The UK's War on Anonymity Has Come to America

For parents who are genuinely concerned about child safety, you are being used to push an agenda. If we want to solve the digital parenting problem, we have to understand how the problem came to be in the first place and why there isn't a good solution at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578

"The government says all children need to be vaccinated in order to be safe"

I'm not saying these arguments are equivalent, but they seem equivalent because they induce the same feeling of loss of agency. And one cannot simply ignore and dismiss something like this.

This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.

You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.

That one can get deep really quick.

These are NGOs not parents. And "child safety" is often a euphemism. The point is it's hard to argue against child safety. For example, if opaque NGOs demand deanonymization to stop CSAM, I am assuming most people would not want to seem like they are in favor of CSAM. So you need an organized effort to argue in favor of privacy and even then anyone who does it can easily be smeared as a CSAM user. So child safety can backdoor something else.

Any argument with such blatant oversimplifications is almost certainly lacking in nuance and can be ignored and dismissed.

I get what you’re pointing at: politicians regularly abuse these arguments, but that doesn’t mean it’s 100% of all arguments involving children.

Should that argument be ignored too?

It's a tradeoff situation and nobody wants to leave it as such to find an answer which serves the best balance. Instead, we are doomed to discuss the absolutes of freedoms vs the absolutes of child safety.

I'd really like to see something like a required parental controls architecture products had to support (but not every device had to force universally). These kind of solutions only goes as far as the problem is a technical one, e.g. a kid on their dad's office computer they weren't supposed to access can still see things they shouldn't, but such is the truth with any pure technical approach to the problem which is not actually fully technically bound.

Believe it or not, sometimes the best answer is to do nothing until the crowd moves on to the next panic, as with the “Satanic Panic” in the 1980s. Turns out D&D was not actually a gateway to Satan worship.

There is a really good way to do this that solves most concerns: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

The only real downside to this is that a 0kp cannot be reliably tied to an identity of the person using the device and thus tickets could be proxied/shared around with semi technical tools (and/or an ai agent tasked with creating a proxy). This really isn't solvable without device-level attestation[0], as if a website needs to reliably say "this person is actually this person" then it needs all pieces of data itself.

This could be solved by adding in a still privacy-preserving step like "The device is doing periodic face id scans and matching them to an identity, and constantly renews/re-presents to the age assurance consumer", but that has its own drawbacks[0].

0: Namely, lock in to devices that can do this, and that includes basically guaranteeing a double digit percentage of adult humans would not have access due to their device being old, unsupported, missing the hardware, etc. And with so many humans excluded, you would not have mass adoption. Probably also excludes rooted devices if we bring in attestation of unmodified software.

That said, I’m a father of 3. I’m a millennial and tech worker. I have the digital literacy to teach my kids about the internet and its horrors in a safe way. Not every parent does, so passing this off as a “parent better” issue doesn’t solve anything either.

I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”, but I’m open to similar ideas so parents can get some support without compromising on privacy.

In letting things flow to easily the opposition is to have heavy lock down on information. A lot of the time, the opposite of one bad idea is another bad idea.

edit: sp

Is there, though? The push is coming from lobbyists who seem to be largely funded by wealthy elites, corporations, and other opaque organizations. One of them seems to be Meta. It doesn’t look like a grassroots effort.

I have never wanted to move out of Europe more than now tbf. Complete f* morons - I get spammed by the wanna be child protectors who are giving a smartphone to their kids.

I don't know how to deal with this anymore - what we are not realizing is that *we* are under engagement - this *is* state surveillance.

The one thing he always said is, they have always been watching and know who is who, what these things do is allow it to be entered into the court of law. Now they can act on these things.

Cheaper computer technology has been great for the average persons uses but it cuts both ways. It also means much cheaper surveillance. I suspect that governmental/corporate surveillance now costs less than 1% of their spending, something that simple couldn't have been done even a few decades back.

I do wonder what the world would have been like is say computer technology peaked at 486 level performance/memory. Much of what we have today simply could not have happened in terms of surveillance and social media damages. Alas, this is the world we didn't get.

"I am as old as the fjords, as young as a newborn lamb" - Thor - GTA Vice City radio ;)

You’ll also notice that Anduril is quickly being accepted now that we’re expending munitions faster than our replacement rate.

"We need the plebs to want to mock people who work from home, to reduce the reticence in coming back to work in the office"

"We need our commercial property values to go back up"

Edited to add:

"Our managers need to _feel_ as if they're actually managing people"

Worse, these laws will actually create new harms to children who will be forced to give their identity to websites and identity services that will exploit them and fail to protect that data.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/prot...

Privacy doomerism is a form of complicity.

They can keep floating this stuff and we have to put in a thousand times as much energy to shoot it down. We get worn down quicker than they can. It only has to work once for them, we have to keep pushing back.

My very pessimistic take is one out of Taoism. If you wish for them to fail, let them grow. Eventually the weight of the whole system collapses itself, the question is just on what time frame.

The way out is to go through. I don't like this framing but it seems to be the most accurate.

Larry Ellison on surveillance: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”

This is not new and it’s not about kids. This is the culmination of years of planning that began after the Arab Spring, when elites began to get concerned about how the Internet could be leveraged for domestic regime change.

Because of the goal of advertising revenue as the ultimate driver as to build an addictive permanent scroll of slop on tiktok or instagram, and the desire of social media companies to build walled gardens where someone's entire online experience stays in their "app.". As you say, this affects young and old alike.