Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools
blog.mozilla.org568 points by WithinReason 15 hours ago
568 points by WithinReason 15 hours ago
Something I learned just recently—the Australian government (surprisingly!) actually recommends VPN usage, they even provide a bit of a guide and how to; https://beconnected.esafety.gov.au/topic-library/advanced-on...
The very same office of the eSafety commissioner that is enforcing age verification for social media.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/blogs/social-media-minim...
That’s funny, I wonder if they might remove it since it is a common way for people to circumvent the ID requirement laws for certain sites.
They probably should at least update it -- I don't think a government should recommend free VPN services. Too many of them are a form of botnet, malware, ddos, etc.
And most people don't even need them any more. The days of free WiFi hotspots being able to easily steal your credentials are long gone.
They never went away, just from your mind. Look at cheap xfinity wifi hotspots everywhere that still steal your credentials in the form of phone number and email address. The bar I went to last night has a free wifi hotspot like every establishment ever.
Misinformation smells like your own farts, disgusting to everyone but you.
But unfortunately, a VPN won't protect you from captive portals. So not entirely sure what your comment adds to the discussion other than being unnecessarily rude.
For other readers who may be too young to remember, improper privacy controls (unenforced HTTPS, poor encryption in the form of WEP, easy MitM attacks, etc) meant that public/untrusted WiFi was a legitimate security risk as things like passwords, bank details, etc were very easy to steal as they were sent unencrypted over the air. This is fortunately much less true these days with the advent of better protections across the entire stack (HTTPS everywhere, WPA*, etc) but unscrupulous VPN merchants still use this outdated argument to try to sell their products to less technically-savvy customers.
What these technologies (and VPNs) _do not_ prevent is the legitimate (and consensual) capture of user data by captive portal software (email, phone, etc), which is typically submitted by a user wishing to connect to a public network. This is what the parent comment is mentioning. Different risk profiles, obviously.
Yeah the being asked for an email or phone for free wifi option is completely different from the “I can MITM all your web requests” which is what needs a VPN.
I usually give a fake email or phone number to get free wifi anyway.
If the captive portal for an open network uses HTTP, then anyone nearby can see the information you submit.
It is perhaps worth highlighting that Mozilla has done this in response to a specific UK government consultation [1] all about "growing up in the online world", which has, buried about 30 pages deep, a specific question about age-gating VPNs and similar technologies.
As far as I can tell, there is no requirement to be a UK citizen to answer this – if you are, were, or could be resident in the UK I urge you to fill it out and help provide a voice of reason...
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...
Has Google made a statement like this?
I guess since I complain about Mozilla a lot for their past 5-10 years (minimum) of poor management decisions, I should give them their due when they do come out with a statement of support on our rights.
1984 was meant to be a warning, not the UK’s digital infrastructure roadmap
1984 is extremely naive.
It assumes that people will fight for their freedom and insane measures will be needed to keep them in check.
So foolishly optimistic… people can’t wait to give freedom away if only they get a stable job and housing in exchange. Or if it hits these other guys they don’t like at the moment.
It’s all much, much less dramatic than Orwell. It is an ordinary, everyday erosion of your rights until one day you will realize that you lost something very important but it will be no longer possible to say it out loud.
One such example is China where all dissent was eliminated because people there prefer comfortable cage. Or Singapore. Seemingly majority doesn’t give a flying dick as long as government buys them.
Maybe the Orwellian times were different but it is what it is. It’s easier than ever to just buy people.
Most people probably don't "give away freedom" in some explicit bargain. They accept one small exception at a time: this restriction is for children, this one is for safety, this one is only for bad actors, this one is temporary
Which is why I like "Brave new World" a lot more.
It actually asks hard questions and explores the tradeoff of an "utopian dystopia." In contrast to the society Orwell describes, where the government is cartoonishly evil, the one of "Brave New World" genuinely cares for the happiness of its subjects, and most of its subjects are genuinely happy, even if we disagree with the methods that it uses. This is by design; I read somewhere that Orwell wanted to position 1984 in explicit contract to Huxley, killing any debate on whether his described society was better or worse than the one the book was written in.
I think he heavily underestimated the human ability to ferret out the truth when the only thing the state gives them is lies. Even without access to reliable news sources, most people will at least realize that the news is lying to them. Even if they don't know what the truth is, they'll know that it's not what they're told it is.
I think the key to a working dystopia is to genuinely make people's lives pleasant. We care about the economics a lot more than we care about the politics. If you're a free democratic socialist republic and decrease people's monthly meat rations, citizens will riot and demand true democracy. If you are a democracy and the price of meat goes up due to the bird flu epidemic, people will riot and demand communism and wealth redistribution.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a further rumination on how Joseph Stalin held power. It was meant to inform Orwell's fellow English socialists, who still dreamed of their own revolution, what the practical upshot of that would be. Stalin did not rule by people ceding their freedoms in exchange for comfort; they suffered intense hardship! Their land was taken from them, dwellings and vehicles allotted based on party loyalty and forced labour regardless of wage. But Stalin ruled through fear, within his party and without. His secret police looked everywhere for dissent and punished it severely. They bugged people, followed people, cultivated informers, asked children to inform on their parents, tried to instill loyalty to the state over and above their own family... they "disappeared" people (either shooting them or sending them to gulags), sometimes entire families. To send a message to any other potential rebels. And unsurprisingly, people wanted out. It was already illegal to leave the USSR without permission, the Berlin Wall was just the most prominent part of that. One of the reasons people stayed in the USSR was because even if they had a chance to escape, they knew the party would punish their family. This is the real world that Orwell amped up. The "memory hole" is code for Soviet censorship, which was rife - see the NKVD commissar vanish here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_images_in_the_So...
You're extremely naive about China. Do you think they wanted the Great Leap Forward and the Eliminate Sparrows campaign? One man's ill-informed policies caused a famine resulting in 15-55 million deaths. The One Child Policy? The state response to Tiananmen Square protests? The Great Firewall? The Social Credit system? Why does Foxconn have anti-suicide nets? You think industry tycoons being in bed with government is bad? It is! Now note that the theory of the Three Represents is part of the Chinese Constitution. Ask yourself why notionally independent Hong Kong imprisoned a large number of pro-democracy campaigners. These are not signs of a benevolent dictatorship. It's a totalitarian state maintaining its dominance over the masses and its elites revelling in the spoils. Why do you think there is such a push by rich Chinese to get their capital out of the country?
Perhaps you should read Brave New World instead?
Your reading of 1984 is a bit shallow.. It was a warning against censorship in the UK as well. (And honestly I think the authoritarian state of 1984 is just a setting, I think Orwell's main point was we shouldn't give into extremism of any form, otherwise we lose our humanism.)
Orwell has been quoted that Animal Farm was a also a critique of capitalism, in favor of democratic socialism.
You also say GP is naive about China. But China has been actually less oppressive as time goes along. In fact, historically, authoritarian states often become less oppressive without foreign interference (my home country, Czechoslovakia, was on path towards democratic socialism in the 1960s, unfortunately, it was reversed for geopolitical reasons; such has been experience of many American client states as well). (And you also have liberal states becoming more authoritarian on their own, we can see that in the western world, due to concentration of wealth.)
This indicates there is no "natural law" that makes things more (or less) authoritarian. It depends on people pursuing politics, and being informed.
I don’t know what to think about China. I think I was brainwashed already. I spend too much time on Reddit where it seems they like China a lot and want to become China. (Is this AI generated sentiment?) Though none of them seems to be moving to China now that I think about it.
Look, it’s extremely hard to remain some kind of objective nowadays on the internet. I no longer know what is true and what is false.
Truth has lost all meaning and was replaced by politics.
Even history books written by scientists are routinely under attack.
In my country of Poland a Nobel prize winner, someone that my teachers said was a hero, suddenly became the villain. I never got my head around it. It still puzzles me. Like a some thorn in my side. He was a national hero? Now he is the bad guy? Why? It’s strange and unsettling how fast narrative changed to serve some political goal and everyone just went with it.
I am not resistant to narratives but I seem to routinely miss them. Then I wake up and everyone is saying some strange extreme things and are angry at each other and it seems fabricated to me many times.
Such as in my city was recently some uptick of anti car sentiment. Yeah like discussion is normal and we want to live in best possible environment but this wasn’t discussion. It was just people throwing shit at each other and extreme tribalism. It’s unsettling to see this. Social media has been doing something terrible to people. And I think it all serves somebody’s interests. Someone benefits from these divisions and wars.
We need to collectively unplug and get a grip
> I don’t know what to think about China. I think I was brainwashed already.
Try visiting if you get the chance and see for yourself how things are. Depending on your workplace you may also have many Chinese coworkers who would be glad to tell you what life is like there.
Definitely don’t listen to Reddit, but also don’t listen to the countless other forums trying to convince you it’s a North Korea like dystopia.
I know the feeling. The only thing you can do is try to keep an honest perspective on reality. Look for confirmation from reliable sources, wait to see how things turn out before passing it on. It feels bad finding out something important is actually hallucinated codswallop, but it's much worse if you sent it on to your friends first. Don't believe things because you'd like they were true, or reject because you'd prefer they were false.
There's always a tussle for who "controls the narrative", it's not always the well-informed. Look at the Covid 19 outbreak. An honest medic would say it's your choice to take the rapidly-developed vaccine, we don't have as extensive safety and efficacy studies as usual but we're in a time crunch, here are its known side-effects, but also consider what happens if you don't take it and end up contracting the virus, which was ultimately fatal for millions, more fatal the older you were. I wouldn't have believed such basic medical advice could be politicised, but there it was with an American right-wing claiming the medics were lying (why would they?!) and performatively defying basic instructions to avoid spreading a pandemic, then predictably dying of something they could completely have avoided, like Herman Cain. Then they started going for the absolutely bonkers science-free "remedies" invented by their tribe, like shining UV light up your arse or taking horse de-worming tablets. Meanwhile the American left-wing wanted to insist on people wearing masks (even where distancing or ventilation improvements would be more effective) and fire people for not taking the vaccine (what happened to informed consent?)
I don't know which Nobel prize winner became the villain, but I can believe both that it can happen unjustly (politicians or social activists start attacking them for their other beliefs), and sometimes justly; "Nobel disease" is when the celebrated scientist lets recognition go to their head and starts speaking in areas where they aren't experts. The famed example is Linus Pauling who got the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, but in later years started hawking vitamin C tablets saying it could cure cancer; it can't, and he died of cancer. Additional studies have shown that when taken intravenously it can have an effect on some cancer cells as part of a chemotherapy regime, but as orally ingested tablets it's worthless.
For what I've said on China in the previous comment, I have never been, but I am fairly certain of the veracity of all the issues I raised. I can't speak for any specific Chinese person and how they feel about their government, I'm sure millions of them are happy in life no matter how the country is run, and certainly the country is more prosperous these days, but these issues are still there, and we in the West should try our best to avoid lapsing into authoritarianism or totalitarianism.
What an original thought.
https://www.google.com/search?q=1984+was+not+meant+to+be+an+...
Look at the images tab. This is so cliché there are hundreds of mugs and t-shirts with it!
Times would be tough if we could only express thoughts noone thought before.
Times would definitely be better if people didn't repeat the same endless clichés.
While their arguments are sound, Perhaps Mozilla should disclose in this document that they are also a VPN reseller.
I may be in the minority but I'm perfectly fine with Mozilla's approach here.
They link to the full document which lists their VPN subscriber count near the top of the about Mozilla section.
It would sound like an advertisement though, so in some way it’s better they don’t mention it
It’s better to hide conflicts of interest?
(Edit: I don’t disagree with Mozilla’s position, but failure to declare an obvious conflict of interest undermines their credibility.)
By your logic it's also better if Ray-Ban and Oakley don't publicly state that UV light is dangerous and that people should use sunglasses if outside.
That sounds silly.
I said that they should have declared the conflict of interest, not that they shouldn't have made the statement.
It’s in the document they link pretty early on. You can argue they could make it more obvious in the blog I guess but that’s flimsy IMO and calling it hidden isn’t accurate
Fair enough. Yes, it is in the linked document. I agree that's sufficient. I was responding to people suggesting that Mozilla didn't need to declare this at all.
All good. I also tuned down my language a little bit there, that came off as a little harsh and lecturing, sorry about that
They also advocate for if not enforce HTTPS. Would this be bad if they were also a trusted CA selling signed TLS certs to companies?
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A complementary policy is to not give six year olds publicly funded mandatory chromebooks their parents don’t control. This can reduce the pressure coming from these parents to warp and twist the web till it is safe for a six year old to have free access to an uncontrolled chromebook.
While I agree with your comment at a high level, simply saying it's the parents job k thx bai is not going to cut it. Parents have to have the tools we need to do our jobs. I don't want the government touching it with a 10 foot pole, and no adults should have to give up their freedoms (these kids will be adults some day after all, so even if we're doing it "for the kids" we need to consider the world we're building for them), but the tools available to parents right now are way too inadequate, unless mom and dad are rich enough to buy enterprise-level tooling.
If we don't want to lose our freedoms, we need to offer constructive and realistic solutions that don't involve the government. Simply saying "not my problem" may feel good, but it's going to end up with a government-enforced tech dystopia.
You have stated everything in your answer. I want to point out that the problematic starts with who controls the safety. Yes tech-constructors should be obligated to build their software such that the end-user can exercise any kind of required control and yes the parent should be liable. None of this require the government forcing identity through the OS layer.
Parents have the tools already here in the UK.
ISPs come with adult content disabled by default and someone has to opt in to it. Every major OS (Windows, Mac, iOS, android) ships with device level parental controls. Games consoles enforce these based on birth date. ISPs here also provide free network level filtering on top of that. All of this only matters if the parents don’t bypass them when asked.
If a kid is determined enough to get past Apple family controls and the network level filtering on their home network, they’ll have a VPN from a dodgy source in 15 minutes. The solution is to use the tools that are there right now, or accept that age verification is coming for everything.
> Every major OS (Windows, Mac, iOS, android) ships with device level parental controls. Games consoles enforce these based on birth date.
These are unfortunately rather half-baked and should be improved. Which is exactly what could be mandated instead of invading everyone's privacy.
Honestly though - they’re enough to “protect the kids”. Any kid that’s smart enough to get around them is going to be snart enough to get around a VPN ban.
You are right though - the fact that those controls exist and are in place and the UK government isn’t enforcing that Apple Microsoft and Google provide better tools (which would actually achieve the aim) tells you that what they actually want is what they’re asking for - a VPN backdoor.
The part I don’t totally understand with the age verification laws is that as I understand it, the websites need to implement the age verification. It seems like the bad actors just won’t do that, and we could’ve made compliance easier for the good actors by just requiring something like the Restricted to Adults label as a meta tag.
Exactly. We need a standardized method for meta tags that accommodates arbitrary user (or rather service operator) defined categories. We also need a broad push to force all websites to adopt said tags so that parental controls can work effectively. Government enforcement of particular categories is one option there (but not the only one, browsers could just start refusing to load any site that doesn't send the tag).
I think you'll find that trying to neatly bin the internet into neatly defined categories is something of a fool's errand. I guess the canonical example is centuries old fine art that shows a bit of nipple.
what about whitelists? this never comes up anymore. I can load profiles from the 'child safety council' if that's what I want, and should expect to cover some of the overhead in evaluating all the submitted links. particularly in an educational setting, part of the problem is kids playing games and hanging out on social instead of working.
it seems a lot more tractable than trying to classify everything and get everyone to play along. let 1000 different filters bloom.
what's fundamentally wrong with that approach?
Whitelists have the exact same problem you're objecting to. Not everyone will agree what should or shouldn't be on one.
In practice I don't think it's an issue. What I'm arguing for is the infra to facilitate self categorization and (likely) also a legal requirement limited to only a few specific categories. For example the government might mandate that porn, social media, and user generated content all be accurately tagged and provide legal definitions.
Nothing about what I describe would preclude additional layers of categorization such as (but not limited to) whitelists. In fact it should improve such efforts by providing a standardized method they can use for arbitrarily fine grained categorization that will be compatible with other software out of the box.
Note that my tagging proposition could be applied per network request. So if the service operator wants to it should facilitate filtering out (for example) a comment section without blocking access to the rest of the site.
the point being that instead of there being a kind of commission to create a schema, there are a whole bunch of different whitelists. so if your religion objects to the existence of mangoes, then you can subscribe to a mango-free internet filter.
and instead of burdening the isp the publisher of mango sorbet recipes with ticking off all the right schema boxes, this can all be enforced at the consumer.
all the rest of these approaches kind of assume that there is 'reasonable' and 'unreasonable' content, and that we all mostly agree on the difference. which I think is fundamentally fallacious. do you really think we can agree, as a species, what PG-13 should mean for the entire internet?
I'm against any kind of age verification legislation, but this is a really bad argument.
It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly."
In theory, one could implement age verification by negligent parent imprisonment, in practice, I don't think that would work, and definitely not in all cases.
If we accept the premise that children having unfettered access to the internet is a bad thing (which, again, I don't think we should), there have to be multiple layers to it. Punishment is one, increasing friction and "making honest people honest" is another.
“Properly” is the choice of the parent, except in some narrow cases we’ve defined culturally.
The last thing we need is society deciding in detail how children should be raised. CPS horror stories are bad enough as it is.
CPS horror stories should be the least of your concern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s-1990s_Romanian_orphans_p...
Nevertheless as a society we do have laws protecting the children, also the adults, on the streets. Why not having or applying laws for the online? Why should we expect or ask that the internet be magically better handled by the parents alone?
Because online is global, and you can't have effective local laws against a global system. Parents don't need magic; they just need to watch what their kids use devices for, and keep the devices in public areas of the house.
The main thing the state can do is stop requiring kids to have portable internet-connected devices for state schooling.
You are obviously not a parent. I lock down devices, lock down my network, then the public school gives my kid a laptop with access to nearly everything I’ve tried to filter. Even if I can successfully monitor it at home, the device is in their possession and out of my control as a parent for 6-8 hours a day. The government is literally bypassing our family rules and my ability to protect my children in the way I see fit.
For 90% of kids, that’s not going to be an issue and everyone can feel like they’re such a great parent. But for another group of kids, they absolutely cannot handle it and have not developed the executive function to be able to manage access to everything the Internet offers.
In the past we understood this as a society. Broadcasters on public airwaves had standards for what was appropriate. We’ve completely thrown those out in one generation and decided gambling, porn, extremely violence, social and emotional grooming and abuse, and lots more are all OK to give children access to, unchecked and with limited education. It’s really kind of sick.
I don't know why you think I'm not a parent. What did I say that made you think that?
If your kids are accessing things they know they shouldn’t, and you know they’re doing it anyway, is that it? We’re at an impasse? I really don’t want to tell anyone how to parent, but I’ll say that if I did what you described I would have been punished and/or grounded, because I knew the rules, and I knew I was breaking them.
Unfortunately, that’s not how addiction works. It’s hard to punish addiction out of anyone. Different kids have different nature and nurture, and for some kids, consequences don’t matter. I would have judged parent’s in this situation before becoming one. It’s humbling and builds empathy.
What do you do when punishment doesn’t work? When therapy doesn’t work? When strict control doesn’t work? When there is no remorse, shame, fear of repercussion, or ability to anticipate consequences or risk? When the kid has the highest IQ in the house but fails tests and doesn’t turn in homework because they don’t care about anything but their vice? When they literally spend 2 hours a day _at school_ on YouTube and games (among other things) on a device the district mandates they have?
Do you punish a child for years because they can’t function with access most people consider normal? When their siblings have all of the same access and devices and don’t have the same issues and would respond to rules and who would punishment in exactly the way you would describe?
Maybe it’s a parenting issue, but I’d like to think we’ve done far more than most parents could imagine for over a decade and come up short for one of our kids. Meanwhile 3 others are just fine.
ok, probably age verification and strict access control from the state solve your problem.. for some time.
But what will you do when this one will grow? There will be no restrictions - not from you, not from the state. Does restriction really solved the root problem?
What you're describing, combined with the sort of state provided access being described, seems like it would incentivize the child learning how to lie and hide things more effectively. It's absurd that the school would facilitate such broad and directionless access to the internet outside of the parent's supervision. It's directly undermining them.
are the school laptops locked down at all? work laptops are locked down at most corporations and that’s for adults!
They are but middle school and high school kids are more creative, have less to lose, and have no concept of long term consequences compared to employees. School district IT is no match for kids with unlimited time, creativity, and access. Bypasses spread faster than memes. AI chatbots are blocked, one of my son’s friends ran a local proxy to his unblocked domain and other kids get local network access to AI. Installers blocked? Get a hacked game loader that looks like an approved binary.
You have a class with 30 kids with gaming (or social media or or porn) devices and a teacher whose just as internet addicted behind their own computer at the front expecting the kids to work on their own through the lesson while they do who knows what.
How much YouTube do you think you can you watch in a a high school PE class? About 50 minutes at today’s public schools. The teacher doesn’t care, the principal doesn’t care, the superintendent doesn’t care, and the school board doesn’t care. As long as the PE teacher’s baseball team does well, who cares, right? (Hi Scottsdale Unified School District! I’m talking about you!)
> Hi Scottsdale Unified School District! I’m talking about you!
Oh, I guess you’re not my neighbor. You had me going there for a long time.
Stories like this are everywhere. Parents don’t share them because they perceive it is an individual problem, and a shameful problem.
We don’t even have a good way to talk about the problems, never mind their solutions.
> It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly."
Define “properly” and how often do the self-righteous themselves cause harm. I see a strong desire for people to want to “control” all outcomes on everything and have everyone in the world think and say and act as they want.
Yes but you see, my views are the correct ones and should be the only allowable views. Other people who want this are controlling and their evil views are simply wrong. If you don’t agree with me you’re a bad person.
We don't hold parents responsible for most neglect. Why is this special?
I would hardly define allowing your child access to the internet as neglect. Like anything else, like crossing the street for example, there are dangers that can be mitigated against by education by parents and schools.
The government is vastly overreaching in this and quite frankly if one argues that this is a good thing, then where to draw the line? Will we want to see government legislation for every possible permutation of potentially harmful behaviours or consequences.
Sorry Johnny can't come out to play because I have not yet bought the latest government-legislated knee guard armour to prevent a graze, and BTW I notice that you have not renewed the foam coating on your sidewalk, if Johnny trips and falls there...
Imagine having unrestricted access to meth. For the vast majority of the population, they’d continue to be productive members of society. For some, limited use might help them function better. But for a few, it would completely decimate their lives and impact the lives of many around them. They have absolutely no ability to manage their use, and oh, yeah, they’re also children.
Some will experience a significant down regulation of dopamine receptors caused by the constant artificial reward stimulus. As tolerance builds, more is needed for longer to get the same response, while the ability to function normally becomes more difficult. That’s screen addiction, not meth.
We regulate most things with that potential, even if it only affects a small percentage. About 1% of the population struggles with meth. 6-10% with internet related addictions and more like 40% among youth.
120 years ago, opium, alcohol, marijuana were a free for all. There was similar opposition to their control. Now it’s accepted as a public health benefit and most people would probably be shocked at how recent these became regulated.
My elementary aged kids can’t use “safe search” without being exposed to pornography, extreme violence, Five Nights at Epstein’s, flat earther’s, etc. Tech company’s have failed to create a safe product and when that goes on for long enough, the government steps in.
Worth pointing out that there are people (such as myself) opposed to the current drug regulations who will be put off by your meth example. The key detail is the part where it's being provided to children - in this case with the help of the school!
People will debate all day what should and shouldn't be regulated for adults but it seems the vast majority agree on shielding children from having potentially harmful things actively pushed onto them by strangers.
Does UK not have equivalent to CPS?
We do - https://learning.nspcc.org.uk/child-protection-system - but, at least in England, as with most governmental functions, it's been slashed to near death by years of austerity and "small government" lunacy.
> It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly."
Nor can it, because it takes a village to raise a human being.
And in this (global) village, we have determined that we will monetise everything... and for the victims, there's thoughts and prayers. [1]
Is your child my child? Should I involve myself in how you choose to bring up the child, if you espouse ideas I disagree with?
It depends on the harm that you witness. Your question does imply your awareness that parents are not/may not be intellectually (or even morally) competent.
In no Western society that I can name are parents omnipotent owners of their children. Parents may even lose custody of their children. If you know that parents are doing physical harm to children, you have a social obligation to try to do something for those children.
Even though we may turn a blind eye, we do have a social obligation to all children. Human anthropological history reflects this.
Although intellectual harm tends to be seen as sunken cost (and possibly "correctable"), social harm has intolerable consequences.
We should be involving our community members more in the exchange of ideas, and digital sources of information quite a bit less.
Why? I certainly don't think as highly of my community as you seem to. But really, what is the value you personally get from opening up your life to your community?
It has always been the responsibility of parents to raise their children "properly" (whatever that means). What is special about internet access that now requires the government to legislate for it, and as a side-effect, greatly reduce the privacy of the rest of the population. This is without even addressing the argument that these measures may even make the privacy situation for children worse.
>It doesn't answer the question of "what do we do about parents that don't do their job properly."
Like with normal cases - have court go over this.
But decision if any form of age lock should be implemented or not is up to parents. You cannot just shift argument to "you HAVE to restrict children from internet or else!"
What about the California version, where the government says you HAVE to offer parents the choice to restrict their children from the internet or not? That seems like a pretty reasonable middle ground, and solves the actual problems without denying privacy.
These systems won’t work any better than identification requirements for alcohol and tobacco or anything else. Maybe you didn’t know anyone who drank or smoked when you were a teenager but they are pretty widespread even when parents aren’t negligent. Systems like the proposed ones will be even easier for kids to find a way around.
I’m somewhat in favour of these foolish attempts at control because they always drive innovation in technology to circumvent them and adoption of that technology creating a thriving underground scene. Content piracy and alternative platforms could use a resurgence and this is just the thing to get it jumpstarted.
I agree that the recent craze about internet ID checks are foolish but your example falls on its face. ID checks to purchase goods at a physical location are actually quite effective. They don't achieve perfect compliance but that's not a fatal flaw (or even necessarily any flaw at all despite what people might say).
Since it is fashionable tiktok subject nowadays, you do it like genx and boomers.
We turned out alright.
Expect more of the same then?
I've gotten exactly one response on what that looks like. The parent suggested writing custom moderation rules for his router. He was serious that this was feasible general solution.
You argue against "individualist societies" but then blame "their parents" for not coping with the kinda impossible task of protecting their kids from big tech or the surveillance state.
It is a collective problem with collective solutions.
I did not say anything about protecting kids from big tech or the state?
Even if I had, your argument is we must surveil more to protect the kids from the surveillance state?
I interpreted you as it was the parents responsibility to protect their children, ye.
I don't argue for a surveillance state. Authoritarians push authoritarian policies with convinient excuses. I do understand that.
I think there need to be a cultural shift and that involves the collective of parents not indivual families.
Like, my TV installed adtech shovelware over night and my son woke up early and watched it. Sport teams organize on Facebook. The school headmaster wants CCTVs. Door bell cameras are getting more and more common.
We can't fight those things as individuals.
So your solution to preventing "surveillance state" is to unmask everyone on the internet? Now who has the inconsistent argument
I don't know the parent's policy position, but it seems like they didn't express one, and you've just assumed they support deanonymization?
Ye this modern view that more and more assumes polarisation of stands on matters is kinda annoying. I don't support deanonymization.
It’s become bog standard to just throw up extremely binary strawmen these days or otherwise bait people into arguments demanding sources that you can then point at and whine about. Zero attempt to understand or ask questions that clarify. Anything that avoids having to listen or express your own opinion in a substantive way.
I do criticize where individualism and those kinds of societies have gone wrong, but I also think it's going to be very hard for a parent to control that.
A single parent, definitely.
A group of parents? I’m more hoepeful.
(In my country,) There are many levels of government between the individual and the nation. Sometimes that is a curse. But sometimes change needs to start locally. This is an excellent example.
This is the way! It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone, in return for not having to care about their offspring and the illusion of 100% safety.
I think the authoritarian trend accelerated during corona. Our western political nobility got a real taste for power, and they have not been able to free themselves from that afrodisiac ever since. Therefore chat control, 1, 2, 3, and when that didn't go as planned... lo and behold... age verification, and that of course needs control over vpn, and encryption, and there we go... chat control slipped in through the back door.
Soon we can no longer criticize china if this keeps up.
Did you ever heard a parent asking for this in the real world? Parents who care either don't give smartphones, or dumbed-down ones that they can control.
Asking for less tech at school is not an authoritarian move, but rather a point of view about how schools should work.
If you asked me, I think that parents should throw away their TVs and minimize screen time at home, both for them and the kids. However I won't ask this to be enforced by the State - if anything, it will make my kids more competitive against the cartoons-infused ones of the other parents.
I do not think parents are the one pushing these controls. They are busy raising the kids.
I think parents are raising the alarm about nefarious social media practices (ie recommendation algorithms that actively do harm) and those services are in turn pushing these controls in order to deflect responsibility away from themselves.
There’s an alternate view that parents are very much in support of centralized policy. When policy is left up to individual families — little Johnny X has an iPhone but little Timmy Y doesn’t — the creep towards everyone having a phone begins. When, instead, the school board bans phones it’s much easier for the conservative majority of parents to hold the line.
Banning phones at school has nothing to do with freedom to use phones. You are not restrained in your freedom because using you smartphone while driving is forbidden.
Kids go to school to learn, not to watch modern cable shopping network (aka Tiktok/Instagram).
I'm more fine with schools banning frivolous use of tech devices on school grounds during school hours.
> It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone,
It's not like parents have much of a choice. When you gotta work 2 jobs to barely make rent and groceries, you need some sort of "safe space" to pawn your children off to.
Just my opinion but…
I’m all for helping people in the situations that aren’t of their own creation, so using the excuse “what are they supposed to do” doesn’t really fit for me? The first option is to use a condom if they are in a bad financial situation. It’s been amazing how every time I’ve used one, I haven’t had a child.
When did we stop making people responsible for their choices? I’m not against assistance, I’m against the idea that it is my responsibility to give up rights and freedoms because <insert person> made poor personal choices and now society is once again a surrogate to yet another child of irresponsible parents. If you aren’t able to parent, don’t have children. Don’t care what your situation is that rule stays the same.
And of course, someone will jump in with “but maybe” and “what if the situation changed”. Again…I’m not against helping parents who fall on hard times to get back on their feet — society SHOULD be there to help with assistance and programs, even help with getting your kids watched. And all of that exists. I’m against expecting every individual of society to not only help bear the costs, fund and administrate these programs, provide countless charities, etc…
But now the suggestions is also somehow that we are required to be the surrogate parent to every one of their offspring by giving up our rights to create an entire society of a padded playground?
No, I think that’s the line for me.
Parents can give up all their own rights they want and live in their padded kingdoms, but that ends at your doorstep when you walk out to the space you share with every other person…including digitally. You can build the physical and virtual walls around your padded kingdom as high and thick as you want to keep your children shielded from the world.
>The first option is to use a condom if they are in a bad financial situation. It’s been amazing how every time I’ve used one, I haven’t had a child.
That's what they've been doing in unprecedented numbers. Which via demographic collapse is going to cause an even worse crisis, economic, social, political, and more, further down the line.
It's also why some political factions are trying to ban condoms. Often the same factions that are trying to ban VPNs.
"Being able to parent" is something you don't know about before you have your first child, and each child increases exponentially the difficulty. You can manage ok the first one and be overwhelmed when the second one is born.
Also not everyone is a trust fund kid that works at a FAANG: people get sick, lose jobs, divorce, change homes, and so on.
I'm really happy that you found the perfect antifragile optimum in your life, but this kind of "vae victis" thinking will only make parents more miserable and decrease birth rates.
love that not having kids when you can’t actually afford your own existence at that time is a hot take that no one could know in advance that they shouldn’t do. Also love that I SPECIFICALLY called out your argument, almost like you couldn’t even finish reading before needing to get in your super well thought response.
That's fussing around with symptoms. The real cure would be to remove the reasons parents don't have time for their children anymore.
> how eagerly parents want to give up freedom for everyone
...is there evidence that it's parents who are the constituency you describe?
> It is frightening how eagerly parents want to give up
... every aspect of parenting.
Sadly, this is how societies eventually tend to become. They need the younger generation to be “properly” raised (definition of “proper” really depends on the society).
If the side effect is that you also end up controlling adults and making them behave “properly,” then that is considered a plus.
"Do you know who's responsible to make sure children are safe online? Their parents."
Parents have the responsibility to do what is necessary to protect their kids
In the case of parents v. so-called "tech" companies, who should win
What happens when the companies are protected from parents by Section 230
Yet platforms should be accountable for the harms they create (in some way it has to be regulated)
Harms to adults. No children should be on the platforms, and it's up to the parents to regulate it.
Not to be to overly reductive, but you could use the same argument for drugs and weapons.
It's not being reductive at all. I'm certain parent commentor doesn't have kids so they don't care. If someone was using the street outside their house to deal drugs and causing problems they would be happy for the police to "regulate" that activity.
It's just selfishness. "I want some privacy utopia on the internet (which can no longer exist, the internet isn't the place of the 90s and early 00s), so your kids can be exploited by social media and porn".
The example you give doesn’t really track. If a drug dealer is outside the entrance of your home it’s completely unavoidable. A kid looking at adult material online? Entirely within the control of the parents. We already have filtering and monitoring software.
I know several parents that limit screen time, require screen usage be restricted to public areas of the home, have parental controls and filtering operating etc.. some of the parents I know won’t even let their kids watch a movie unless they screen it first.
If a drug dealer is outside the entrance of your home you can avoid it by not leaving your home. What if every time you turn on the computer it shows objectionable content? It's easily avoidable by not turning on the computer. Same argument. Is it a reasonable one?
Something must be wrong with your computer. I don't see objectionable content when I turn mine on? I'd have to actively seek out objectionable content and I don't even have any sort of filtering or parental controls enabled on my own devices.
I do, it asks me to log in with a Microsoft account and thereby give all my personal data to Microsoft.
Actually not, since I use Linux, but most people's do. It's much worse on my phone.
How does banning VPNs equate to policing drug dealing? The drug dealing is already illegal.
It doesn't equate; it's being employed as an analogy to address the justifiability of broad enforcement efforts targeting something.
As a parent, then, what do you do when a public school district hands every 7 year old a Chromebook and has completely inadequate filtering on it?
That is a thought-terminating cliche. Everyone has some responsibility to everyone else. That's what living in a society means.
If Facebook decided to start showing hardcore porn to people it identifies as being under 14, would you blame the parents for letting the kids use Facebook, and not blame Facebook? If you would blame Facebook, that means you believe Facebook has (at least some) responsibility.
Okay. How?
I have a little boy. He does not use computers yet. One day he will. His friends will have YouTube or it’s spiritual successor and everyone in his school will be on TikTok where they’re hammered with whatever brainrot gets the most engagement.
What do you propose, exactly?
I will do everything in my power to keep the tech bros out of my children's life. Yes, that includes being a responsible parent. It also includes societal norms being established. Just as was done for alcohol, nicotine, movies, porn mags ect.
I guarantee you are not as dedicated as me trying to protect my kids, so there will be age gates, and that includes VPNs.
Everyone knows VPNs are only used for getting shit for free, so there is also a pretty powerful corporate interest to lock them down. In the case of the "corporate content provides" vs the "tech bros", the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I'll take a win however it comes.
Mozilla have picked a battle that will kill off Firefox, I am now not longer interested in recommending or using it. I'd bet their user base skews to older people, more likely to be parents.
> Mozilla have picked a battle that will kill off Firefox, I am now not longer interested in recommending or using it
Presumably your support is for a browser developed by Google instead, as they are clearly not interested in surveillance or being in your children’s life?
Firefox forks are available, and will probably last long than Mozilla.
And exist because of the amount of work Mozilla does in keeping the browser up to date.
every corporation is running a vpn network. Every router manufacturer builds them into the firmware so you can safely access your home network. there’s a much bigger use case than free stuff.
>Everyone knows VPNs are only used for getting shit for free,
I don't use my vpn for 'shit for free'.
Elderly undue influence costs victims billions.
I shouldn't have to consider getting a parent an under 18 account to protect them better.
Parents are expected to do more than you can imagine and everyone has an opinion on how they’re supposed to do it, especially in the US. You’re a terrible parent if you can’t keep a 5 year old from ever alerting somebody to their presence, but you’re also a terrible parent if you give them an iPad for a few minutes so they don’t bother people.
This whole thing where parents are expected to do it all themselves is actually a new phenomenon. Historically, across basically every culture, it was up to the community to raise all the kids together. To sacrifice and make compromises together.
Your parents likely didn’t have to deal with YouTube. There were basic laws in place that guarantee the content on broadcast TV fell within certain limits. Was that unacceptable to you as well? It strikes me that you take for granted the fact that you could never have been exposed to Alex Jones as a child. Let’s not pretend your parents knew everything you watched and saw, they just knew it could only be so bad most of the time. Yet you now expect parents to know everything on every screen in front of their kids with no assistance ever as the “attention economy” machine attacks all of us. It’s not a fair fight at all and your response is “parents just solve it yourselves” without a second thought.
I do not agree with all these age verification and surveillance state initiatives we are seeing. I am categorically against them. But your philosophy is harmful and frankly selfish. You live in a community. You have to make compromises.
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This wikipedia article is a great example of degenerate propaganda, that permeates anything historical/political on wikipedia.
It doesn't even worth trying to correct, since correcting would imply that it has some worthy material, which it doesn't.
while I certainly agree that wikipedia is full of propaganda written by volunteer degenerates and paid shills, I'm not quite sure how is that relevant to this particular article. the amount of tangible evidence of that particular Soviet propaganda campaign is overwhelming. that name is still notorious there.
How about this: nobody shall be unsafe online or offline, and the state shall guarantee it. That's a foundation you can build law on, instead of hoping every child got lucky with their parents.
I think North Korea is attempting to do this, for example by punishing not only the criminal but also their immediate family to a life-sentence in working camps, if the person commits severe enough crime.
I don't think it's as successful as it sounds on paper, from the comfort of our western society homes.
That's why the government wants to get rid of them.
And also VPNs are tools to open doors in the minefield of legislations that they need to create to improve the incoming of some business, not of the people that voted for them.
I love how the comments miss that the problem these laws address deserve addressing, but from the producers side: making safe products for the public. This specific solution is fashioned after tobacco and alcohol regulation, which was never primarily about parental supervision, it's about what can be sold and how. And in public health we'd want everyone moving away from both not just kids. The boneheadness of age verification is that unlike tobacco and alcohol, where the best we can do is restrict access, online harm can actually be fixed at the root by regulating what these services are allowed to do to users in the first place.
The issue is, to regulate the service Meta (or whoever) provides, they have to age gate anyway. Unless the service is child friendly for all users. Which would mean; follow and friend limits, usage limits, blackout periods after 9pm, only seeing posts from friends, no algorithmic "time line". That sort of thing.
That regulation would be orders of magnitude more difficult to implement. Just look at the malicious compliance the cookie regulations created, that was a single modal.
Better to just ban it for under 16s. That might happen before my kids are old enough to be fully exploited.
Interesting that they mention the UK but forget that the EU also wants to protect the kids by banning VPNs
This blog post is highlighting their specific contribution to the UK government's open consultation[1], not a general call for sanity. There's a link to their open letter at the end of the piece. No doubt they will write other authorities when the need arises.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...
So your strategy when you are trying to change someones mind is to mention a lot of other people think like the mind you are trying to change?
Could you explain what is the theory behind that?
I think better enforcement against harmful platform behavior and better digital literacy would do more without normalizing surveillance as the default
It is unclear to me what VPNs have to do with the conversation with respect to age gating.
If a government has the ability to fine content providers for providing content to its citizens, why accept IP verification is good enough to determine the user’s jurisdiction and not fine them anyway for providing the content?
Is the charitable reading of whatever’s going on in Europe right now that European states don’t believe they can hold American tech giants accountable to their laws? I genuinely don’t see why a law banning under-14 year olds from social media wouldn’t be the first step.
Because it’s not a good idea, everyone else becomes inconvenienced and/or subject to spyware just to arbitrarily age-limit something that doesn’t have to be age limited, and despite that inconvenience, it will inevitably be worked around by motivated 13 year olds.
> to arbitrarily age-limit something that doesn’t have to be age limited
There is evidence of a growing consensus that this does have to be age limited. Both in the research and in voter polls. (I personally believe in it.)
> it will inevitably be worked around by motivated 13 year olds
The same goes for liquor and cigarette laws. They're still of net benefit.
This isn't only happening in Europe: https://ondato.com/blog/florida-age-verification-law/
The real answer to what's going on is one that HN doesn't like to consider. It's simply that a lot of people in a lot of countries are worried about what children are able to access on the internet and want the government to help restrict it.
I don't support these sorts of restrictions. However, HN seems completely unable to have a sensible discussion about them because most posters are convinced that this is all part of some kind of sinister authoritarian scheme. In reality, it's just some bad legislation pushed by various people who largely have good motives, and who are concerned about something that is a real problem.
The bad legislation should be opposed. In order to do so effectively, we have to address the actual concerns driving it, rather than railing ineffectually against a largely imaginary authoritarian conspiracy.
User to Mozilla: Cannot read your statement with a variant of your own browser because you have it "protected" by an internet gatekeeper.
I think this is a genuinely difficult problem that happens to look exactly like what you’d need for extended surveillance. When I think about it seriously, I end up coming up with the idea of a whitelist enforced on device for local accounts used by children.
This would probably block most of the internet, and allow access only to sites that are validated as being safe. This would put a lot of pressure on sites and service providers to ensure safety, such as children-only walled gardens within their broader services.
We already have piecemeal attempts at something like this through on device private age restriction software, but it’s not organised at the state level, and I think it’s not effective enough as a result.
If legally enforced it could be made into a pretty effective system that would give adults freedom and anonymity and provide safety for children, while pushing the costs of child safety onto the platforms, which is where it belongs. If you want to cater to children, prove that you can make it on to the whitelist. Otherwise that’s an audience you’re just not able to access.
There are already whitelisting solutions that can be installed on devices controlled by parents.
That don’t really work because this isn’t a nation state level enforced system, and realistically the only state that can force such a thing is the US. If they worked, we wouldn’t be here having this discussion.
... that don't need the identity of the parents to work.
Nor do these devices require the identity of non-parents who will never enable the childproofing mode
Nor does legislation invert the burden of proof and require the device's manufacturer obtain and store identity documents just to use the devices, otherwise it must restrict all access to a small handful of "kid safe" actions.
These aren't "child safety" laws, they're "adult anonymity eradication" laws
> the idea of a whitelist enforced on device for local accounts used by children
What’s wrong with making it the social media companies’ problem? If they sign up a child, they get fined. Everyone is then incentivized to come up with solutions. If some of those are shit, restrict them. If they’re not, great.
> If they sign up a child, they get fined. Everyone is then incentivized to come up with solutions.
This already is the threat, and all the solutions social media comes up with are eerily “Age Verification” shaped. They are all going to be shitty.
> They are all going to be shitty
But constrained to those using the platforms. My issue with these broader measures is even if I don't use social media, I'm still caught up in the dragnet.
Because your "solution" creates massive privacy violations unless age verification and age assurance are banned, and result in even larger fines.
Did you actually read the post that you’re replying to?
Yes. It goes off into the same on-device wilderness the lawmakers have wandered into. It also fails Mozilla’s objection list to the status quo proposal.
I just don't accept any ban on VPNs, I will just be a criminal. I'm not fighting for a country I'm not allowed to wave the flag of and I'm not respecting any digital safety laws that simply do not apply to me because I am not a child. I will provision my own infra if thats what it takes, I simply don't care. Fuck this country.
I have seen some of the inside of this and it's not quite as clear cut.
One side of this is driven by a bunch of not too reputable think tanks behind the scenes who persuaded a couple of fringe academics to agree with them and push for it via the civil service. The government is taking bad, paid for advice. I don't know what the agenda is there but there is one and I reckon it's commercial. Probably a consortium of businesses wanting to create a market they can get into.
However the security services do not agree with the government or the think tanks and actually promote advice contrary to the regulators. They will ultimately win.
Attacking the regulators and revealing who is behind all this is what we should be doing.
Why does your last sentence sound like something yoda would say?
This comment is a little unclear.
However no matter what the government or security services want, they won't be able to stop people who want to use VPN or End to end encryption. Nothing would ever change in that regard.
VPNS need money to operate, and money businesses have anchors in the real, physical, brick-and-mortar world, which is ultimately under control of the British police, with their extendable batons and prison bars.
If you make money by laying asphalt on British streets and get paid in British pounds, there's no way for you to pay an internet business in Malta if the British government doesn't want you to. Sure, there's crypto, but crypto needs businesses which let it interface with the British banking system, which the UK government can instruct banks to shut down.
A internet based company in many countries can not be held to any law because the UK aren't a fan. Companies don't need to collect cash in the UK to run a business worldwide.
The technology bit doesn't really matter though.
The real problem is that the legislation would bring the power to prosecute people who use them or use it against them.
The security services aren't having any of that shit because it puts their position at risk both from the front-facing side and recommendations and guidance issued and from their own operations.
The power to prosecute and the actual ability to prosecute are two different things. They currently can't prosecute CSAM offences nor piracy due to capacity. It won't happen.
I think VPN prosecution could happen if it was treated more like traffic offenses than like felonies.
Force ISPs to log all connections and make ISP customers accountable for their traffic, like they are in Germany for example. If you detect an IP to be used for a VPN, ask every ISP to disclose al customers who interacted with it and issue them a ticket. Three tickets and you're denied internet service for two years.
I think this would scare most people off.
The problem is not with the state actually prosrcuting all, or even many vpn "offences". The problem is that the legislation gives states another powerful tool to prosecute people they find annoying but cannot easily punish for clearly breaking other laws.
Exactly, the effective purpose of overcriminalization is to provide a tool for selective use against “bad” people (those who get in the way). This includes recidivist criminals—though often only those who do damage to someone important—but it also includes counter-establishment activists, influencers, and supporters.
Well true but wait until you do something else and they pile that on top of it.
That’s because they don’t want to stop VPNs, they want to criminalise the ones they don’t have visibility into.
Bullshit. GCHQ loves new ways to spy. Being able to harvest all traffic is their dream. I’m sure they already do harvest it all.
If they cared about privacy and security they wouldn’t be [redacted].
Their job is also to secure national infrastructure. Compromising that through policy would do more damage.
There has always been tension in this area. A prime example is Dual_EC_DRBG https://harvardnsj.org/2022/06/07/dueling-over-dual_ec_drgb-...
Actually with data fusion VPN does not fix privacy. Ad networks does data fusion of Javascript browser finger print. So you are de cloaked any way on a VPN
You absolutely should not be using the same browser for general browsing and VPN based browsing. Check out Mullvad Browser, based on Tor Browser but without Tor.
most vpns block ads
not if the fingerprint code is coming from the first party server which is the case for most modern malware.
The regulators don't want you to have neither privacy nor security (from them).
That VPNs are undoubtedly essential privacy and security tools is precisely the problem the UK government has with them.
Didn't people make kinda that huge and broad movement too terminate PIPA and SOPA?
Could you, my wonderful Western friends, do that again?
I mean, all of it is even on video and largely on YouTube.
UK regulators are just hearing another excuse for a loicense.
It's worth pointing out that some people under some circumstances need to use VPNs. For example, timestamp.apple.com stalls when I call it from my machine, so I cannot sign any executables for macOS. When I use a VPN that changes my IP number, signing and notarizing works perfectly fine. My CI chain would literally not work without a VPN.
The UK government does whatever Meta tells them to do. We tax cigarettes because they’re bad for you. Let’s tax algorithmic news feeds.
> VPNs are essential privacy tools
Does Mozilla not understand that this is the exact reason why the UK wants to forbid them?
And that's also the reason why they introduced "age verification". It's not age verification, they couldn't care less about children.
Age verification is just mass surveillance under a fake name.
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Yeah except that Ofcom(the UK communications regulator) already said that the main goal of the Online Safety Act isn't about protecting children, it's about "controlling online discourse". They dropped that pretense literally one day after the act got passed.
>>I am getting very intolerant of these conspiratorial comments
Weird thing to brag about, but sure.
Source, please?
https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...
"officials explained that the regulation in question was 'not primarily aimed at ... the protection of children', but was about regulating 'services that have a significant influence over public discourse'".
Isn't this presentation disingenuous? The act is called the "Online safety act" and the quote isn't about the "regulation" in its entirety but about what constitutes a "Category 1" service. Described in an official explainer, meant for the public, as "Large user-to-user services" under the heading of "Adults will have more control over the content they see"[1].
It's not clear to me that this is some nefarious underhanded technique. The secretary of state asked why non-porn sites were included in Category 1, and was told that Category 1 wasn't intended to catch porn sites, but is intended to apply to "Large user-to-user services", in line with public communication from the government.
I don't think anybody is under any illusion that "Adults will have more control over the content they see" is intended to protect children.
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act...
This presentation seems entirely reasonable for the purposes of observing the stated goals, which differ from the purported goals. The act is being pitched as a means of "protecting children", which is also the mechanism making it harder for people to argue against it. It is entirely reasonable for people to observe that in practice the government is intending to use it to control online discourse.
The part of the act they are talking about seems to be concerned with content recommendation systems, not proof of age.
The original framing of the quote in that blue sky thread is highly misleading as a result.
> of observing the stated goals, which differ from the purported goals.
The problem is precisely that it doesn't show that. The Online Safety Act is, on this public explainer, described as legislation that provides protections to multiple groups. What they say in paragraph two is that "the strongest protections" are offered to children, while paragraph three then calls out that "The act will also protect adult users".
What is described is a tiered set of protections that at its lowest protects everyone (including adults), and a set of more narrow protections that are only extended to children. It follows quite logically that you will only need to know the users age if you want to show content to adults that you are not allowed to show children.
The "categorization" they are discussing is another axis of "tiering". Smaller provides (in categories 2A and B) are imposed less duty of protection, according to the explainer to account for their "size and capacity".
With this context. I think it's quite clear that the comments about the targeting of Category 1 are completely pedestrian. It isn't supposed to apply differently to PornHub and Amazon, because both are large multinationals that have enough resources to uphold their imposed duty.
For this to reveal anything nefarious about age verification, it would have to be about the designations of "Primary Priority Content" and "Priority Content" which are the types of content you are allowed to show adults, but not children.
It is all intensely boring, so I can't blame the news from not wanting to cover it, but it is exactly the type of context you have to include when making quite extraordinary accusations of misleading the public.
Would you mind linking to where you got that "controlling online discourse" quote. I am not able to find anything like that.
It comes from an article in the times - https://archive.ph/2025.08.13-190800/https://www.thetimes.co...
However the context is highly misleading, as in the original context it appears to be in reference to parts of the act that deal with content recommendation, not parts that deal with age verification -
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910161
But as usual, that no longer matters in online discourse, it forms a soundbite that backs up the preconceptions of one side of an argument, that the whole exercise is nefarious, so it doesn’t matter if it’s actually true.
"privacy tools" doesn't sound strong enough. "tools to bypass censorship of the future fascist government" sound better, though longer
I always remember a video snippet of some meeting in US, some chinese looking woman says something like "Mao took our guns and killed us all, I'm never giving up my rifle". Some politician reminds her that they live in the democracy. She asks him something like "can you guarantee me that in 20 years it will still be a democracy", which he admits he can't
found the video https://www.reddit.com/r/GunMemes/comments/1c13kkz/survivor_...
The UK gov needs to sod off with all this 1984 BS
UK is not and has never been a free society, UK elites have an authoritarian streak.
Historically they were fairly smart at doing it subtly but the mask slipped during Covid and they never really put it back on.
Also - outside the HN bubble this stuff isn’t even unpopular. Normies supported covid lockdowns and they don’t want their kids watching porn either.
The people yearn to be ruled and nannied
I've heard people on HN make the argument that a blanket ban is better because their kids won't feel it's unfair that only their family implements strict internet blocks
> Also - outside the HN bubble this stuff isn’t even unpopular.
This stuff wasn't unpopular on HN until it actually happened. Almost every submission on HN about social media had people calling for similar regulations or even outright bans. It was not until they actually started asking for IDs when HNers realized what they really wanted to achieve with these laws.
There is a huge difference between supporting the regulation of algorithmic feeds and other dark patterns and a direct attack on personal privacy.
>There is a huge difference between supporting the regulation of algorithmic feeds and other dark patterns and a direct attack on personal privacy.
Normies don't see the difference and politicians don't want there to be a difference. Normies want security and politicians will offer it wrapped in surveilance.
It should be possible for VPNs to only give UK customers UK exit nodes so that sites can still properly enforce the law. Same thing with having VPNs that ban explicit sites. It's not an all or nothing thing.
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I hear the UK regulator did want to respond but Mozilla office doesn't have a fax machine. So the grandpas in charge of regulating modern tech just took a nap instead
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This is a fairly difficult problem. I think the internet should be for adults only, like many other things. But we've fucked up by giving children internet access and it's going to be hard to undo it. I think rather than fighting these measures we need to work on alternatives because keeping children off the internet is a good idea, we just need to implement it in a good way.
What about just banning phones for children? Could we ever make that work? It would be like cigarette bans except we now have 5 year olds addicted to tobacco and addict parents who don't want to make them go cold turkey.
Public libraries and schools can be used for genuine research purposes, but not addictive shit. And implemented ad blockers at the network level.
I had internet since I was a kid. By attacking the internet you are attacking my homeland.
How old are you? I had the internet too but my homeland is already gone. Forums are empty, IRC channels quiet. It's just garbage run by adtech companies now.
IRC is not dead, and not all forums are dead.
Adtech companies are working tiresly in order to deceive us and drop us into their narrative, but I don't believe that everything is lost. After all, even fbpurity continues being developed. We need to write scrapers to extract our friends, relatives, and everyone else's data from walled gardens, not whine about gardens having walls.
Yes, Google enshittified, OkCupid enshuttified, many things enshittified, and many people who were the founders just passed away. But this only means that we need to be the militant generation, not that the battle is lost.
Or we could realize that there are already 2 generations that grew while having access to the internet and turned out perfectly fine?
Who knows?
Sexualization of teens is a thing. I personally blame social media together with showbusiness. But kids had access to the internet at the same time.
And the internet was slightly different than it's now. It had much more sharp edges that we learned how to live with.
But it also was much less predatory. World's smartest psychologists and programmers didn't work 80 hour weeks for small fortunes to make it as much addictive as possible.. if it was only that. It's also as triggering and depressing as possible, because distressed and depressed people are engaging more and can't stop.
What I mean to say is that you can't really draw an equal sign between internet we grew up with and the one we give (or choose to limit) to our children.
I don't mean we should block them, just that it's not the same.
We are many things, but "fine" isn't one of them.
How much the problems today are due to, rather than coincidental with, the internet, is a much more difficult thing to discern.
We are fine. You're just falling for the "*this" generation is different" fallacy. Look up some history if you think previous generations had it all sorted until the nasty internet came along and corrupted us.
I'm not saying past generations were fine. Every generation having problems doesn't mean the most recent ones don't.
What makes problems into disasters is denying that there is a problem until it is too late.
Past generations mostly tried (with varying success) to fix the problems in their world. Sometimes the past generations' solutions are good, like much of the world mandating 40 hour work weeks and public pensions and workplace health and safety and so on; other times even when the problem is real, the solutions are worse, like the US experience with prohibition.
But when problems get ignored, you get stuff like leaded gasoline, cigarettes, and asbestos being everywhere, the Irish potato famine, the dissolution of the USSR, and the 2007 global financial crisis.
Even if AI doesn't do what it promises, the internet brings with it even more globalisation, cheap labour that undercuts any rich nation for jobs which can be done on a computer (which we've already seen examples of, not just with coding but also call centres). Even if Musk's promised about Optimus remain as unfulfilled as whichever version of full-self-driving just got made obsolete, a remote-controlled android does much the same for manual labour. And the internet does enable much weirder warfare: our governments can blame hacks on whoever they like, but there is often no dramatic photo of something burning as a result, just a diffuse degradation of economic performance from fully automated scams and blackmails.
And that's without any questions about demographic shift and who pays for the current generation's pensions when they retire, and if this has anything to do with free porn and the state of online dating apps. And without personalised propaganda. Without your home surveillance system (or robot vacuum cleaner) being turned against you by hacks only possible from cheap ubiquitous internet. Without any questions about if doomscrolling does or doesn't induce psychological problems, if sexual deepfakes are worse than schoolyard rumours, or if AI is sopping kids from learning as cheating is easier.
I would be one of those two generations. I dispute your point on two grounds: first, the internet today isn't what it was back then; secondly, I, and many of my peers, didn't turn out just fine.
Back then the internet was a wild west run by thousands of clever people. It was like living in a neighborhood full of people kind of like you. Nobody built it to be addictive or to cultivate attention. If you wanted something you searched for it. Nowadays everyone is on there and it's run by evil adtech companies. Kids these days are not having the experience we had back then.
It also didn't really do us much good. Already back then geeky types like me had somewhere to retreat to and we did. It took me years to learn real social skills and build a life off of the internet. When I see headlines like "Gen Z aren't having sex" I'm hardly surprised. They're not having sex because they're on the internet. What's more is nobody is learning to be an adult at all. People are in a adult bodies but still totally children at heart. They don't own anything, shun responsibility etc.
USA entities tend to think that terms like "privacy", "security" have same meanings and assumptions across the globe, and that the USA laws are universal. Maybe they also think that entire world is just as dumb or dumber than USA.
For a start, you should consider this fact: Privacy for a bad actor goes directly against the security for citizens and good actors.
So when you talk about privacy you are making an assumption that it is contributing to safety. But for whom? Bad actors or good actors? Without such qualification, you are just talking lofy-sounding but meaningless ideals.
I think that's a silly argument, but even if we accept it at face value 1) VPN usage is difficult to detect and 2) bad actors are still going to use VPNs. This line of thinking removes privacy from good actors while doing nothing to address security concerns from bad actors.
I agree that privacy and security are not identical, and that bad actors can benefit from privacy tools too. But I don't think that makes privacy a "lofty but meaningless" ideal
If you don't like privacy, publish your bank card number and cvv in response to this message.
Here is my beef. I'm pro-VPN. The ability to gain more control over who can track your online communication is a net-positive to me, personally and philosophically. However, I can't justify their existence from a utilitarian perspective.
Practically speaking, when I look at the actual number of people affected by VPN I estimate that:
- Very low: Protecting political activists and dissidents
- Low: Circumvention of overzealous blocking and surveillance
- Low-to-Medium: Hiding abusive and malicious behavior
- Medium: Additional layers of trust and network security (mostly business related, which makes it tangental to the consumer VPN market)
- VERY High: Enabling piracy and avoiding geo-content restrictions (no judgment on good-vs-bad, just asserting magnitude)
So... conundrum! If I take the position that piracy-related stuff isn't a net drag and that business VPN use is fundamentally a separate beast, VPNs in this context are hard to justify.
Age-gating VPNs fails, becausw it probably won't stop determined piracy or abuse, but it will make privacy tools feel abnormal, regulated, and less available to ordinary users and families