sabotage business plans, and even plant fabricated evidence within company communications and systems, leading to potential takeover and imprisonment of owners.
In my experience, companies care about things that affect them but not their competitors. But government shenanigans tend to affect all companies equally, and so does not affect market share, and is therefore mostly ignored by companies.
As already posted in another comment:
Here is just one solution that helps parents, and respects everyone's privacy:
Allow any organization that already legitimately verifies ages (i.e. credit card company, driver's license issuer, ...) to provide a cryptographic key to their clients, that they can use to anonymously verifiably assert they are 18+ to any adult sites they visit.This solution (1) gives sites no user information except 18+ verification, and (2) gives key providers no information about sites clients visit.
Everyone wins:• Parents jobs get easier.
• Children are less likely to encounter adult material.
• Everyone's privacy is protected.
• Adult sites can verify 18+ ages, without driving users away.
Not solving/mitigating endemic child access to adult sites is (1) a great disservice to parents and children, and (2) makes the success of draconian surveillance legislation MORE likely.
(If you have a critique of this solution, please frame it as an issue to resolve, not a categorical swipe at crafting solutions. The cynical prevalence of the latter is so damaging to these debates.)
Or parents could set accounts to "child" and every service send the proper tags so the programs deny access locally. No third parties involved.
PICS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...
POWDER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...
ASACP/RTA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...
Reality check: Children have many and useful opportunities to use devices in all kinds of situations away from parents.
Useful situations. On devices parents don't control.
Expecting parents to follow their children around 24/7, in case they access some adult site from a public or friend's device they don't control is beyond ridiculous.
Privacy protecting, anonymous validation of 18+ status solves the problem, in a way that doesn't require unrealistic "parenting" behavior, protects everyone's privacy, and is even helpful to responsible adult sites.
Condescendingly telling parents to "parent" in a way that is virtually impossible, instead of helping, is just rolling out the red carpet for alternate non-anonymous age verification legislation.
Zero knowledge tech, like end-to-end encryption, protects privacy.
Children will always be able to use devices or accounts borrowed or bought from adults, regardless of how the initial verification is carried out. Not to mention that the verification key / token / device might also be borrowed or when copied or transferred, depending on how it's implemented.
I think a device level setting is actually quite pragmatic.
What exactly is unrealistic in marking child devices as a child device?
Also known as "parenting". This would be solved long ago if it were not a politically charged topic. So much wasted time, it boggles the mind.
I am having trouble understanding how anyone is unaware that children have pervasive and useful access to devices outside of their parent's sphere on a daily basis.
Or why anyone would discourage use of cryptographically hard privacy protecting solutions.
This is the perfect opportunity to take zero knowledge proofs mainstream, like end-to-end encryption, as a solution for myriads of current privacy leaking services and infrastructure.
The alternative to cryptographically protected privacy, is sites increasingly collecting people's identifiable information and associating their identities with access/behavior logs. Information that can never be assumed to stay private.
Where exactly children have this access in your opinion?
Let’s start with friend’s devices. Children have lots of devices and lots of friends.
Friend’s phones, home computers and devices of other family members.
Unattended PCs and laptops at school. According to a music teacher who has literally had to clean her work computer after it was used for erotic viewing by students when the music room in a temp building wasn’t otherwise in use.
Web browsers on game consoles, e-readers, VR headsets, smart TVs, tablets, …
Now throw in constant device turnover, software updates, including settings panel changes, and settings values that get reverted, across the board.
I am not sure why you wanted my opinion. That’s less of an opinion and more of a list of what counts as ordinary for the last decade or so.
So if we secure personal devices of children, with simple, standardized "child-owned" marker, we're basically back to 80s/90s, where children could occasionally get access to adult material via friends or irresponsible adults.
In my opinion that's more than enough, especially when you compare it to requiring everyone to identify themselves. It may be ZPK on the tin, but likely it will be close-source, corporation owned implementation, which will have holes. Then in a few years we will learn that Meta exploited them for years to sell your soul for ad money.
Btw - students occasionally steal teacher's cars. Should we block engine start with ID check too?
> In my opinion that's more than enough, especially when you compare it to requiring everyone to identify themselves.
The solution I proposed was the opposite of people identifying themselves.
Zero knowledge proofs. Enabling trusted verification without revealing identity is exactly what cryptographers designed them for.
We should be using them everywhere. Like end-to-end encryption they provide massive privacy, security, and trust (I.e. ability to verify intended disclosure) improvements.
Or we can complain about parents, the ones who care enough to ask for better help, while legislatures keep passing identity revealing anti-privacy rules. That seems to be the direction many are taking here. Complain, condescendingly, don’t solve anything. Repeat.
I have a categorical swipe to make, sadly this is a human problem, and attempts to solve it using technology are doomed to fail or to be increasingly complex and require endless modifications.
Your solution sounds good and should work fine, and be easy to implement, which is perfect! But people will soon wonder what all the elderly people that are living in retirement homes without internet access are doing on porn sites watching mostly the overwatch and fortnite cosplay themed videos...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46247515
I am having trouble understanding how that is a swipe.
If you are pointing out that the technical solution I proposed isn't perfect, that children may steal their older family members identities, I agree.
As noted, imperfection is a common, unhelpful argument, against improvement. However, identifying imperfections is constructive, if the point is to continue to solve problems. (Kids stealing identities isn't great for many reasons.)
I can't prove that there are no technical solutions to this kind of problems, but it certainly feels like so (to me).
It's like electronic voting, you can have the best cryptography hardware and software in the world, if the end user does not understand at least on a surface level how it works, it will be vulnerable against manipulation. You can certainly keep the same system and educate all users, but that's a whole other class of problem.
Well we can build out privacy preserving standards, with cryptography that already exists. (You can go to Wikipedia or many other places to verify for yourself what kinds of things cryptography can do.)
Or we can continue to have our identities and activities logged by more and more actors. And our online and even offline experiences “personalized” for us for ends that are not friendly. Now add AI, which is only in its early stages, actively participating in our surveillance and manipulation.
Privacy holes are serious security holes.
Ironic or not, zero knowledge proofs allow people to volunteer exactly the information needed for an interaction and no more.
Isn’t that the ideal? Maximize both freedom and trust? With existing tech.
Flip the parental concern upside down. Let’s take the side of genuinely responsible adult sites. Isn’t their ideal to be able to verify that visitors are adults, without surveiling them? Avoiding becoming a resource and target for other actors? A target for lawsuits if they are hacked or leak information.
Lots of adult sites are already unhappy for being put in that role in a growing number of regions.
How do you prevent people from using their keys to set up servers that remotely provide tokens to anyone?
I don’t have a full design out of the blue.
But as design criteria go, that is certainly a sensible one to include.
Just a random first idea, the key effectively auto updates, I.e it’s a time varying key chain. I can think of several ways to do that, so the time varying nature can’t be replicated by someone else without the same originating account. But couldn’t say if any were good or not. It is something to design carefully, as all cryptographic systems need to be.
Other criteria would be easy revocation by the original key holder. Keys that are created from any multiple number of independent accounts, blind to each other, that the key recipient chooses.
Again, just throwing out first thoughts.
Before anyone who hasn’t read the actual link reacts to its current title and gets swept up by the single thread that’s dominated the entirety of this submission, it’s an interview.
Alexander Linton of the Session Technology Foundation on building decentralized messaging and why platform-wide content moderation is impractical on encrypted platforms.
Not familiar with him or the platform. But sounds like an interesting exchange.
I was two thirds of the way into the article before they revealed that this messenger is just a shitcoin vehicle.
reminder - there's tech out there capable of reading your mind. noninvasively and from afar
Today's FTFY: s/Privacy/Anonymity/
Make sure that it's impossible for my online actions to be traced to my identity, and then I don't need privacy, because there is no association that needs to be hidden and protected.
I see this distinction mentioned from time to time and it doesn't make sense to me. IMO, your actions not being tracable to your identity is privacy. In this framing, anonymity is part of privacy. You desire anonymity because of the privacy it gives you. Which is not to say that anonymity is always required for privacy though it tends to strengthen it.
Similarly, sometimes people say there's a tradeoff between security and privacy, which doesn't make sense since privacy (confidentiality) is one dimension of information security.
If you still disagree, could you attempt at defining privacy and anonymity and how you can prioritize meaningful anonymity without caring about privacy?
There are two sense of "privacy". Actual privacy, which of course is subsumed under anonymity, and the fake "privacy" that everyone is telling you they have a policy about and are assuring, while they track you and collect personal information.
Thanks for following up.
Food for thought: Rather than nitpick on people who apparently use the word in earnest in its actual meaning and thereby conceding that those policies are actually "taking your privacy seriously", rendering the word void of meaning, we educate and take it back?
Saying "Make sure that it's impossible for my online actions to be traced to my identity, and then I don't need privacy" is in a way giving up on privacy alltogether.
Probably a push back against the commercialization of the term privacy to now mean "we get your data and share it widely for money making purposes, but here are the terms so you have privacy."
"Privacy policy" is definitely one of the most prominent Newspeak terms around today. The full term should read "how we'll violate your privacy policy".
The longer you rely on anonymity for your privacy, and keep leaving tidbits about yourself out there, the more likely it becomes that anyone interested in breaking that anonymity can do so.
Sounds like you might be talking about some strawman anonymity whereby the user takes some feeble steps on their own, in the face of systems that doing everything they can to rob them of anonymity.
[dead]
Let me be blunt with what I think happened here.
For years, technical people insisted it was the parent’s job to monitor Internet safety. Parents, especially with the advent of social media, hardcore pornography, and every childhood friend having a device, correctly said this was unreasonable and impossible.
Technical people had a chance for two decades to solve this problem on their terms. Instead we collectively decided that anyone articulating this point of view must be a morally panicked maniac, and that this is a problem with “no reasonable solutions” that we would tolerate. Now we don’t get to dictate the terms, because everyone has had enough, and nobody has patience left for kids watching BDSM on their friend’s phones at 12.
Because of our industry’s refusal to take those concerns seriously, we lost our voice, we lost the grounds of sounding reasonable, and the floodgates are now open - for everything. Nobody is listening anymore to our point of view and arguably correctly so.
When I was 12 our computer was in the living room and shared by everyone. It could access porn but you had to wait till you were the only one in the home.
There's a pretty simple solution here if you don't already see it and I'm not sure why it isn't more acceptable. It solves all the problems you mention. You don't want kids being sucked into social media? Sucked into porn? Constantly staring at their screens?
Have you ever considered not giving your kids smartphones?
Or have you decided the benefits are worth the costs?
Let's be honest here, even with strong government intervention this is always a cat and mouse game. The play of "no smartphone" is going to be far stronger than anything the government can ever do. Why is this not an option?
“No smartphone” is a boundary, and U.S. parents are often raised not to set boundaries under threat of mental, emotional, and/or physical abuse. So it makes perfect sense that we have now-parents completely unable to define and discuss boundaries with their children. Far better to capitulate in the face of an uncertain and not life-threatening risk than to allow their child to ever think that boundaries are healthy, etc. For the unfamiliar, here is a good starting point for understanding the generational cognitive dissonance in play: https://www.issendai.com/psychology/estrangement/contradicto...
Even the most Laissez-faire of parenting has boundaries; no reasonable adult is allowing their teenager to experiment with heroin or giving their 12 year old permission to drive their car down the freeway. The problem is that smartphone access isn't seen in the same category of danger that recreational opiates and unlicensed driving are in.
“Reasonable” is a lynchpin bearing an awful lot of load here. Most people unfortunately aren’t very reasonable.
> “Reasonable” is a lynchpin bearing an awful lot of load here.
No it's not. I could imagine sentences where it would be, but not this sentence. Here, watch me replace the word:
"99% of adults are not allowing their teenager to to experiment with heroin or giving their 12 year old permission to drive their car down the freeway."
Even if most people aren't ""reasonable"", they are whatever adjective that sentence describes.
“Over half of U.S. adults surveyed said that it’s very inappropriate, somewhat appropriate, or were uncertain whether it’s appropriate for their child to set boundaries for their interactions” is a reasonable-sounding statement, too; it’s plausible, applies to children of all ages (below or beyond age 25!), and is demonstrably an aspect of culture represented by media and other ephemera.
The position itself is, of course, completely unreasonable — boundaries are never inappropriate to consider (and to contrast with the parent’s boundaries about immediate versus deferred conversations in unsafe circumstances, the child’s age and cognitive ability to assess risk, and so on), no matter how uncomfortable it is to teach a child about boundaries by honoring one they’ve presented one! — but that intolerance is presented in such a reasonable guise, with a tone of majority support to quash any brief qualms, that it causes many to overlook its true nature.
See also “pleasant”, as in “Pleasantville”.
If you thought the discussion was actually about 12 year olds doing heroin and driving, I think you might have missed something.
That sentence was the only part of the argument using the idea of something being "reasonable".
Whether you agree or disagree with their general stance, the word "reasonable" isn't load bearing.
In particular they didn't say that limiting cell phones was reasonable, or requires parents to be reasonable. They just wanted an example of parents enforcing boundaries.
The only load-bearing part of that sentence is the idea that parents do enforce those boundaries. Which they do. It's irrelevant if they are doing it because they're "reasonable".
TL;DR: I do know what the discussion is about. But your comment wasn't about the general discussion, it was about the quality of a specific point, and I'm defending that specific point.
It's a pretty generalized phenomena too. Few people actually think about the assumptions their arguments rely upon. It makes actual discussions difficult to have and leads to more arguing than problem solving
I'm sure you've got some hard data about the crazy amount of parents knowingly letting little Timmy develop an addiction to street drugs
It's starting to change in places, including in the US.
The reality is it's not the smartphone, but the slot machine type software running on it.
There's more than enough science that placing this kind of content in front of humans before their prefrontal cortex is fully formed at age 25-26 leads them to leaning on the pre-frontal context of the adults around them, and missing that, whatever they're spending the most time with that's then possibly raising them.
Screens at lower resolutions and quality didn't seem to be as much of an issue compared to the hyper saturated motion with sound effects that are consciously chosen to keep eyeballs.
Like anything, digital can be used for good, or bad, and in lieu of good, the other can to happen and become more of a default.
I agree but it is much harder to stop people from building slot machines than to stop children from using them. Even easier than telling people to stop using them.
And hey, maybe if we actually take some autonomy and remove that market from actors who don't want to build the things the market is requesting then they'll actually build the things the market is requesting... it's easy to say we want something but no one listens when we still buy the thing we say we hate. Maybe it's addiction but it's still hard to fight against. (Though we could still do better by accommodating those who are trying to break the network effects. You can complain how hard it is to get off Facebook but if you're not going to make the minuscule extra effort to accommodate those who do leave then how can you expect the ground to be laid for you to?)
At the end of the day though, with kids, the OP's argument fails because it either assumes smartphones are an inevitability or that the benefits outweigh the costs. It's a bad argument.
The market isn't always requesting thing, viral consumer loops are used to form addictive habits to get a market to request things.
That being said, it could be used for more positive things too, beyond attention farming and resale to ads alone.
I remain sympathetic to parents who don't know where to start in terms of understanding technology and computers. It is a big topic. But I am entirely unsympathetic to parents who throw up their hands and make no effort.
At this point, any parent saying, "I just don't understand technology," or, "I just don't have the time to mind my childrens' computer use or monitor their Internet access," is morally equivalent to saying, "I just don't understand traffic safety," and, "I just don't have the time to teach my children the rules of the road or how to cross the street," while living in a big, bustling city.
It is lazy, entitled, and negligent. The world is full of networked computers and, barring some new massive Carrington event, is never going back to the way it was before.
Many parents think their kids are safe when they are inside the home, without realizing they are letting in the entire world, including things worse than they ever imagined into their homes, through the devices.
In the past, the general disconnection of the world and information had a natural insulation factor. Probably less so today.
Rather than admonish adults, it's actually quite common that many people in many professions don't know how to purchase, or implement software in their day to day work, let alone at home.
Maybe, this is is an aspect of digital literacy that has been lacking - we know that the consumer habit loop that smartphones go after is not always about digital health, or the user's digital literacy, it's about capturing their attention.
Parents actually seem to want the same kind of quality curation not just with the internet, but all areas of their children's lives.
The free for all they may have grown up with 20-40 years ago is simply not the same any more online, or offline.
In that way, even trying to make an effort sometimes isn't enough I'd say. Ignorance is one thing, but maybe it could seem like negligence to others.
Would there be some possible solutions or approaches you or others could offer here to help parents build the skills that lead to not giving up? Sincerely curious where folks see the starting point of these skills.
>Ignorance is one thing, but maybe it could seem like negligence to others.
In person I've found the difference to be usually very clear. It's why I distinguish between the sympathic attitude of "I don't know where to start" and the contemptible reaction that "therefore I will act as if nothing is wrong, or write it off as someone else's fault."
>Would there be some possible solutions or approaches you or others could offer here to help parents build the skills that lead to not giving up? Sincerely curious where folks see the starting point of these skills.
It's a hard problem. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, and almost as much time talking to relatives with children. I have come to no happy, easy answers.
Carey Parker's Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons is a good starting point to Security and Privacy, but not really how computers work. There are various books I remember from childhood about how computers work, but I don't really remember the process of coming to understand computers distinctly because it was both early and continuous over a long period.
I think the best we'll do as a species is one-to-three computer people per extended family. And I think the key will be teaching those people how to be of service to their families. But there's not really an existing framework for a "computer court wizard" in each family nor for what maxims and/or proscriptions such a person might teach computer illiterate family members in order to use computers safely and protect the family's children from the worst of dark algorithms, surveillance, and abuse/predators online.
It's completely uncharted territory.
Appreciate the thoughtful reply.
I'm not sure its entirely uncharted territory.
TV channels used to get managed. Magazines used to get managed.
There is a lot more volume now, obviously.
Tools like Circle can provide some level of family level DNS which can help.
Something that stands out is also helping parents get a handle on their own consumption and habits to be able to better teach kids on what to look out for.
The conceptual frontier of a world of networked computers is uncharted, and we are in the well along into that dark frontier now. I don't think TV or magazines are a good point of comparison, nor anything from the analog world of yesterday.
Analog mass media couldn't dynamically adapt itself to individual viewer proclivities in order to attract attention. Parents can understand that children shouldn't watch TV at night because society has agreed to constrain more mature programming to when children are mostly asleep. We can understand not to leave a Playboy magazine lying around in reach of children or, better, not to have such things in a family home at all. But digital media defies more than convention... It defies all points of reference a human computer-layperson might have in the analog world that could help to understand it fully.
Try to explain to someone on the street the sorts of things that are and are not possible with computers and networks, and why various things fall into one or the other category. Watch their eyes glaze over. Absent points of reference and useful context it's almost anticomprehensible.
>Something that stands out is also helping parents get a handle on their own consumption and habits to be able to better teach kids on what to look out for.
Strongly agree. I've always shied away from algorithmically managed feeds and dark patterns. It felt instinctual to me but I think those instincts were born from coming to understand computers at a young age. Humanity at large has basically zero instincts for the digital world... Yet. Square one may be feeling the difference when you cut slopfeed content and targeted advertising out of your life. Square two may be new, computer-age fables to cultivate those instincts among those who aren't (and largely won't ever be) deeply computer literate. The sort of parables every single American grew up deciphering in McGuffey readers, once upon a time, but concerning things like, "a person can pretend to be anyone online, and that can cause trouble," or, "the boy who gave away his secrets could never get them back."
It is not my job to parent your fucking child. You want to talk about responsibility? Take some.
This frames the issue in a fundamentally incorrect way.
Since the dawn of pseudoanonymous communication, politicians have been trying to get their nasty little claws into it. See Clipper Chip in the 90's. They've tried many avenues to deanonymize and centralize. Going after the parents is just their latest - they've discovered they could use convincing language like this to trick a bunch of people who previously had no reason to care about The Internet to now suddenly "realize" oh gosh it's scary out there, what can we do to help.
Unfortunately their latest tactic is working. They figured out how to recruit a (possibly) well-intentioned bloc into supporting efforts that undermine privacy in an irreversible way.
> Because of our industry’s refusal to take those concerns seriously, we lost our voice,
Fighting against demands to censor, unmask, and neuter the closest thing we've got to a global platform of freedom is a valiant effort. Not entertaining these bureaucrats isn't some moral failing of our industry, in the same sense that ignoring a persistent busker on the street entitles him to your money after some uninvolved observer has arbitrarily decided he's made the same demand enough that somehow it's starting to make sense because the victim hasn't yelled at him with a good enough argument against it.
In other words: yep, still the parents' job, yep, internet was still there when I grew up, yep, I turned out fine, yep, politicians have been trying to take away our privacy for 30 years (and unfortunately, they're finding more creative and convincing ways to disguise it). Hint: it's never about the kids
> Hint: it's never about the kids
Well yes it is. It is about both the cover problem (child safety), and the ulterior motive (surveillance, control).
And not taking the reasonably concerning cover problem seriously, by finding sensible solutions, both leaves it festering unsolved in its own right, and growing in usefulness as a cover problem.
"because everyone has had enough, and nobody has patience left for kids watching BDSM on their friend’s phones at 12."
Is that the reason? I really don't think so.
I just think it's a power grab by the participants in government and tech companies.
When people are operating at two levels, you can't leave either unaddressed.
That plays into the hands of those using subterfuge.
The power grab is riding on reasonable concerns about children. So its worth improving safety for children for two reasons: (1) reducing parents reasonable concerns and making parenting in the modern age a bit easier, and to (2) take that issue off the table (or meaningfully reduce the leverage it supplies), for the power grabbers.
Ironically, the fact that the underhanded motives lie beneath a reasonable concern, makes solving the reasonable concern in a healthy way even more critical.
Is it a reasonable concern?
Parents are supposed to raise their children.
> Is it a reasonable concern?
Yes.
> Parents are supposed to raise their children.
Yes.
Vapid questions and statements aside, ...
Here is just one solution that helps parents, and respects everyone's privacy: Zero knowledge proofs.
Which allow anyone who is verified by anyone already (i.e. credit card company, ...) to get a cryptographic key from that organization, that they can use to anonymously verifiably assert they are 18+ to sites, (1) without giving sites any other information, and (2) without their key source getting any information on what sites they visit.
Treating users like adults and allowing them full control over setting system capability and app launch restrictions on devices (and even implementing fully optional, widely blocking restrictions as "parental safety options") was the industry taking it seriously. You considering the freedom of choice to the user as disastrous and the lack of heavily restricted lockdowns by default as "refusal to take concerns seriously" is just a reflection on your attitudes about other people, not any real argument for improving privacy or safety. You ARE a morally panicked maniac if your only grossly offensive things you want to keep pretending are horrifying examples have absolutely nothing to do with the invasion of privacy of children and more to do with puritanical outrage on children accessing adult material.
> implementing fully optional, widely blocking restrictions as "parental safety options") was the industry taking it seriously
The myriad of settings, accessed differently on every site or service, that everyone needs to be aware of, and actively fight dysfunctional defaults and frequent "helpful" resets after updates, are not the solution parents or anyone else are looking for.
Why are the defaults set to favor the company, in a way that makes them real customer/user-targeted security holes that people have to play endless wack-a-mole to secure themselves?
That is industry taking plausible deniability and the monetizing potential of parasitical behavior at scale "seriously" indeed.
Except parents not being trained to really use it unless they look for it specifically.
Yes, a parents attention is a limited and valuable resource. It is a parents job to monitor the environment for dangers to their children. Not to neuter the entire adult world to make it pseudosafe for kids.
It's less about neutering, and more about diet.
Junk food and processed sugar creates dietary based ADHD kids.
One's information diet also changes how the brain develops, that's not a pseudo threat.
I sense some trepidation around not having unfettered access to swim in the whole ocean as a child with more and more sharks and angel fish floating around.
The environment to monitor is increasingly digital, not just in person. See my note above about parents who think their kids are safe at home, when they're letting the entire unfiltered world into their kids devices, eyes, minds without context.
The reality is those parents have tried nothing and are all out of ideas, or, in the vast majority of cases, simply don't care.
This is not at all about children by the way, because all millenials have grown while consuming porn and social media, and haven't turned into degenerates. It is 100% an excuse to spy on citizens, and nothing else.
I don't think it has much to do with caring.
If it's simple to begin with doing this, or things to try specifically that can build any parents skills and competencies in this area, mind sharing that?
BDSM at twelve!?! Thats nothing compared to what we grew up with… just make it really really slow to download, being back the old internet!
While we’re posting honest opinions that run against the consensus on this site:
In my view, freedom of speech is a natural right that no government can take away. But no such guarantee exists that you can do so anonymously.
Now before you immediately flame me to death, please read a bit further:
We already have a hodgepodge of laws in basically every jurisdiction around logging IP addresses, cooperating with law enforcement when there’s a warrant, being able to track down who is (say) organizing violence, posting csam, etc. Like it or not, the government is entitled to search and seizure if there is a warrant signed by a judge to do so, and if you run an online service where can people can post things publicly, you better damn well keep logs of who’s posting things and you better cooperate if a law enforcement officer with a warrant asks you to.
So what I propose is that we streamline all of this. At age 16 you get a digital ID that works something like a FIDO chip that can be used to prove your identity to a government authentication server. Sub in/out whatever tech you want, it can be a passkey (blech), something resembling a yubikey, etc. You get them at your local post office, where you can actually prove your identity in person. There’s post offices everywhere, and they’re already meant to serve everyone in the country.
But critically, this key isn’t used to auth to any sites except a government-run signin service. The service itself would be a modified form of OAuth/OIDC that preserves privacy from the site you’re making an account on. They don’t know who you are, they just get a signed payload from the government signin site saying “this is a user over the age of 16”, and via a pre-established relationship between the website in question and the government auth site, a UUID is minted for that legal person. It will be the same UUID for that website for the same person, so you can’t just pretend you’re multiple people when you create multiple accounts.
With this system, and using Reddit as an example site that may leverage this:
- Reddit can’t know who you actually are, they only get a UUID and a signed payload indicating you’re over 16 (or whatever other set of properties are legally salient for the account.) In the event of a breach, all you’d get is a list of Reddit-specific UUID’s. You’d have to also hack the government auth service to know who these people actually are.
- The government doesn’t know who owns your username on Reddit, they only know the list of citizens that have Reddit accounts at all.
- In the event of a crime with a warrant, the government can compel Reddit to inform them which UUID corresponds to some account. Reddit continues to not know who the account belongs to.
- Every site using this system gets a completely different UUID for the same legal person and has no ability to correlate them
- Every legal person using this system has no idea what their UUID is for any site
- Every site using this doesn’t have to worry at all about proving identity. They get working auth for every legal person in $country, streamlining signups and onboarding, and doesn’t have to worry about asking the user to prove they’re over 16.
- You still get pseudo-anonymity in that you can use an alias (as many as the site allows, too), the site can remain blissfully ignorant as to who you really are, as well as everyone who reads your posts, etc.
- The government can find out who owns an account, but only with a warrant. They don’t have a list of account/UUID mappings anywhere.
This system is probably the most closely aligned to how I would do things if I was somehow “in charge”… you have a right to pseudo-anonymity, but you don’t have a right to cover your tracks so thoroughly that the government can’t track you down with a proper warrant.
With such a system, saying “social media is for ages 16 and up” is a simple checkbox in the signup flow. Done.
You can argue all day about whether a government should be able to uncloak your accounts with a warrant, but to me that question is already settled: yes, they absolutely can do that, they do so today all the time. Except today we have messy data breaches where everyone’s identity gets leaked because every site has to reinvent their own form of proving your legal identity (in the case of Facebook/etc) or simply proving you’re a certain age (uploading ID, etc.). I’d take a centralized government-run approach to what we have today any day.
You could ask “but should government be in the business of electronic authentication and identity?” And my answer is: “YES.” It’s basically the primary function of a working government! We trust them to issue passports for chrissake. To me this is basic table stakes in the 21st century. If we did government all over again, having the government provide a service to prove online identity is basically right up there with “collects tax revenue.”
Now, in the current government up to the challenge of doing this, and not fucking it up? Yeeesh, probably not. You got me there. But one can dream…
> Now, in the current government up to the challenge of doing this, and not fucking it up? Yeeesh, probably not. You got me there. But one can dream…
The question should be about whether any future government would be up to the challenge of not fucking it up, as the system would stay in place and only grow in size. That's why privacy-invading infrastructure like this should be kept to a minimum.
> Parents, especially with the advent of social media, hardcore pornography, and every childhood friend having a device, correctly said this was unreasonable and impossible.
It is neither unreasonable or impossible. No need to hand the kids a device that can access the open internet. If parents do, restrict or deny gadget time. Stick to a Nintendo or console.
Learned helplessness and codependency on internet is part of the sales pitch of big tech, salesmen in general. They push self doubt and sell their solution.
Fill the time showing kids how to rotate tires and change oil. Show them how to make pizza crust.
Learned helplessness is a feature of capitalism. Not immutable feature of physical existence.
It's still moralist pearl-clutching in service of totalitarian horseshit no matter how you'd like to justify it.
I don't even think you're strictly 100% incorrect here. That said, I refuse to entertain the "think of the children" horseshit when parents happily park their kid in front of an iPad for hours a day because it shuts them up, not with kink content they shouldn't see, but with AI/algorithmically generated garbage, or for that matter, human generated garbage, that rots their brains far more than any gimp costume ever could.
For fucks sake, 12 kids in America die PER DAY due to mass shootings, and we can't even pass common sense gun regulations that the vast majority of gun owners are completely fine with. We don't give a fuck about our kids here. This has from jump, and continues to be, astro-turfed puritan whining not merely to pornography of whatever preferred kind of the moment, but to the existence of queer people as a whole.
It IS parents' fucking responsibility, and maybe that is an onerous burden, but instead of even attempting to meet it, the majority of parents have abdicated it. And it isn't porn fucking their kids up, it's non-stop screen exposure leaving them with no attention span and no ability to simply BE BORED.
There is probably nothing that is safe for a toddler to have displayed on a screen 6 inches from their face for an hour+ a day, either for their physical or mental development. Adults suffer as well, but at least by their own agency.
Also to point out, if a 10 year old walks in to the street and is hit by a car, their parent gets charged now (in some US jurisdictions.) The idea that the adult is not responsible for the child does not correspond with US law. Maybe it's different in Europe.
A secondary issue is tech companies on-boarding children to having public social media profiles (and their parents posting the child's entire lives on their own) -- which is completely asinine and appalling. That bridge was breached years ago and somehow no one complained loud enough. Certainly a mistake.
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What's it matter if shooting victims are gang members or just too poor/unlucky to live somewhere with sane gun control?
Dead kids are dead kids.
Well, gang members go out looking for trouble, for one thing. For another, they would just as well use knives, bats, chains, hatchets, or any other terrible implement to commit crime. Banning guns just makes it difficult or impossible for non-gang members to defend themselves.
Fucking AI summaries. Correct you are, 12-per-day is the combo shot of all gun deaths in children in totality, which includes much more banal things like unsecured firearms in the home.
That being said, my point remains: the #1 threat to children in this country is guns, wielded by classmates, road-ragers, gang members, or stored improperly. We still have no meaningful gun regulation in huge areas, and no public will to see it done. And this kind of insipid bullshit is what we're doing instead.
If you look it up, the most gun crimes occur in Democrat-run gun-grabber areas that have the most gun laws. Disarming people is an unacceptable solution for many reasons. It also doesn't work. The best solution to gun crime is to arm the law-abiding.
> If you look it up, the most gun crimes occur in Democrat-run gun-grabber areas that have the most gun laws.
Highly populated areas tend to be Democrat-run. People commit crimes so places with more people = more crimes. More gun crimes cause people to push for more gun laws. Gun laws limited to cities (or even states) have limited impact when it's trivial to get guns from neighboring areas without those laws. Gun laws with limited impact can still be helpful.
It's not as if we don't know for a fact that legislation works (since it works for many many other counties) but a patchwork system of laws that only applies to some areas and not others is bound to perform worse than federal systems. Even federal systems need to be smart and actually managed and enforced correctly to work well.
> Disarming people is an unacceptable solution for many reasons.
Disarming people is an acceptable solution for many reasons. We already do it to all kinds of people in many circumstances. It's just a question of when/how much is appropriate for which circumstances.
> The best solution to gun crime is to arm the law-abiding.
Only if you're a gun/ammo manufacturer. Real world evidence has shown over and over that the best solution is laws placing legal regulations on firearms. We can point to nation after nation whose gun problems are drastically lower than ours because of the laws they enacted.
On the other hand, there exists only fantasy world evidence that giving every man woman and child a gun would solve the problem. Arguably it's already been tried in the US and the result was complete failure.
>Highly populated areas tend to be Democrat-run. People commit crimes so places with more people = more crimes. More gun crimes cause people to push for more gun laws.
Are you suggesting that there are no red cities? The only sense in which this is true is that more laws = more crimes lol.
>It's not as if we don't know for a fact that legislation works (since it works for many many other counties) but a patchwork system of laws that only applies to some areas and not others is bound to perform worse than federal systems. Even federal systems need to be smart and actually managed and enforced correctly to work well.
The federal gun laws are dumb and unconstitutional. I could be on board with disarming children, violent criminals, and nutcases. Anyone else should be able to own a gun if they want to, through a convenient process. That is to say, the current federal laws are at the limit of where I want them to be, if not beyond.
I don't care about other countries. They let themselves be disarmed, and they will ultimately suffer tyranny as a result.
>On the other hand, there exists only fantasy world evidence that giving every man woman and child a gun would solve the problem. Arguably it's already been tried in the US and the result was complete failure.
It's a fact that guns curb certain kinds of crime. The mere possibility that a thug might not survive an encounter with granny means he will think long and hard before making a move on her. The fact that normal people might lose their shit keeps politicians in line. Give up your rights, and evil will follow.
> They let themselves be disarmed, and they will ultimately suffer tyranny as a result.
There's plenty of tyranny in the USA today and guns have done nothing to stop it. There are countless videos on youtube right now of government tyranny in America, how many videos have you seen of tyranny by the State being stopped because someone pulled out a gun or opened fire? I'm not saying that rhetorically, if you've got a bunch of youtube videos of people shooting police or politicians engaged in tyranny which successfully stopped that tyranny from taking place please respond with links. I'd be genuinely interested in seeing them.
> The mere possibility that a thug might not survive an encounter with granny means he will think long and hard
This is demonstrably false. Everywhere in the US there is a possibility that grannies can have a gun, but nowhere, even the places where there is concealed carry and a large number of gun owners, has crime been stopped as a result. Muggings still happen. Beatings still happen. Rapes still happen. Thugs don't "think long and hard" period. Guns don't make a difference. Gang members in particular aren't scared of guns. They have guns too. They've been shot, or been shot at, many times. They've watched their friends be killed by gunfire. None of that stops them.
> The fact that normal people might lose their shit keeps politicians in line.
Where do you live where your politicians are kept in line at all, or by anything except maybe fear of not being reelected? Again, there are countless examples of politicians out of line all over this country. The number of guns/gun owners has zero impact on government corruption. It's everywhere.
> Give up your rights, and evil will follow.
I, like most Americans, don't want to abolish the 2nd amendment, but like with all of our rights, there are reasonable restrictions and limits that can be placed on it which would still allow people to defend their homes and hunt and shoot while still bringing gun deaths closer to what we see in other counties.
>There's plenty of tyranny in the USA today and guns have done nothing to stop it.
Guns stop crime which is a form of tyranny. As for government tyranny, you are not going to be able to fight a heavily armed tyrant without guns. We didn't win independence from the British via debate. Guns are a factor in reigning in deranged politicians. That is why they want to disarm everyone.
>This is demonstrably false. Everywhere in the US there is a possibility that grannies can have a gun, but nowhere, even the places where there is concealed carry and a large number of gun owners, has crime been stopped as a result.
Crime has been reduced by gun ownership.
>Thugs don't "think long and hard" period. Guns don't make a difference. Gang members in particular aren't scared of guns. They have guns too. They've been shot, or been shot at, many times. They've watched their friends be killed by gunfire. None of that stops them.
They do fear guns. They have guns because they are effective for self-defense, even for criminals. Hard-boiled criminals fear guns. Even if you find some that are so calloused and/or stupid that they don't fear guns, the guns will protect you from those criminals anyway. The gun does not care what its target thinks of it.
>Where do you live where your politicians are kept in line at all, or by anything except maybe fear of not being reelected?
Like I said, it is a factor. The people who want to take our guns are heavily guarded by men with guns. Take the hint.
>I, like most Americans, don't want to abolish the 2nd amendment, but like with all of our rights, there are reasonable restrictions and limits that can be placed on it which would still allow people to defend their homes and hunt and shoot while still bringing gun deaths closer to what we see in other counties.
We already have background checks on every legal gun purchase and extra unconstitutional laws restricting many types of firearms. There is a de-facto and illegal national gun registry.
For all the benefits we get from government, it remains the biggest domestic menace to all of us and we must take steps to not allow ourselves to be defenseless against the state. How do you think genocides happen? The second amendment is not for hunting, or for warding off low-level thugs, though it might be useful for those purposes. It is there to give normal people a real chance to reign in evil in government. A standing professional army would not win against a well-armed majority standing up for their own rights. Even if they did win, it would be a Pyrrhic victory.
> It's a fact that guns curb certain kinds of crime.
It's not.
> the most gun crimes occur in Democrat-run gun-grabber areas
The most full stop, yes. But that's not surprising, is it? Since densely populated places disproportionately vote blue.
But not the most per capita:
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116676/documents/...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ariannajohnson/2023/04/28/red-s...
I haven't read that but "gun death rate" is not the same as "gun crime rate"... Of course I expect guns to be used more in areas where they are available. Many legitimate self-defense cases are imperfect as well, and technically count as crime for BS reasons. Gun suicide rates probably would be higher with more guns owned by the public.
In summary, I don't think you are right and I would still support broad gun ownership rights even if you were correct about per capita. I am more worried about the public not having guns than having guns.
OK. There isn't any arguing with anyone who doesn't have a problem with the idea that someone else's right not to be murdered is less important than their unlimited gun ownership rights, which is the only conclusion I can draw from what you are saying. So I will leave you to the hell of your own making, I guess.
Guns prevent murder. There's not much you can do besides using a gun to defend yourself against physically superior individuals or groups of people. Banning guns does not prevent murder, it just changes the methods. If you are worried about being murdered, you should probably get a gun lol.
https://xkcd.com/1138/
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> 12 deaths per day is VERY low
Assuming that the number is real, 12 children dying every day from guns is the opposite of VERY low. It's insane. What is your limit? How many child corpses do you think need to be put into the ground every day before the government should pass the kind of laws most Americans are asking them to?
Unlike how most Americans want something done about guns, they don't want to be tracked. There is a lot of opposition to it once people are made aware of the issue. Censorship is pretty unpopular too, although while the majority tends to oppose it, it's far more popular with people in the US than is should be.
>How many child corpses do you think need to be put into the ground every day before the government should pass the kind of laws most Americans are asking them to?
There are already plenty of gun laws. "Most Americans" are only in favor of more laws to the extent they don't understand what is already in place, except for those that want a blanket ban on guns. There are many millions of legal gun owners in the US, and you should be thankful for that.
Out of many millions of people, 12 per day is a rounding error. You'd probably save more lives by launching a campaign telling kids to tie their shoes or lay off the soda, for real. How many bodies are worth our freedom? Millions die in wars, for far worse reasons than a few hundred as a natural consequence of being free. It is very hard to quantify the benefits of owning a gun because only crimes are reported.
Also, what gun grabbers don't understand (or choose to ignore) is that the people who are murdered by their peers with a gun could just as easily be murdered with a knife, or a brick. They might not be able to do it so quick, but a deranged person can go John Wick on your ass with a sharpened pencil. If you walk alone without a gun, you also have no way to defend yourself against a gang of several thugs. But with a gun, even grandma has a fighting chance of escaping nearly any crime.
> Out of many millions of people, 12 per day is a rounding error. You'd probably save more lives by launching a campaign telling kids to tie their shoes or lay off the soda, for real.
If I told you that I kidnapped 12 kids every single day and fed them into a woodchipper would that be acceptable to you because it's "just a rounding error" or because "You'd save more lives telling kids to tie their shoes than by stopping me"? Any number of children I threw into that woodchipper would be an unacceptable number of children and of course actions should be taken to stop or at the very least reduce those deaths. It's no different with gun deaths.
> Also, what gun grabbers don't understand (or choose to ignore) is that the people who are murdered by their peers with a gun could just as easily be murdered with a knife, or a brick.
Once again, the facts don't support your argument. We know that mass-stabbers don't kill as many people as mass-shooters. It's obvious why that is, you even said it yourself: Sharpened pencils and bricks are slow and far less effective at killing than guns. There's a reason why the militaries of the world arm their troops with guns and not just bricks and knives. People with bricks and sharpened pencils (which become very hard to hold on to while covered in blood by the way) are far easier to disarm safely. It is much much harder to kill with those everyday objects than with guns.
Obviously psychopaths will still find ways of killing people. Keeping the most deadly weapons out of their hands, or making it more difficult for them to get those weapons will reduce the number of deaths they can inflict on us which is something everyone should want.
>If I told you that I kidnapped 12 kids every single day and fed them into a woodchipper would that be acceptable to you
In all aspects of life, risk is involved. Would you ban cars because some children are hurt by them? Would you ban playground equipment on those grounds? Keep kids in cages because they might get kidnapped if they go to the corner store?
I can't put an exact number on it, but the potential victimhood of children and others does not invalidate our basic rights to self-governance and self-defense. Even if you could ascribe violence to guns solely (you can't really) there are many benefits to keeping the right to own guns. If safety comes at the cost of freedom, it's not worth it.
>We know that mass-stabbers don't kill as many people as mass-shooters.
The stats on such things are unreliable. Many gang shootings are registered as mass shootings.
>People with bricks and sharpened pencils (which become very hard to hold on to while covered in blood by the way) are far easier to disarm safely. It is much much harder to kill with those everyday objects than with guns.
When it comes to murder, all of these methods are effective. Guns may be the worst because they draw attention. On the other hand, would-be victims are much safer when armed.
>Obviously psychopaths will still find ways of killing people. Keeping the most deadly weapons out of their hands, or making it more difficult for them to get those weapons will reduce the number of deaths they can inflict on us which is something everyone should want.
Again, we have laws that require background checks for buying guns. I'm in favor of that, or at least not strongly opposed. But I do not in any way support banning guns for ordinary law-abiding citizens.
I guess, but there's a philosophy that goes something along the lines of: Government is not the answer to every problem. It's a very divisive issue, clearly. Technical people were never going to solve the problem of kids having access to adult materials online because tech people are only interested in making gobs of money, not in dealing with delicate social issues. Government isn't going to fix anything, either, mind you, because the moment the crackdowns begin, the technologists will walk right in with a solution. Maybe we'll finally have the distributed, peer-to-peer network we always thought we were getting but instead got centrally controlled nodes featuring mass surveillance.
I stopped worrying about it as a parent. My kids want to look at porn? Let them. If they want to see horrible, violent shit that gives them nightmares and they can't un-see it, let them. They'll either figure it out or they will be lifetime children looking for big daddy government to solve all their stupid problems for them and society will collapse.
Do you have kids? Do you give them unfiltered Internet access? Do you have any experience with PTSD caused by viewing the worst output of humanity?
I don't know whats more damaging - watching some beheading video when 12 or having controlling parents that do not leave you any autonomy even in the digital space.
Personally i prefer the beheading video as its not far from whats already on TV.