We want to teach our children how to _responsibly_ use technology. We're still not sure what that looks like in detail, but the general agreement we've come to is something like 'no screens before age X'.

And this is why laws should always include their justification.

The intent was clearly to protect people - to make sure the balance of power does not fall too much in the government's favor that it can silence dissent before it gets organized enough to remove the government (whether legally or illegally does not matter), even if that meant some crimes go unpunished.

These rules were created because most current democratic governments were created by people overthrowing previous dictatorships (whether a dictator calls himself king, president or general secretary does not matter) and they knew very well that even the government they create might need to be overthrown in the future.

Now the governments are intentionally sidestepping these rules because:

- Every organization's primary goal is its own continued existence.

- Every organization's secondary goal is the protection of its members.

- Any officially stated goals are tertiary.

If none of your child's friends and classmates have cell phones yet, I'd strongly encourage establishing a smartphone pact with the other parents. Our community used http://waituntil8th.org pledges but even a shared spreadsheet would work.

I see no logic in the above statement. You gave your kid a smartphone when she was 14. By today's standards, that's very late, and it's basically just one year before Denmark's proposed ban on social media. You can ban your child from having a smartphone for an arbitrary amount of time, but they are a future adult. Adults use smartphones. You can either prepare your child for the potential negatives of smartphone use, or they will learn that through their own experience later. There's no escaping smartphones and social networks.

The only way to deal with this is to talk to your kids, warn them, and educate them. I gave my kids smartphones when they were 8 and 9 years old. Those phones were fully managed by me, and the only web pages they could access were their school pages and Wikipedia. Every year, I relaxed these restrictions and frequently talked to them about the dangers of social media. Now, they have almost fully unrestricted phones, and I don't think there's anything to worry about.

The problem with social media for kids and teens is constant comparison. Any kind of comparison, but predominantly about visual appearance. Most people will never win this fight, and I believe it is a parent's role to explain this to their children. Banning smartphones or social media won't save anyone from facing the reality later on.

We basically give cigarettes to children.

This is a stepping stone towards further control elsewhere, especially once a framework for enforcement is in place (which nobody actually thinks about when emotionally reacting to feel-good ideas like this). How easy would it be to expand ID based age enforcement to tracking ALL online activity and cracking down on "non-approved" speech? No thanks. I'll handle parenting myself.

Also, if you don't care about the age number, and think social media is just objectively bad...why are you on this social media site? Isn't posting here the definition of hypocrisy...given you're supporting what you believe to be worse than cigarettes?

Regardless, this wouldn't run afoul of this. This is similar to restricting who can buy alcohol, based purely on age; the identification process is just digital. MitID - the Danish digital identification infrastructure - allows an service to request specific details about another purpose; such as their age or just a boolean value whether they are old enough. Essentially: the service can ask "is this user 18 or older?" and the ID service can respond yes or no, without providing any other PII.

That's the theory at least; nothing about snooping private communication, but rather forcing the "bouncer" to actually check IDs.

That's very much not how danish law works. The specific paragraph says "hvor ingen lov hjemler en særegen undtaglse, alene ske efter en retskendelse." translated as "where no other law grants a special exemption, only happen with a warrant". That is, you can open peoples private mail and enter their private residence, but you have to ask a judge first.

This is perhaps one of the most bizarre opinions I have ever read. This would bar under 13s from using everything from vending machines to modern fridges. What would you consider "using"? Would under 13s be blocked from riding in any car with "smart" features?

This is a perfect example of the kind of nonsensical totalitarian extremism you see on here that people only espouse because they believe it would never affect them. It goes completely against the Hacker ethos.

WhatsApp groups are a source of slightly different issues - fake news, radicalization, social bubbles - but not a source of addiction to the same level, especially among the young.

I agree, and this is easy to implement. My kids have to hand over their phones every day before bedtime. I see no need for any institutional interference to implement such trivial policy in any family.

> We basically give cigarettes to children.

In my opinion, this is not a good comparison. Just because parents give their kids smartphones doesn't mean they want or force them to use social networks. Kids use them because it's socially acceptable, and they aren't warned against using them.

When I was a kid, my father sometimes asked me to go to the store to buy cigarettes for him. At that time, this was a socially acceptable thing for a parent to do. However, the problem of kids smoking cigarettes was almost non-existent. This is because every kid was strongly advised that only adults could do this. There would be consequences if you didn't obey this advice. By the way, I never started smoking.

There are a lot of communities built around things like Discord and Telegram. IRC existed long before these.

There are many websites that allow you to post pictures and have other people comment on them. DeviantArt pre-dates the vast majority of modern apps.

There are also vast numbers of iterations on forums.

At what point should you prevent people from finding and talking to each other?

We see similar attacks on personal freedom with the new GDPR updates: https://noyb.eu/en/eu-commission-about-wreck-core-principles...

Censorship really is one of the few laws that are pretty unambiguous, that's really just "No, never again". Not that this stops politicians, but that's a separate debate.

In practice, the law does help greatly in spite of not being a mathematical proof the minor will no longer get alcohol because of "parenting well" alone and almost all parents are fine with the restrictions, even in places without the flexibility, because they've come to see and agree with the level of harm over the years. Ie. there is a point enough parents agree strongly enough that the common good of children is accepted over the rights of a parent to decide their child's welfare - it's just usually a hogh bar (e.g. how far punishment can go before it turns into abuse, as another example).

Which whole community? Churches, politicians, cops, and that strange 'uncle'?

I'll decide for them, until they're old enough, or mature enough, to decide for themselves. My spouse agrees.

Banning stuff for kids doesn't work, one (of them) will find a way, and once the cat's out of the bag, it's hard to get an elephant in the bag.

So far, education, information, and trust (!! - and I most certainly don't trust them), seems to work for us.

I'm in favour of anything that tries to address the appaling effects of social media, but as long as there is advertising that will, surely, be some sort of personalisation. In the past you bought a magazine about, say, gardening, and all the ads were about gardening. The advertisers were betting that most people reading a gardening magazine were interested in gardening products, the ads were, to some degree, personalised.

If online 'personalised' ads were banned how would personalised be defined ?

https://digst.dk/it-loesninger/den-digitale-identitetstegneb...

The platforms asks your government if you're old enough. You identify yourself to your government. Your government responds to the question with a single Boolean.

> they learn how to function without technological dependencies.

So like the Amish? Or are they still too technologically dependent and children need to be banned from pulleys, fulcrums, wheels, etc.?

Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.

And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.

So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.

You’re lucky. Some kids do prefer the real world.

That's why if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are diametral or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test. If control group with smartphones gets consistently less points by graders who do not know them or their smartphone habits as compared to those who live in digital exile, we can talk. Until then, 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.

Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study. For me, that's an indication that the outrage is pearl-clutching.

If you don't have that you get the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards.

Is this so?

I think of it like the time when Hong Kong was flooded with Opium.

"adults smoke opium"

If you find that too crass, there are countless other ways to put it:

"adults eat sugar"

"adults watch TV"

Just because everyone in the mainstream does something, DOES NOT mean that this is a good thing or a smart thing to do.

In fact, we can easily observe that the few adults who are at the absolute top of their game, the most skilled, the most wealthy, the most powerful... well guess what? They DO NOT use smartphones. They don't tweet. They don't have profiles anywhere.

Except for GPS directions, there is actually very very little actual need to use a smartphone. At work, you have a computer for access to Google. At home, you have a tablet or TV or books or a Kindle for media consumption.

You can just swipe a credit card for payments.

A smartphone is not at all needed to be a highly functioning adult.

In fact - it actually prevents you from ever unlocking your fullest potential by removing any chance for your brain to ever catch a breath and just be bored for half an hour and hear your own thoughts.

It’s not 1995 any more. My 13 year old gets social contact doing things like playing Minecraft with people from school, organised via WhatsApp with group chats and then yelling about diamond swords and lava chickens or whatever.

There’s then the simple reality that most schools require smartphones for things like homework. It’s set on devices you can only access via an app. Ok maybe you could run some form of android emulator and maybe that works and maybe they can’t do the homework on the bus on the way home and instead can just stare out of the window, but then the teachers tell them to do something in class.

Then once they leave home at 18 and get introduced to something which has been banned yet is completely normal, they go overboard anyway.

The idea that governments are incapable of acting in the interests of their citizens is just a narrative designed to weaken public democratic institutions and hand power to the real authoritarians.

I dont feel as if any of that applies here. In fact HN has gotten further from a social media site by not displaying comment points.

That has nothing to do with the medium of the ticket and is all about knowingly presenting a fake ticket. The ticket is a document proving your payment for travel. They could be lumps of dirt and it would still be document fraud to present a fake hand of dirt.

> That's the theory at least; nothing about snooping private communication, but rather forcing the "bouncing" to actually check IDs.

Hopefully the theory will reflect the real world. The 'return bool' to 'isUser15+()' is probably the best we can hope for, and should prevent the obvious problems, but there can always be more shady dealings on the backend (as if there aren't enough of those already).

But of all the problematic advertising you could choose, you choose instead political advertising and semaglutide ads?

To which, I assume, the same question applies?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/teen-goes-viral-for-tweeting-fr...

> Dorothy, who runs an Ariana Grande fan account, was suffering through a typical teenage nightmare: Her mom took away her phone. But the resourceful teen didn't let that stop her from communicating with her followers. First, she started using Twitter on her Nintendo DS, a handheld video game device.

> Sometime after finding her DS, it was taken again, so Dorothy started tweeting from yet another connected device: her fridge. "My mom uses it to google recipes for baking so I just googled Twitter," she told CBS News.

Bans like this make much more sense at a community level. Not an individual level.

The reason most parents give up to regulate their children's online activity is because the children end up isolated if an individual household prevents their kid from socializing online. All the other kids are online, therefore switching individually ends in isolation. What might be beneficial for each household is unworkable as long as there is no collective mechanism. (which is the case for virtually every problem caused by social networks)

Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear. I'm not against contextually relevant ads. Ads related to gardening makes sense in a magazine about gardening. There is no need to aggregate enormous amounts of personal data in such a scenario because the topic of the magazine (or webpage) is enough to give an idea of the type of readers you get.

I was talking about the current prevailing practice of collecting massive amounts of personal data, fine grained enough to make a psychological profile more detailed than what your closest family and friends could produce. Just to show you ads!

Context can be deduced from the topic of a website, no need to collect, package and sell data so intimate that it could be used against you in horrific ways by the higest bider, be it a nation state or a company.

Same people now: how will the poor company know that it's an underage user?? Oh noes!

True, but that's why you don't do it alone. You need to talk with other parents and encourage them to talk to others until the majority of parents understand the risks and let the administration, school board, and teachers know that they have your support.

That's a bad comparison. The main reason for importing opium to Hong Kong at that time was to use it as a sedative drug. Smartphones, on the other hand, have many legitimate uses for every user. The addiction to social networks is not a primary motivation to sell smartphones.

> A smartphone is not at all needed to be a highly functioning adult.

It depends on your definition of "highly functioning." You probably also don't need a Google account, a tablet, a TV, books, or a Kindle to be a highly functioning adult. I guess I can just go on. Arguing this way is meaningless.

When your kid reports that 90% of the other kids in their classroom already have a smartphone, you either give your kid a smartphone or make them feel like a loser in their social group.

Besides, having a smartphone doesn't mean having access to social networks, the open internet, or the ability to install any application. It's up to parents to properly configure parental controls for the respective age group.

> Except for GPS directions, there is actually very very little actual need to use a smartphone.

It conveniently replaces many things, usually in a more secure way. For example, paying with a phone is more secure than paying with a plastic card. And most importantly, kids listen to music on their smartphones, just as I used a Walkman/Discman in the past.

The digital illusion of a "social life" that smartphones create is neither social, nor living.

Terrence Tao regularly posts on Mastodon, and Geoffrey Hinton on X/Twitter. Sam Altman has a huge X presence. Elon Musk, no comment.

I'm thinking that it comes down to one thing in particular: the absence of response notifications. There's only so much addiction you can get out of a page of text without so much as a bell icon.

The world of variety shows died for a reason.

This is Denmark. The country who reads the EU legislation requesting the construction of a CA to avoid centralizing the system and then legally bends the rules of EU and decides it's far better to create a centralized solution. I.e., the intent is a public key cryptosystem with three bodies, the state being the CA. But no, they should hold both the CA and the Key in escrow. Oh, and then decides that the secret should be a pin such that law enforcement can break it in 10 milliseconds.

I think internet verification is at least 10 years too late. Better late than never. I just lament the fact we are going to get a bad solution to the problem.

Effect it? If you (a social media co.) disobey you cannot collect ad revenue. Advertising on the platform could be banned.

Moving the burden off individual parents who often have a lot on their plates.

And I'm pretty sure she did it just for laughs. I also built a listening device to hear what my mom was saying when I wasn't there. But it was too boring to me to actually listen to the conversations, I don't think I ever actually did it. But I did enjoy immensely setting it up.

This one hit me recently. My 4th grader has a friend who is on tik-toc and has a phone. Me, living in a bubble, where other parents I've met are terrified of social media and phones for their kids, was shocked when I met the mom and she wasn't aware of all the negative impact of social media. But, like with smokers, you can tell them it's bad for you but it's up to them to quit.

It's absolutely a collective action problem.

The fact that most advertisers would flock to promoting on smaller special websites/apps (equivalent to your gardening magazine), is exactly the side-effect we want. The shift in spending will hopefully lead to the current "massive social media platform" model will dying out, and boosting smaller independent platforms.

This is the key part, isn't it? There's a large degree of difference between "these garden magazine readers might enjoy these gardening ads" and "based on our profile of you collected over 15 years and including every single bit of private data we can acquire about you, we think you might like..."

Personally I think any advertising targeted at children should be banned, but I guess that's probably too extreme.

It seems to me like it's either a privacy disaster waiting to happen (if not required) or everyone but the biggest players throwing out a lot of bathwater with very little baby by simply not accepting Danish users (if required).

The wording on the page also makes it sound like their threat model doesn't include themselves as a potential threat actor. I absolutely wouldn't want to reveal my complete identity to just anyone requesting it, which the digital ID solution seems to have covered, but I also don't want the issuer of the age attestation to know anything about my browsing habits, which the description doesn't address.

the social media platforms already measure more than enough signals to understand a users likely age. they could be required by law to do something about it

i think it'll get to: "these methods aren't good enough, we'll have to enforce digital id".

Source: I wrote Digitaliseringsstyrelsen in Denmark where this solution will be implemented next year as a pilot, and they confirm that the truly anonymous solution will not be offered on other platforms.

Digitaliseringsstyrelsen and EU is truly, utterly fucking us all over by locking us in to the trusted competing platforms offered by the current American duopoly on the smartphone market.

Some kids learn to drink and smoke at a that age too, and many turn out ok.

It doesn't matter how good the tool can be, what matters is how it actually is used

I had a good time programming BASIC on my V-Tech pseudocomputer, at age 9. But that's a world away from tiktok, reels and the predatory surveillance economy.

Teaching kids how to code isn't all that meaningful on its own. knowing what to do once you learn how to code is. If your plan is to teach your kid how to code, teach them to solve problems without code at that age. Unless you're serious about thinking learning at age 5 vs age 13 would make a big difference.

I think every kid 13 and above should have an rpi too.

I recall "no personal calls" at work as a rule, in the old days. Inbound emergencies allowed, of course.

Why do people think looking at their personal email, or looking at their phone is acceptable at work?

It's no different than sitting, reading a magazine pre-Internet. The very idea would have been absurd.

The interesting tidbit in the case of social media and smart phones is that they are at least partially pushed by the parents (I've seen plenty of examples of parents demand that their children have smartphones at school).

> Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing.

> And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago.

I think there is a difference though. There is the "off my lawn" crowd of "children today are so bad because..." sure, but I think they are not the ones demanding social media bans. The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture. These are based on actual statistics and have been confirmed many times.

> So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.

Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever.

My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car.

Me: "Umm. You'll find out. When you get to it."

> 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.

To clarify, do you think that phones or the removal of phones leads to these outcomes? Do you think that teachers like or dislike phones? Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?

> they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be

Some do. Are teachers the only ones?

> if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are [detrimental] or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test.... Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study.

I am not sure how you would set this up in a way that does not fall victim to a dozen confounding variables. There have been comparisons of standardized tests before and after phone bans, of course, but those also fall victim to similar statistical issues.

I can't speak to anyone else, but it seems to be working well enough in our town. The overwhelming majority of kids don't have cell phones until high school. That doesn't mean your kids won't beg you for a smartphone, it just means you can say "no" without socially isolating them.

> As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone

The point is to engage in collective action early enough that you can prevent these situations in the first place. Once a critical mass of kids have smartphones and their socialization and coordination moves to online spaces it becomes intensely isolating to be the only kid in a friend group without a smartphone.

But you know what I mean, right? The ones using intricate algorithms and tracking to keep you "engaged" and manipulate what you read and see

Fundamentally this is an upvote driven social media platform no different from Reddit, which everyone agrees is social media.

If you live in Denmark, get ready to tie your State ID to your HN profile to login and hope that you don't say anything that would make the wrong official (or your employer) upset with you.

As we know from history, well-intentioned government laws have zero unintended consequences, always work perfectly every time, and are very easy to remove once they've been created...

I mean, who cares what the kid wants? It's your job as a parent to be a parent. Sometimes that means telling your kid no, even if that means they're not your best friend for a day or two.

> Would you want that for your kids?

Unequivocally, yes. Social media is cancer. I'd prefer my daughter not be pathologically depressed and my son not turn into a little hateball because of Meta's shitty algorithms. I have no idea why this is even a question, aside from the pure cowardice of Millennial parents.

None of this to comment on GP's suggestion that we don't need laws, or the idea that we shouldn't do this societally anyways.

It's also the justification used for some of the dumbest laws in history.

Think about what level of enforcement is going to be required for this (National IDs tied to online activity), and then think about the fact that Denmark is one of the main governments pushing chat control. Now start to think about how, once this tracking/enforcement scheme is created, that it might be expanded to things outside the scope of this law.

Like communism, this idea sounds good in theory, but is going to turn into an authoritarian nightmare in practice.

https://github.com/google/longfellow-zk

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44457390

All 3 were a total hotbed of bad influences for a child: Team Fortress had trade pub servers with people doing sprays of literal CP and wearing custom lewd skins to harass users with them - and people with very questionable social skills and intentions huddled up in realtime microphone comms with children, Roblox's predator problem for the last 14+ years (at least that I can attest) is suddenly en vogue now that they're a public company and there's stock shorting to be had, GMod is still the community with the most colorful vocabulary I've ever encountered - plus grooming. And much more.

Indeed, you can (and I did) get burned by these actualities when exposed to such communities in your youth - and it can cost you real money, real time, real idealism/innocence, and real mental health. However, I think being exposed to softwares, systems and games that inspired curiosity and led me toward a path of WANTING to contribute brought me to this software development career and life path, and it would have been much more inaccessible and unknown to me in any other way. And I favorited a comment from another HN user a few days ago that goes in astute depth on why that path can only be organically introduced and self-governed [1].

I referred to these places earlier in my comment as "bad influences". I think the single-most powerful thing a parent can do tasked with this dilemma - especially during an upbringing in systemically hard, uncertain, and turbulent times - is teaching them how to identify, avoid, and confront bad influences. Equipped with that, and knowing how to handle yourself, is of utmost importance.

1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45718773

You can teach kids electronics, have them construct toys that work on batteries,etc... work on components that don't require programming. teach them algorithms, math, crypto,etc.. without using computers.

If you're teaching kids how to code, you should give them the skills that will help them learn _what_ to code first?

Yes. Kids getting access to knowledge that clicks with them earlier than later makes a huge difference.

Which is exactly why so many people are rushing in to control what kids get exposed to. You seem to have pretty strong thought on the issue yourself, if you agree on the possible negative impact, you can't also deny the possibility of positive impact.

The dose makes the poison, I think we can understand how extreme position tend to bring more negative than positive consequences, regardless of the rethoric.

[edit: rephrased the last part]

Breaks improve employee health and reduces burnout. Not taking breaks harms performance.

Work breaks are also required by law in many states.

I'm curious, do supermarket cashiers where you live stand or sit? Why/why not?

The job of pick items up from a belt, finding the barcode, moving that across the scanner until there's a beep, and then putting it on the "out" belt, really does not require the employee to be standing for it.

So why then, are they standing? Because merely sitting looks lazy and unprofessional? Sure if it's a 20 year old they have the energy, but if the employee is 64 about to retire? Making them stand for an entire 8 hour shift, I mean, that's how it is, but it doesn't seem cruel to you when the job doesn't require it and isn't affected by giving the 64 year old employee a stool to sit on until she retires?

Or do you also feel the same about the 6x14 hour workdays?

Do the stats prove that cell phones are the cause of the dire mental health indicators? Or at least that there is a correlation?

You drill a dark spot on tooth and put some resin inside to fill it up. /s

My point is that if you ask wagonmakers what they think about cars, you won't get many positive replies, but enthsiastic ones where city governments decide to go full Amish. New times and new technology necessitate changing the craft, and the methods of yesteryear, though trained into teachers, just don't work anymore. Change is scary.

I'll also add that I'm not specifically opposed to banning minors from using social media. It would probably also be better if it was illegal for children to buy their own soda tbh.

It asserts that underage bans are usually applied to things that are unhealthy for all.

You follow that by stating that provided examples of underage bans are things that are not things with negative impacts on populations.

I'd suggest that real world examples exist of adolecsent alcohol induced brain damage, drivers 10-16 having higher rates of accidents causing death and injury, child soldiers having a negative impact on society, industrial scale under age sex in Christian Brother homes having bad outcomes, early exposure to excessive porn being cited as causing brain rot and social malfunction, etc.

As for:

> we regulated smoking out of the market through a combination of safety regulations, limitations on marketing etc.

I'd point to Australia that started down that path with good results, and continued further only to regulate tobacco out of "regular" markets into the embrace of black markets that come with worse problems than the older established markets that "had a code" (established criminals rarely went after family or indiscriminately acted such that bystanders were killed or injured).

You raise interesting questions that deserve deeper thought and consideration.

Plus this: https://www.nintendo.com/en-gb/Support/Nintendo-3DS-2DS/Usag...

> As of 25 October 2022, it is no longer possible to use Nintendo 3DS Image Share or Wii U Image Share to post images on Facebook and Twitter.

(And it seems like there's a physiological basis to both cases, it's just that one involves endogenous chemicals and the other doesn't)

I know of plenty of alternative communities & schools in which all the parents agreed to keep their kids away from phones until they were 15 or something. Great! If you try to roll something like this out to state schools, it looks like “the government”. But it’s the same idea.

I don’t understand the hatred and mistrust of government in this thread. The government protects us from lead in our food, from underage drug use, unsafe roads and lots of other stuff. Why not social media too?

Social media itself doesn’t make sense at an individual level. If you’re the only one on a discord server, it’s not much of a party.

Personally I’m happy for some countries trying this. Let’s run the experiment and see how it goes. I too worry about the age verification system. Let’s see if the mental health of young people actually improves and by how much.

Rest assured, if the US couldn’t take collective action in the face of a global pandemic, there’s no way a law like this will come for America.

I’m not sure if you’re just fantasizing about the “good old days” of phpbb or something.

The biggest players in social media are precisely the ones that this law is targeting.

No one in charge of implementing this law is going to care whether some Mastodon server implements a special auth solution for Danish users or not, they are going to care that Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc. do so.

The difference is meaningful. It's mostly prisoners dilemma. If only one persons porn habit is available thats bad for them. If everyones (legal) porn habits are available, then it gets normalized.

There were a plethora of books in the library on how to program, and here you are suggesting I, and everyone like me, be banned from doing so. You'd probably also ban me from the library by assuming I couldn't read aged 5. I certainly could, especially computer manuals. The computer was an amazing thing which did exactly what I told it, and I learned quickly how precise I needed to tell it, and when I made a mistake, it repeated my mistakes over and over without noticing. I learned more about digital ethics age 5 trying to write games than the typical CEO learns going on a "Do Not Create The Torment Nexus" course.

You'd insist I not be allowed to even use software, let alone write my own. You'd be actively cutting off my future professional life, and depriving entire nations of bedroom programmers cum professional software engineers, with your ill-thought-out ban.

If your children show an aptitude or a fascination for a topic, I hope you feed that and praise them for it.

it’s extraordinary meaningful as it helps in brain development.

Basic human decency says your workplace environment should be chill enough to let you take breaks as you, yourself, dictate. If you're underperforming because of it, you're fired. Enforcing a rule as you claim strips the employee of what little respect they have left. To be honest, your suggestion is sickening to me.

That reminded me of Warren Buffet asking for his kind and to be taxed more.

Again, every generation thinks that.

This time might be different. But it's probably not.

>The bans are being motivated largely by health professionals ringing all sort of alarm bells because mental health indicators paint a pretty dire picture.

Honestly you could just cut and paste the same arguments about jazz music in the 1920s or rock music in the later 20th century and they'd be indistinguishable. Just replace the mentions of jazz with social media topics and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference whether it was an article today or 100 years ago. "Health professionals" wringing hands about social media and jazz music in hilariously similar terms a century apart to a bunch of old people who are convinced the kids these days are going to shit because of the things they like to pay attention to.

https://daily.jstor.org/when-jazz-was-a-public-health-crisis...

Young people ARE SUPPOSED TO make poor decisions and be stressed out about it.

Middle aged people are supposed to clutch their pearls and wail about how this time it's different and truly awful (but what we did as kids was reasonable)

I was driving when I was 5 on the farm, it's not that hard and if you have the attitude that things aren't hard that tends to be true. Don't set your kid up for failure.

The relevant points I believe to be:

> All citizens are placed under suspicion, without cause, of possibly having committed a crime. Text and photo filters monitor all messages, without exception. No judge is required to order to such monitoring – contrary to the analog world which guarantees the privacy of correspondence and the confidentiality of written communications.

And:

> The confidentiality of private electronic correspondence is being sacrificed. Users of messenger, chat and e-mail services risk having their private messages read and analyzed. Sensitive photos and text content could be forwarded to unknown entities worldwide and can fall into the wrong hands.

[1] https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/

Keep in mind that alcohol is also a carcinogen. Similar to cigarettes, even one drink shouldn't be tolerated. Even if a certain amount will have no ill effects on average, impacts on individuals depends on individual factors, so one harmless drink for you might be one deadly drink for someone else. It is poison.

That said, I don't judge anyone who uses substances. But there is no tolerable threshold to giving children poison.

Coding is just more rewarding, it is important to learn how to solve problems with less rewarding systems. Would you have wanted to solve algebra problems on paper if you knew python? You don't need to solve those problems on paper, but it is good for brain development. Even better than coding for example. Keep in mind that a child's attention window is limited, this is very much a zero sum situation.

It's like a parent telling their kid not smoke, while they are still addicted and smoking in the garden themselves.

School A bans them, school B does not. None of the teachers know a study is being done.

True, but it is significantly easier for a single motivated individual to pull it off in their own community than for them to change laws at the territory/state or country/federal level.

And even if your end goal is a universal law, it usually makes sense to start at the lowest level from a process perspective. Laws at the community level are often a precursor to laws at the territory/state level, just as territory/state laws can be a precursor to country/federal laws. In the USA, both alcohol and age of consent laws have gone through (and in some respects are still going through) this process. Bypassing this (admittedly slow) laboratory of democracy to implement novel laws directly at the country/federal level results in controversial laws that often have unintended consequences.

> It’s way more sensible to just make it law.

Centralizing laws can be sensible if you're somewhat confident that the people writing and enforcing those laws will behave sensibly.

And if that little Mastodon server ends up hosting some content that is embarrassing or offensive to the Danish authorities, laws like this will surely not be used to retaliate...

Arbitrarily and selectively enforced laws seem like an obviously bad thing to me. If the government can nail me for anything, even if they practically don't, I'll be very wary of offending or embarrassing the government.

The problem isn't my peers, it's the people in power and how many of them lack any scruples.

this is too narrow a view on the issue. the problem isn't that a colleague, acquaintance, neighbor, or government employee is going to snoop through your data. the problem is that once any government has everyone's data, they will feed it to PRISM-esque systems and use it to accurately model the population, granting the power to predict and shape future events.

There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.

This is a danger to their mental development. Look at teacher forums all over. r/Teachers on reddit should be illuminating. Tech and parents sticking devices to their kids instead of raising them properly has resulted in utter disaster. If there was no harm imposed on children, I would agree that it is a nanny-state thing.

The usual figurative nanny state refers to a situation in which unreasonable rules and regulations are imposed on the behavior of grownups, not children.

First, my proposal is a delay, not a ban. This is such a good idea, that a lot of FAANG CEO's are doing this for their kids welfare (more or less) already.

I think the overall welfare of kids should be weighed against the benefits.

I think you should have been learning to tinker with electronics, solve math algorithms and develop all kinds of curiosities. the future of being a programmer involves competing with LLMs, you have to be good at knowing what to program. Humans aren't needed when it comes to simply knowing how to write code.

I acknowledge that there will be exceptions, and perhaps that should be considered. but also lookup terms like "ipad babies" and how gen-alpha is turning out. Most parents don't teach their kids how to code in basic. and content regulation for kids is futile, unless you want the government monitoring your devices "for the children's sake".

> If your children show an aptitude or a fascination for a topic, I hope you feed that and praise them for it.

Same, but I hope you let them learn things in the right order and consider their overall long term wellbeing instead of temporary satisfaction. Children did fine without computers for all of humanity's history. the nature of children hasn't changed in the past 3 decades. What you consider feeding might actually be stagnating. If there is a good and practical way to make sure that children are developed well enough to interact with computers, and we can also make sure that the content they consume is age-appropriate without implementing a dystopian surveillance state, i'm all for it.

But pretending the problem doesn't exist, and letting 99% of children suffer because 1% of kids might learn BASIC doesn't sound like a good plan.

> This time might be different. But it's probably not.

And this is an appeal to tradition.

This article[1] from 2024 discusses this the studies on this topic. It seems to me the results are mixed, but conclusions range between social media being neutral to harmful. There is a lot in that article, so it's worth a read.

[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/728739

Highly skilled jobs can absolutely be 'perform or be fired', because you're paying for a person's ability to do a specialized thing, and there's usually only so much specialized work to be done.

But there are also a lot of 'we need bodies at a low cost' jobs.

And those latter jobs run on work_output : labor_cost, which can always be maximized by making fewer workers do more.

(Consequently, why the real goal for people studying / graduating in the modern economy should be to find a way to get into the former jobs...)

We could assume that this time is different and people, well children and minors specifically, will learn to avoid the addiction rather than banning them like alcohol, cigarettes and gambling.

This time might be different. But it's probably not.

I would hazard a guess you didn't meet that many other drivers on the farm (!)

> Don't set your kid up for failure

I'm doing my damndest not to ... but you have no idea ;)

> No judge is required to order to such monitoring

That sounds quite extreme, I just can't square that with what I can actually read in the proposal.

> the power to request the competent judicial authority of the Member State that designated it or another independent administrative authority of that Member State

It explicitly states otherwise. A judge (or other independent authority) has to be involved. It just sounds like baseless fear mongering (or worse, libertarianism) to me.

I myself grew up with a desktop computer from around age 7 and it shaped me early on in a positive way to be curious. Computers were also a central part of my social life. There are many positive things that kids can get out of computers, so I find the comparison with alcohol to be hyperbolic.

it makes people much better and more patient drivers because you can't just rely on traffic laws you have to know the intention of somebody in a piece of machinery and if they plan to back up or where they're going and what's in their head... and how to communicate with hands or a yell

The law will obviously be framed in such a way as to hit the targets it is supposed to hit, avoid collateral damage. It's not like complete amateurs are writing our laws.

Briefly, when the ID provider issues the ID it gets cryptographically bound to your phone. When you use the ID to prove something to a site (age, citizenship, etc) the is done by using a zero-knowledge proof based protocol that allows your phone to prove to the site (1) that you have an ID issued by your ID provider, (2) that ID is bound to your phone, (3) the phone is unlocked, and (4) the thing you are claiming (age, citizenship, etc) matches what the ID says. This protocol does not convey any other information from or about your ID to the site.

If the app is open source, what stops someone from modifying it to always claim the user is over 18 without an ID?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility_Project

I didn't claim the participants wouldn't know whether they own a phone - obviously they would. I said they wouldn’t know they’re in a study whose purpose is to correlate smartphone use with academic performance.

That's perfectly compatible with a double-blind setup:

* the *students* just think they’re taking standardized tests, not that the effects of their smartphone habits are being monitored;

* the *graders* don’t know whose tests belong to whom.

That’s about as "double blind" as social-science research gets. The commenter I replied to latched onto the literal impossibility of hiding the phone itself, not the intentional design of the experiment.

It therefore breaks EtoE as it intercepts the messages on your device and sends them off to whatever 3rd party they are planning to use before those are encrypted and sent to the recipient.

> It explicitly states otherwise. A judge (or other independent authority) has to be involved. It just sounds like baseless fear mongering (or worse, libertarianism) to me.

How can a judge be involved when we are talking about scanning hundreds of millions if not billions of messages each day? That does not make any sense.

I suggest you re-read the Chat control proposal because I believe you are mistaken if you think that a judge is involved in this process.

Otherwise a single person could donate their ID card and let everyone else authenticate with it.

Now you might counter and say it would be enough to give each card a sequential number independent of the person's identity, but then you run into another problem. Each service might accept each card only once, but there are many services out there, so having a few thousand donations could be enough to cover exactly the niche sites that you don't want kids to see.

There is no way to implement this without a complete authoritarian lockdown of everything. There will always be people slipping past the cracks. This means all this will ever amount to is harm reduction, but nobody is selling it on that platform. Nobody is saying that they are okay with imperfect compromises.

And before anyone asserts that the phone can be anonymous, that doesn't work, otherwise you can just have an app that claims to have a verified ID attached.

And using someone else's Id and password is the same as every method of auth

It would be possible for them to provide an open-source app, but design the cryptography in such a way that you couldn't deploy it anyway. That would make it rather pointless.

I too hope they design that into the system, which the danish authorities unfortunately don't have a good track record of doing.

Your responses have been an appeal to tradition (“every generation thinks that”), and a dismissal of the information because of the reproducibility crisis.

Ie you are arguing that we (humans) struggle with discerning Truth, and therefore we are wrong, and everything is fine.

But taking the negative position is just as epistemologically flawed. Hence the OPs attempt to discuss the best data we can find.

You're barking up the wrong tree if you're expecting it to be corporation-initiated.

I responded by explaining why that wouldn't be a good thing.

Have you changed your mind on that point or are you simply not keeping track of your argument? Either way there can't be an honest discussion whether you have the memory of a goldfish or are deliberately ignoring what you've said.

https://github.com/Governikus/AusweisApp

That all sounds extremely boring and political, but the essence is that it mandates a local authority to scan messages on platforms that are likely to contain child pornography. That's not a blanket scan of all messages everywhere.

I dispute that. The proposal explicitly states it has to be true that "it is likely, despite any mitigation measures that the provider may have taken or will take, that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material;"

> How can a judge be involved

Because the proposal does not itself require any scanning. It requires Member states to construct an authority that can then mandate the scanning, in collaboration with a judge.

I suggest YOU read the proposal, at least once.

So every platform, everywhere? Facebook and Twitter/X still have problems keeping up with this, Matrix constantly has to block rooms from the public directory, Mastodon mods have plenty of horror stories. Any platform with UGC will face this issue, but it’s not a good reason to compromise E2EE or mandate intrusive scanning of private messages.

I would not be so opposed to mandated scans of public posts on large platforms, as image floods are still a somewhat common form of harassment (though not as common as it once was).

Some of them even live on TikTok. I don't use TikTok, but my girlfriend uses it quite a lot and while there is plenty of brainrot, she also learns a lot from it, too.

Today, the panic is that kids read too little, or the wrong stuff.

What is and isn't societally desirable changes. The tactic to ban the currently undesirable behaviour persists. Moral panics tell us more about generational dynamics and power structures than the medium itself..

[1] https://www.historytoday.com/archive/medias-first-moral-pani...

> it is likely, despite any mitigation measures that the provider may have taken or will take, that the service is used, to an appreciable extent for the dissemination of known child sexual abuse material

That is an absolute vague definition that basically encompasses all services available today including messaging providers, email providers and so on. Anything can be used to send pictures these days. So therefore anything can be targeted, ergo it is a complete breach of privacy.

> Because the proposal does not itself require any scanning. It requires Member states to construct an authority that can then mandate the scanning, in collaboration with a judge.

Your assertion makes no sense. The only way to know if a message contains something inappropriate is to scan it before it is encrypted. Therefore all messages have to be scanned to know if something inappropriate is in it.

A judge, if necessary, would only be participating in this whole charade at the end of the process not when the scanning happens.

This is taken verbatim from the proposal that you can find here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=COM%3A20...

> [...] By introducing an obligation for providers to detect, report, block and remove child sexual abuse material from their services, .....

It is an obligation to scan not a choice based some someone's opinion like a judge, ergo no one is involved at all in the scanning process. There is no due process in this process and everyone is under surveillance.

> [...] The EU Centre should work closely with Europol. It will receive the reports from providers, check them to avoid reporting obvious false positives and forward them to Europol as well as to national law enforcement authorities.

Again here no judge involved. The scanning is automated and happens automatically for everyone. Reports will be forwarded automatically.

> [...] only take steps to identify any user in case potential online child sexual abuse is detected

To identify a user who may or may not have shared something inappropriate, that means that they know who the sender is, who the recipient was , what bthe essage contained and when it happened. Therefore it s a complete bypass of EtoE.

This is the same exact thing that we are seeing know with the age requirements for social media. If you want to ban kids who are 16 years old and under then you need to scan everyone's ID in order to know how old everyone is so that you can stop them from using the service.

With scanning, it is exactly the same. If you want to prevent the dissemination of CSAM material on a platform, then you have to know what is in each and every message so that you can detect it and report it as described in my quotes above.

Therefore it means that everyone's messages will be scanned either by the services themselves or this task will be outsourced to a 3rd party business who will be in charge of scanning, cataloging and reporting their finding to the authorities. Either way the scanning will happen.

I am not sure how you can argue that this is not the case. Hundreds of security researchers have spent the better part of the last 3 years warning against such a proposal, are you so sure about yourself that you think they are all wrong?

Why would they, though, if "no one in charge of implementing this law is going to care whether some Mastodon server implements a special auth solution for Danish users or not"? The EU CSAR proposal (which Denmark seem very much on board with) doesn't make such exceptions, so why should this law?

> A law isn't a headline on Hacker News, it's a carefully written document.

This is a non sequitur, and also pure speculation.

Were there well studied negative health impacts from reading excessively during this very similar scenario?

I'm not a historian so I'm curious to see the parallels because right now it looks like we're talking about two completely different things.

You're taking quotes from the preamble which are not legislation. If you scroll down a little you'll find the actual text of the proposal which reads:

> The Coordinating Authority of establishment shall have the power to request the competent judicial authority of the Member State that designated it or another independent administrative authority of that Member State to issue a detection order

You see, a judge, required for a detection order to be issued. That's how the judge will be involved BEFORE detection. The authority cannot demand detection without the judge approving it.

I really dislike you way of arguing. I thought it was important to correct your misconceptions, but I do not believe you to be arguing in good faith.

Of course, that was 200 years ago, so our standards of 'rigorous empiricism' can hardly be compared to what they had. But the patterns still are eerily similar.

Also, note how modern diagnostics not only concern the well-being of the media-consuming/delusional individual, but also their environment. Polemically speaking: You can be perfectly happy being weird, if your environment feels negatively affected by you, you technically still are a psychiatrical case and need 'fixing' according to the DSM.

Hell is other people, only the young can defend themselves and their interests less and are easier being picked on.

> You see, a judge, required for a detection order to be issued. That's how the judge will be involved BEFORE detection. The authority cannot demand detection without the judge approving it.

Your interpretation of the judge's role is incorrect. The issue is not if a judge is involved, but what that judge is authorizing.

You are describing a targeted warrant. This proposal creates a general mandate.

Here is the the reality of the detection orders outlined by this proposal:

1: A judicial authority, based on a risk assessment, does not issue a warrant for a specific user John Doe who may be committing a crime. 2: Instead, it issues a detection order to Meta mandating that the service Messenger must be scanned for illegal content. 3: This order legally forces Meta to scan the data from all users on Messenger to find CSAM. It is a blanket mandate, not a targeted one.

This forces Facebook to implement a system to scan every single piece of data that goes through them, even if it means scanning messages before they are encrypted. Meta has now a mandate to scan everyone, all the time, forever.

Your flawed understanding is based on a traditional wiretap.

Traditional Warrant (Your View): Cops suspect Tony Soprano. They get a judge's approval for a single, time-limited wiretap on Tony's specific phone line in his house based on probable cause.

Detection Order: Cops suspect Tony “might” use his house for criminal activity. They get a judge to designate the entire house a "high-risk location." The judge then issues an order compelling the homebuilder to install 24/7 microphones in every room to record and scan all conversations from everyone (Tony, his family, his guests, his kids and so on) indefinitely.

That is the difference that I think you are not grasping here.

With E2E, Meta cannot know if CSAM is being exchanged in a message unless it can see the plain text.

To comply with this proposal, Meta will be forced to build a system that bypasses their own encryption. There is no other way.

This view is shared by security experts, privacy organizations, and legal experts.

You can read this opinion letter from a former ECJ judge who completely disagrees with your view here:

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Vaj...

I am sorry if you think that I am arguing in bad faith. I am not.

While there is nothing I can do to make you like my arguing style, just know that I am simply trying to make you understand your misconceptions about this law.