Asklemmy

In the UK, The Online Safety Bill is almost about to become law. Without going into the full details, the government basically wants to monitor everyone's messages to stop child pornography and protect people (and other stuff too).

The problem is, they want companies to scan messages and photos as they are uploaded and to give themselves backdoor access to E2E encryption services.

It's very likely the UK will lose access to iMessage, Signal, WhatsApp etc as they would rather withdraw their services from the UK than break their promise to their users.

None of those blocks actually work, it’s theater. I think it’s better to prepare your child for the world and how to handle it than to try and lock them in a bunker.

It's a well-intentioned goal that's impossible to implement without egregiously privacy violating measures.

I had an interesting experience as a teen looking at porn online and blocking is not the way. Education is the best, basically teaching teens is better than letting them make mistakes when they turn 18 and get their ass fucked

It’s impossible. That makes it perfect for building an unlimited enforcement apparatus, which is the real goal.

It should be the sole responsibility of parents or guardians to control any restrictions like this. I'm not a parent myself, but if I were, I wouldn't just let my child have a device with unrestricted access to everything on the internet. To me, it makes more sense to just have content restrictions on children's devices than force all adults to go through extra verification steps to access porn.

Didn't South Korea do this? IIRC some kids would steal their parents'/grandparents' government IDs to watch porn.

My upbringing in the US shamed all forms of sexuality; I was entirely forbidden from watching porn until I moved out on my own for college. I feel like that upbringing was very very harmful to me as an adult though because I spent my entire 20s breaking away from that shame and guilt. I had a good sex-Ed teacher in 6th-7th grades but they just simply didn’t spend enough time on the topic to educate me at all about anything but very basic anatomy though. The amount of shame I got at home just didn’t let my sex-Ed class information get absorbed in a way that was conducive to a normal sex life; we were never told that sex was normal and healthy either.

Me personally, my interest in animal science/anatomy led me to reading books about sexuality and the missing sex info I needed. I really don’t think it was healthy to have to learn that information alone; I’m lucky and I was reading official textbook material; I couldn’t imagine kids today learning accurate information from uncertified sources.

Like, sex-Ed at the senior HS level should be basically a how-to pleasure yourself and others in a healthy way and pitfalls to avoid. They should go into the anatomy and physiology ad nauseum so every student feels comfortable in their body as an adult.

Unbelievably stupid.

it's my belief that if you try to shield your children from the evils of the world, you will invariable fail and they'll be unprepared for the world itself once they leave the nest. not saying that you shouldnt try to enact parental controls on their devices, just that you'll fail.

also, not sure how the government is going to control access to the porn. it's one thing to gate pornhub/xhamster behind a ID required page, it's another thing entirely to ban all porn everywhere. like, good luck mr government but you're going to fail.

These bills are intended to make it harder for anyone to look at porn online. There are plenty of tools parents can employ to make it harder for their own kids to see porn -- that's where the responsibility belongs.

Parents should have the tools to be able to give their children specific information. And part of that toolbox is keeping them off the internet. Or only supervise internet use for an hour or two a day. Giving any child complete and total access to a tool is kind of dangerous. You have to educate them about the dangers of the tool and how to properly respect it. So if your child is 3 years old they may not be ready for the raw internet.

If an organization such as the government wants to spend money to create a child friendly network space, KinterNet, Great more power to them. Then concerned parents could VPN to the Kinternet on devices for their children. It would be opt-in.

De facto if you give your child a device with unfettered internet access, you're saying they're ready and responsible enough to handle the kind of information there. That you've trained them in the proper use of the tools.

Most kids used to be farm kids, they knew about sex, because on the farm sex happens. Happens a lot. They see the entire life cycle of a various animals. But now we have many children who don't have exposure to the whole life cycle, and if you cut the internet off for them then they're going to grow up very stunted as well. Everything's a balance, and that's up to the parents.

But I think all of these words are wasted. The reason surveillance bills are pushed on us "for the children" is because it's a convenient excuse, it sets precedent, it's about control, it's not about the children. It's an excuse only... And if everyone really is trying to protect the children, where does it end? Can't talk about Santa Claus online? We must reaffirm the tooth fairy industrial complex?

Personally, I don't like the idea. Government policies aren't good substitutes for parenting. even if they implemented these changes, kids and adults alike would likely move to other websites that don't have the government ID scanning feature in, or kids would use things such as a fake ID or their parent's IDs.

If someone wants porn online, they will find it. It's up to the parents to ensure that their children don't become porn addicts in the first place.