Authentication & Authorization is a OS feature. But instead of the OS collecting everyone's age, just give parents the ability to verify their child's phone is in child lockdown mode. Then the phone narc's to the website: "the user is under age". Not "the user was born on Feb 29 2001." We can rely on parenting to ensure a child doesn't have a non child mode phone. Enable parents, not control everyone.
Colorado is trying to do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097904
It's just terrifying to think of an internet that goes from open & usable, to requiring only approved government devices & systems. Within a very brief time.
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You could call it something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_controls
Oh I would absolutely love this.
It would prove that many, many parents are incapable of being the responsible adults they should be and will just cave to their kids tantrums about their phone being unlocked so they can watch tiktoks for (sometimes more than) 8 hours a day.
Everyone in the UK is now using a vpn for everything because of these "won't somebody please think of the children" smucks. Now let's see if they make good on their end and lock their child's phone...
This sounds like a very neat guideline. I'd like to see this fleshed out further, but not at the cost of freedom (ie locked bootloaders etc)
OS vendors don't want to add this feature, though. That could be because they make their money from a percentage of IAPs and ads.
And when they are mandated, like in Brazil, we HN commenters hate that even more, because apparently in Brazil it's illegal to sell a phone without locked bootloader, or an OS that can run software from outside of an app store, because the user might install an OS or an app that doesn't comply with the child-lock law.
Well yes, they are actual real risks - a badly thought out law can literally make it illegal for a device to allow an adult to, say, unlock a device's bootloader to install open source software (EDIT: this example was in my comment before the OP edited theirs to add it there as well), because the device vendor can't guarantee that it will comply any more.
I don't think anybody is actually opposed to parental controls being mandated to ship in commercial operating systems, as long as it doesn't restrict the freedoms of adults to completely disable them or to install software that removes them or doesn't have them. The problem is when these features are forced on adults and restrict devices or computers 'just in case'.
IMHO a better approach would be two-layered tagging to indicate traffic from children.
Firstly traffic can be tagged by ISPs/cell phone companies, at the bill payer's behest (whose name and age has already been verified). Secondly, smartphone OSes can tag traffic at the behest of parental controls (which already exist).
FOSS doesn't mean that you get a right to break the law. Just because software patents exists in a society, that doesn't mean that FOSS does not.
It's a feature that has existed for years. And is built into every OS.
The US also locking the bootloaders has been extremely extremely extremely saddening. Just remarkably shit turn of events.
Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp are not "the internet"
Anything that hurts Meta's business is arguably a potential step toward more "anonymous" internet access. Anything that helps to stop the process of indoctrination of future generations into and the normalisation of what Meta does is a step toward more anonymous internet access as it allows expectations of privacy to rise to previous levels
Companies like Meta have worked to systematically destroy anonymous internet use. Anonymity directly conflicts with Meta's "business model" of data collection, surveillance and serving users up as ad targets
Meta and "anonymous internet access" are mutually exclusive. Meta doesn't collect data about and show ads to "anonymous" internet users. It forces users to create "accounts" and "sign in" with clients that run surveillance-related code on the users' computers without the user's input. It builds profiles of internet users (ad targets), even ones that do not use Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp, e.g., through the use of tracking pixels on the open web
Apple's and Google's operating systems also try to profile users. The companies encourage users to create "accounts" and "sign in". The operating systems intentionally provide a purpose-built machanism to target users with ads. If used as encouraged by the compaanies, these operating systems are incompatible with "anonymous internet access". The user is not anonymous to the companies, and the companies invite advertisers to use the computer user's internet bandwidth to deliver ads
It was not always like this; I owned Apple computers when there was no such thing as an Apple "account" and Apple's computers did not attempt to automatically "phone home" when powered on. Expectations of "anonymous" internet access amongst new internet users have greatly diminished thanks to Meta, Google and Apple
It seems a stretch to me that an operating system having an isAdult() function would end anonymous internet access. Plenty of apps want to avoid showing NSFW content to children and having an API that lets them easily do so has a lot of value. Parental controls must be trivial for an app to implement if we want it to be widespread.
I find it amazing that we continue to let parents ruin society with their overprotective bullshit. They should be parenting, not passing the buck.
This isn't the first time overprotective parents have caused problems for everyone else. The US drug war (and the mass incarceration of poor and black people) was started mostly by organizations of parents who thought marijuana was going to kill their kids. The movie rating system introduced censorship into movies which limited artistic freedom. Game rating systems limited what games could be sold on store shelves, so most games had to be carefully censored and had limited story lines and content. Ratings on music forced major retailers to drop any music which had an 'explicit' label, making it harder for artists with 'adult' lyrics to get exposure or earn a living. Book bans are largely organized by parents' groups, a significant number of the books they want banned being LGBTQ+ books, so kids aren't exposed to the fact that homosexuality is normal. And of course you can't possibly have an app in a monopolistic App Store that has any kind of adult content; heaven forbid an actual adult wants to use an adult app.
Parents and 'Child Safety' are toxic af and we shouldn't put up with it.
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Had to wade through a lot of text to find out that apparently Zuckerberg and OP both apparently think the internet is something you access through phones.
Talk to someone under 30. Show them this cool "phone" app on their cellphones.
Tbf the majority of per individual Internet use is on a phone. Countries other than America exist...plenty of Asian countries where having a phone is far far more common than a laptop let alone a desktop.
Child safety is just the tip of the iceberg. We need to secure ourselves by implementing human verification and there are ways to do this without sacrificing anonymity[1].
1 - https://blog.picheta.me/post/the-future-of-social-media-is-h...
Why would we turn to the person who created the problem for a solution to it?
This was the intent all along people.
Which is the very target. Forcing full tractability of anyone for better conformism at the dominus will.
I find it relatively strange that over the past 30-40 years, we went from a world where most everything was intermediated by parents, and “adult” media was relatively well gatekept to this online Wild West where it seems almost any attempt to gatekeep is seen as a freedom violation.
Maybe this is why we need protocols over platforms? But like, kids shouldn’t be able to sign a ToS until they’re 18.
I have little sympathy for anything that limits people’s access to these biggest platforms. I’m also largely cynical to the idea that anyone’s doing any free speeching on meta or Twitter in the first place. If counter culture gets driven back to IRC, or gasp meatspace, then all the better.
When I was a kid, they said don't meet strangers you talked to online. That was it. Sometimes it turned out poorly, but as it could anywhere. Perhaps on the internet it was less risky because the person you were talking to had no idea you were a kid or anything about you.
There were not apps that all of your friends in school used, and if you didn't use them you wouldn't be cool, but also the apps would push you or cause you to unwittingly share photos publicly while publishing your photos/videos globally to adults who for some reason use their app longer when they look at videos of kids.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding how things work here, I don't use Facebook or Instagram. I've never even seen Tiktok. I've never used LinkedIn. But when I read these stories about what is going on with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta it sounds like they were doing a lot of things they shouldn't be doing in a commercial context, period. If you aren't 18 you should still be able to talk to your friends without being spied on, but you sure as hell shouldn't be getting connected to random people adult or otherwise from all over the world because it's increasing the usage time of those adults on some app.
I think protocols are the way to go and will be what dominate in the post-AI era. Fuck the ads, the constantly changing UIs, the bait and switch, and now just add photo verification to the list. No thanks.
The idea is of general purpose computing. In past, you could restrict access without restricting most freedoms. Today's world, restricting access means restricting access to a ggeneral purpose computer. And thats the biggest deal.
Cory Doctorow:
Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing
Jan 10, 2012
https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html
The article does reflect the issue at the time (the media mafia's boogeyman "piracy") and the thought that to prevent piracy, users must be restricted from access to "general purpose computers".
Does it? If we had real control of our machines it doesn’t feel like this would be an issue.
When I was a kid, most families that had a computer kept it in a common area. Same with the TV, for that matter.
Some families did not. Mine did not! But that was a decision that was up to individual families.
I don’t see why these decisions should be up to anyone but individual families. Period. If your kids are mature enough for unsupervised computer use, or if you don’t see it as a problem, that’s up to you as a parent. Same as if you feel comfortable taking your kids skeet shooting or rock climbing.
Attempting to manage this as a parent is hellish.
I can't speak for other parents, but some standards for parental controls—the presence of which and adherence to might be enforced by law, if need be, and need probably would be since none of this is stuff vendors couldn't have figured out on their own long ago if they cared to—we could leverage would be goddamn nice and is all I'd really want.
Especially as devices get more locked-down and it becomes hard to control stuff at the network level if you don't have root on the devices themselves, like... man, it's such a time-suck, and I'm 100% sure I'd be having to choose between "I guess we just don't have the Internet in this house" and "fuck it, I give up, go stumble on gore videos I guess" if I weren't a lot better at this stuff than the median parent. I feel for them, this stuff is entirely hopeless for 'em.
Like, my kids have Chromebooks from school. They pretty much have to bring them home. So now I have this extra physical item I can't administrate that I must police at night if I don't want them to stay up all night on trash-tier web games or something. So I'll block the devices at the network level at night, right? Easy fix! Nope, the fucking things rotate MAC addresses as an anti-tracking measure I guess. We have zero need for that feature (the number of times they're gonna use the things outside school and home over their whole school careers is going to be very small) but I'm not admin on those devices, so, stuck with it. So there's an extra hurdle to making that happen.
Repeat some other incredible frustration for every single thing. Oh look, AppleTV has a simple rating interface so I can at least make sure nothing too bad can get through if I mess something up. Great. Oh except almost nothing on the device except Apple's own software respects the setting, at all, just ignores it. You have to go dick around with every single service on there to lock them down, then hope it sticks through updates and other nonsense. Awesome, great feature that's actually totally useless because nobody cares about the users. Sigh.
Your options are go full-luddite, give up and leave them to the Internet gods, or take on this load of work and stress that our parents did not have.
I agree that it should be easier. We’re on a frigging VC website. Shouldn’t there be a huge market opportunity here for parental control systems? Why is this not a problem that anyone is going after?
I’m also surprised that “family monitoring” stalkerware companies like Life360 haven’t expanded into this market.
You have to make everyone abide by them, for it to not-suck. At a minimum, software and service providers would have to respect settings client agents tell them they have (as in the AppleTV case, it's bordering on pointless for platforms to even have them if most vendors ignore them)
That'd probably be enough (plus something for school devices in particular to let parents set stricter settings during non-school hours, without having full admin rights on the devices) to do a ton of good, but it's not a startup, it's a protocol and maybe a law.
The startup version would probably try to capture that as some kind of one-stop-shop web portal.
I would think that as a platform like this grows, they would be able to build relationships with OS and service vendors to manage parental control settings via API. After all, this would take a lot of public pressure off of the individual vendors, especially for social/gaming/media platforms.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, just decent.
>Shouldn’t there be a huge market opportunity here for parental control systems
Requires parents to be invested and unlike the OP (appreciate you btw) many parents are not.
No money/use in it unless people actually care enough to invest personal effort into it (which they don't, hence forcing solutions that fuck everybody over, like UK requiring id for adult websites).
> Shouldn’t there be a huge market opportunity here for parental control systems?
It's so huge that it has been built into every operating system for years
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When I was a kid 5 gigantic companies didn’t basically control the whole internet.
Skeet shooting isn’t in every pocket, school, library, Best Buy kiosk. Etc. Maybe if the phones were open source and I truly had the capability to control access this would make sense but the currently available tools are obviously toothless in a way meant to ensure that your u feel like your in control.
I’m not really scared about what my kids might do or see. If the internet was still countercultural and not everything was fucking force fed to you by gigantic billionaire mega corps it would be fine. But there should be some friction.
Because they are harmful. The worry is not online use, but online addiction. We don't just allow parents to regulate what drugs their children consume (medicinal), we trust medical practitioners for the correct dosage. Similarly, social media regulation should be done to achieve the same effect.
The failings of individual families have far reaching consequences beyond their own homes, especially in non collectivist societies that mostly put themselves above all others.
Medical practitioners actually don’t typically administer drugs to kids. They prescribe a dose, but it’s up to the parents to administer the drugs.
You’re basically saying that non-collectivist societies should become collectivist. No thanks!
There’s definitely an inversion going on, where all the predators (individuals and corporations) target parts of the internet designed for children, and the kid’s platforms created financial incentives for themselves that mean the worst content bubbles to the top.
I thought youtube kids was sketchy as hell until I discovered the current state of “educational” online games.
I'd never have guessed it'd be the case, but the number of "educational" games has exploded since I was a kid, while I'm not sure the rate of new ones that are any good at educating (not proportion, actual count) is even as high as it was in the '90s. It's kind of amazing. It appears that, for some reason, the market's way bigger but being any good isn't a useful differentiator for the purposes of sorting out who gets money. I mean you expect that to be the case with ad-supported, but paid edutainment games are like that too. It's so weird, my kids have been around for the golden age of the App Store and beyond, and there's been vanishingly little in the way of good edutainment games that entire time. A few, but it's so very few.
As I understand it, Sierra acquired most of the educational software outfits, and then was acquired for stock by a company that had been propped up by securities fraud.
Here’s the story of the acquisition that killed the company:
https://www.filfre.net/2025/04/the-end-of-sierra-as-we-knew-...
That site probably has the story of the educational software consolidation somewhere.
as personally identifying information becomes more and more central to modern life, the risk of that info being leaked or stolen becomes even greater. And, given the global nature of the internet, having that info on some server that is connected to the rest of the internet increases that risk further still.
Previously, your local dirty movie theater might ask for ID before selling you tickets to Debbie Does Dallas and they might even keep a copy on file for later reference. Assuming that the underpaid usher didn't just glance at the DOB, that copy likely goes into a filing cabinet in the back of the building. That's not necessarily safe, but the opportunity for that being stolen and sold is minuscule compared to today. Even if it were on a computer database somewhere, the internet of 30-40 years ago, inasmuch as it existed, was not the behemoth that it is today.
For all the extensive list of my character defects, I'm pretty sure none can be attributed to me having seen Robocop at 5 years old.
I’m not sure if you meant this in support of my argument, but this is in fact, a cornerstone of my argument. Kids should be watching robocop and not force-fed Zuckerberg approved AI slop.
> where it seems almost any attempt to gatekeep is seen as a freedom violation
1.) Because it always seems to have an outsized impact on adults. Then the predators get away with it because the platforms DGAF (for example, Discord has had a MASSIVE problem with illegality for YEARS, with boatloads of reports and evidence that was blatantly ignored, and yet NOW they need your ID?) And any gate design that COULD work without PII won't be implemented because data is too juicy.
> Maybe this is why we need protocols over platforms?
> If counter culture gets driven back to IRC, or gasp meatspace, then all the better.
2.) Yes on both counts. But protocols need to be decentralized, massively scalable, available across every platform including phones, and normie-grade easy-to-use (not everybody, and it's getting better now, but lots of devs tend to give up here, like it's a binary choice between a lobotomized barely-functioning bloated Fisher-Price app and a fully-functioning lean app with awful UI. Shockingly difficult, as I discovered trying to program, but both possible and necessary.) But as for meatspace...
> we went from a world where most everything was intermediated by parents
3.) If anything, the world is intermediated by parents like never before.[1] Not everywhere, not everybody, but enough freedom of movement and gathering has been lost by children and teens that it is killing meatspace. This CANNOT be ignored if you want to address online problems. The internet, awful as it can be, is the only "free" place left to roam for many.
Necessity is the mother of invention, kick all the kids off the internet, and let them drive their parents crazy until they let them out.
I remember when I was younger there was consternation about people believing AOL was the internet. Now we’ve basically all settled into the walled garden.
I really don’t know that there’s any more baby to throw out with the bath water.
Until
* CPS gets called?
* cops harass them again?
* the malls and many other places kick them out
* (at least for most of the USA) zoning laws and public transit issues are all fixed?
You cannot let individual families, even individual kids/teens, shoulder this burden alone. If your local malls, cops, and nosy neighbors have already clearly shown that they DO NOT want free-range kids in practice, would you risk the breakup of your family and bankruptcy from legal fees alone? (Assuming there's no community support, because a functional community wouldn't have this problem.) Kudos if so, but most people won't risk it if the chance of success is too low.
I’m feeling very William Wallace, you make take our lives but you’ll never take our freedom. We cannot keep saying well the laws are insane so we’ll just let Zuck force feed them mindless crap and advertisements. Yes, people need to become more active in their communities to fight this bullshit.
> I’m also largely cynical to the idea that anyone’s doing any free speeching on meta or Twitter in the first place. If counter culture gets driven back to IRC, or gasp meatspace, then all the better.
The thing is, any speech controls imposed on Facebook and Twitter will probably be imposed on all services - including IRC.
And while Facebook and Twitter are capable of compliance and have bottomless pockets to implement it, IRC isn't and doesn't.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
They want their cake and to eat it too. They want the internet to be used for everything for everyone because of money but that also means children, teens, elderly, and non-technical normies.
Isn't the entire point of the ToS to make it legal to sell your personal information? Primarily to increase programmatic ad revenue?
Maybe we should just end advertising targeting anyone under 18. I wonder if by removing the financial incentive the problem would mostly sort itself out.
At least outlawing user-targeted advertising and most of the related data collection & selling (for things like credit cards and magazines, too, shouldn't limit it to just things like social media) would fix an absolute ton of problems, or at least improve them a lot, including this one.
I'm not sure it's a total solution but it'd likely help, and there are plenty of other reasons to do it.
Just make child phones. And make a parallel internet run and curated by, I dunno, the UN child safety task force or something. We're playing this dangerous game of "oops we almost destroyed the world in a hellish authoritarian dystopia" because we can't figure this simple thing out.
sounds like a potential use for generative AI.. they can "validate" and "verify" the "biometrics" of the output from this-person-does-not-exist[.]com
Ban cell phones. The internet must again become something you sit down to use. It'd fix the child problem and many problems for adults. It is not something that should be following you around all day.
Just asteroid the planet and hope we get shit right the next time around.
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There is very little publicly known about them. All the bylines appear to be pseudonyms used almost exclusively for posts there. No contact information other than email addresses at their domain.
They don't release any information about what funding sources they have, if any, other than donations and merchandise sales.
In this article [1] about X being ordered to obey the DSA requirements to make election data available to researchers they go on at great length about the importance of knowing who is funding the organizations asking for the data. Maybe they should set an example and disclose their own funding.
Also in that article they suggest X is being singled out for enforcement, ignoring that the the other platforms covered by DSA are at least partially responding to requests for data under DSA. That kind of biased framing is common in many of their articles.
I've never seen any reporting by them where I could not find the same thing covered with less bias from a source that is much more transparent over who funds and controls them.
[1] https://reclaimthenet.org/berlin-court-orders-x-to-share-hun...
That would certainly benefit Zuck and a lot of the other oligarchs.
Yes, it feels like another round of the same old tired "force everyone to use legal names online to save the children" that has been pushed continuously since the Internet driver's license of the 90s.
It will not save any children. It will destroy privacy, destroy free speech, and give lots of money to whatever corporation wins the bid for supplying the tech.
And of course, when that corporation gets hacked and all the personally identifiable information is put on the dark web, nobody will be held accountable.
It will make children visible targets and be more exploitable.
Blizzard, the video game company, moved their forums from character name to legal name. I think it lasted a week or two before a ton of people got doxxed and they reverted.
Curiously, people doxx themselves. That is like the entire business model of plaintir, collect all the information people volunteer about themselves and others publicly, for free, to anyone that cares to look.
We seem to be at the bit where people liked having their cake and eating it too, until they had to pay for it. This is the part where the bill comes due.
And that is fucking _nothing_ compared to the massive, eye-watering amount of information people fucking pay to give away to an LLM company. sama must laugh himself to sleep every night.
I have no problem supplying my real name online - it's trivially attached to this account via my resume, and I use this account name all over. I also have several other account names, some disposable and some not.
There are plenty of reasons to be anonymous online. There's plenty of reasons not to be. I kind of wish that the government would launch a series of public political debate forums that required real ID, not that I think they would actually be valuable places for debate, but the technical challenges would be worthwhile to solve and the ability to publicly register debate positions would be incredibly useful for nailing politicians down.
The problem comes when the government tries to regulate one form or another, because strongly authenticated, pseudonymous, and anonymous forums all have their place in debate, and there's reasons for both public and private entities to host all three.
> I have no problem supplying my real name online - it's trivially attached to this account via my resume, and I use this account name all over. I also have several other account names, some disposable and some not.
You’re aware and made a choice, that’s good. Most people are not aware and have not elected to make this choice. This is a heavily-conversed topic on this and many other sites.
Yup, including Altman who has been betting on this (and anti-bot measures) for 7 years with his biometric authentication cryptocurrency startup.
I don't think he cares either way. He knows that the government is going to crackdown on social media because the voters are tired of anarcho libertarian tech bro dipshits.
So he can either go down with the ship or bend with the wind. And Zuckerberg always knows how the wind blows.
>Could End Anonymous Internet Access
I doubt that, but with people using Cell Phone Apps and sites like Facebook/Twitter, people are giving up their anonymity on purpose. You can still be anonymous if you want to.
And as for verification at the OS level, good luck with that.
It would be exceptionally easy to pass a law requiring verification at the OS level. Politicians are technical morons.
I don't understand what position this article is trying to stake out. How is it Zuckerberg's fault that a California court called him into a courtroom demanding to know why he didn't stop children from using his platform? It seems like the author recognizes that he agrees with Meta on all the substantive questions here, but feels obligated to jump through hoops to avoid taking a pro-corporate position that Meta is right and the plaintiff is wrong.
Zuckerberg tries to avoid liability by passing the back to OS vendors. Article writer thinks that would be bad. Hence it's all the plaintiffs fault.
I don't think that's an accurate characterization of Zuckerberg's testimony. His primary argument for avoiding liability is one the article writer explicitly agrees with: the science of "social media addiction" is highly contested, and it's not clear that it's real nor that the plaintiff had it if it is real.
Nor is "passing the buck" a fair characterization of the article author's criticism; he clearly does not think that Apple or Meta should be in the business of age verification.
Addiction is a red herring in the context of this article.
The thing that is a problem for the author is age verification on devices.
Facebook supposedly does not allow users under 13, but does nothing to enforce that rule. Instead of coming up with a way to enforce their own rule, Zuckerberg comes up with the idea of apple and google doing it for them because "they are in a better position".
That is Zuckerbergs idea. That's the idea the author objects with, but instead of putting the blame on Meta for trying to pass of enforcement of their own rules to the devices. The author inexplicably puts the blame on the plaintiff for merely starting the conversation.
Whether the plaintiff is wrong or right is not important. The issue is that when meta was told you should really enforce your own rules they said actually we would rather apple and google were forced to do it.
It's about externalities meta is trying to move the cost of age verification to Apple and Google to the detriment of everyones privacy, and the author is for some reason upset with some 20 year old girl for rocking the boat, instead of the trillion dollar company that does want to enforce their own terms of use.
Perhaps "their own rule" is the confusion? Facebook didn't come up with this idea. COPPA, a long-standing federal law, heavily disfavors collecting any personal data from users under 13.
> a California court called him into a courtroom
To you and I it's made to appear that these things happen without warning. I assure you that's not at all how these things actually occur. If this truly caught out Meta by surprise then they should fire their CEO for general incompetence.