I won’t comment over the subject matter, but as a hobby archivist I like to save most of the stuff I come across online into portable and durable offline formats. Laws like this one in the U.K. only reinforce my interest in archiving. I’d like to suggest people who care about privacy also check out the topic of archiving. After all, the Venn diagram between privacy and archiving overlaps neatly. It’s hard to lose access to, or be surveilled over, content when most of your engagement occurs with self-owned files without any internet connectivity. 
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Just blocks teens from getting bank cards and ban them from buying smartphones and PCs. This way, they can’t buy online (no need for ID-gating) and in-person there is a face/quick ID check.
Parents then can decide whether to give it to kids. This will responsabilize the parents on choice for kids.
Also ban them in schools (drop in a box for examples). The only issue
I think I would take EU’s mywallet apporach where you only give the validated birth of date without risking the rest of the information and is preferably stored on-device or backed up with E2EE (eg. Proton-zero-access-like encryption with a recovery key if necessary, maybe also using passkeys for further security).
Now I have to emphasize that I still think that we should be regulating parents to do their job, not the internet.
regulating the internet and mandating invasive age verification instead of parents to do their job, which is you know, parenting, sets a horrible predicament and enforces the parent’s behaviors to not do anything on their kids as they can now basically justify “well the government is now enforcing age verification what do I have to worry about my child going to bad websites” (literally if you you say something like this as a parent, you either shouldn’t have been one in the first place or missing the plot)
this or idk, target the group that is causing this mess which is negligent parents for regulation and not the companies or the internet. Obviously make the fines and then jail time brutal enough to face their consequences for not parenting enough
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Guys, I’m begging you. I am PLEADING with you. Can we please stop just assuming that every parent is a negligent moron? Parenting is a hard, 24/7 job. After the birth of her first child, my sister said that “I didn’t know it was possible to be this tired.” She texted me the first time she was sick and said “I have a newfound appreciation for mom for getting up and powering through it. I can’t take a day off. I have to look after the kid.” There are no days off.
Next, you’re discrediting yourself. “Just learn code/networking/Linux/etc.” This is stuff that takes a lot of dedicated research (hold that thought). Not to mention parsing through all the garbage snake oil there like “NordVPN will solve all your problems, baby!” Understanding what the actual hell a tech stack is, let alone how it works, and picking what’s right for you and your needs. That takes a lot of work. Not to mention that at the start, people don’t know what the don’t know. Most parents have no idea they can look into tools like DNS block. My sister’s been on iPhone for nearly a decade and didn’t realize til I told her last month that it has parental controls built into it. People don’t know what the don’t know. You guys are REALLY insulting yourselves when you act like this wealth of tech knowledge you’ve accumulated over years of dedicated study is something that people should just innately know and that anyone who doesn’t know it is mentally challenged or maliciously ignorant.
And on the topic of “dedicated research,” parents are tight on time. Most parents work full time these days, both parents. Plus running errands. Plus cooking. Plus spending quality time with their spouse and their kids. Helping with homework. Being attentive IRL and not just at securing their devices. You’re basically asking them to go back to school fulltime (see again that “people don’t know what they don’t know” and “parsing snake oil”) on top of all this.
Finally, a lot of people just aren’t that interested in this stuff. You’re in a tech forum. Of course you know all this stuff. It’s obviously your passion. Now explain to me - you yourself, don’t send me a link - how to rebuild an entire car from scratch. Or every system of the human body. Shoot, even doctors can’t do that’s why they have specialists. Explain the deep historical context of every factor that led to World War 1. To you guys, this stuff is fun to study, and that helps make it easy and interesting. A lot of “normies” are intimidated by this stuff, and they find it hard. It’s like math class. They’re just not interested. And yes, there is a baseline tech literacy I believe everyone should have, but blaming them as “negligent” and stupid because they’re not eating, sleeping, and breathing this topic is on par with calling you guys negligent because you can’t explain to me exactly how your various body systems work in great detail. Nobody knows everything. There’s plenty of important topics where you’re ignorant, and that doesn’t make you stupid or negligent. It makes you human.
Please, please, PLEASE stop calling parents negligent or stupid. Especially when they’re going up against experts working against them - like algorithms, dark patterns, and data harvesting. It’s gatekeepy, it’s cruel, and it’s false. You’re watching Mike Tyson fight an infant and making fun of the infant for not doing well.
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let me be clear, im not saying all parents are like this, in fact for sure there are mom or dads that are smart and I understand it is a hard job and I have to admit I would try my best but I would certainly struggle myself.
but what im trying to say is that it should be common sense nowadays that monitoring your child in a respectful way is important and those that choose the government to do it over themselves is not acceptable. I really don’t think you have to be a perfect parent to grasp the situation we’re in in 2026.
Of course I also think lack of education very much plays a role here
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These statements are all very common beliefs, but they are mutually exclusive imo:
“There is a health/safety/wellbeing issue regarding kids and their internet usage, action is needed”
“Parents should not shoulder the blame & burden”
“Government should not shoulder the blame & burden”
Only one can be true imo:
- The kids are fine, take no action
- Parents are neglectful, they must act
- Governments are neglectful, they must act
If we reject all three, then we embrace a social contract where citizens bear no responsibility for the wellbeing of other children or society at large, everyone just gets your own house in order, and acknowledge many children will have unrestricted internet access. It’s not a totally unreasonable POV, but most seem to reject this
So we have a widely acknowledged issue that needs attention, where nobody is to blame & no solutions are viable
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With respect, absolutely not. This is a toxic attitude that the privacy community HAS to shed if we’re gonna make any progress. The world is full of contradictory things that are simultaneously true.
Sodas are delicious, but are objectively bad for my health.
Working out is hard but objectively good for my health.
You can do everything right and still fail.
Wars can be both devastating and awful but necessary for the “greater good.”
The privacy community has this incredibly toxic belief that only one thing can be true: Graphene is the most private and secure, therefore nobody should use anything else. This example ignores the fact that in some places Pixels aren’t available, or maybe someone can’t afford one, or maybe they NEED (yes, NEED) a feature that GOS doesn’t offer like parental controls. Therefore in this scenario, two contradictory things are true: GOS is the golden standard for privacy and security but it’s not the right advice for that person.
It’s extremely possible - and likely - that the truth in this case is a mix: parents need to be better educated and more hands-on with their childrens’ tech use while the government needs to step up and do more to protect kids online in some form.
In fact, more often than not, two contradictory things are true. Humans are wired to LOVE easy, simple, black-and-white answers but the world is chock full of shades of gray and nuance. In my experience, there’s most often a gray, complex, nuanced answer while there’s almost never a clear-cut black and white. (Maybe “almost never” is an exaggeration but it’s certainly the vast minority of cases.)
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It is the parents’ choice to provide their kids with electronic devices which they don’t have adequate control over. They could just not give their kids the iPad, it’s that simple.
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iPads actually have really great parental controls. Probably you can’t go wrong with an iPad (although you can question how early kids should have any electronic devices in general). The problem definitely isn’t a lack of strong parental controls though. Maybe you could argue if your kid has say a windows desktop and an iPad and a Chromebook, dealing with the parental controls on all three separate ecosystems is a huge pain compared to if they had all Apple devices. Maybe there could be some standardized open parental control protocol that every OS could support that would let parents easily control all devices at once. I think we’re in a better place than we’ve ever been though in terms of easy-to-use tools for keeping your kids off things you don’t want them to see, porn sites have been labeling themselves using RTA to give internet filters an easy way to filter them out. There’s honestly been so much progress in keeping kids off porn sites and I feel like this sudden ban wave is putting a huge wrench in all that effort and possibly exposing kids to shadier porn sites that don’t want to follow the law (there’s plenty of sites accessible on the open internet for piracy for example so it’s fairly easy to get away with breaking the law).
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That’s a very short-sighted solution. Eventually your kids will need to grow up and learn how to use a phone to be part of modern society - unless you’re in a very unique situation. At that point you’ll HAVE to introduce them to tech. And you can either do it responsibly, or you can just be the authoritarian “not in my house” parent which will result in them being completely unprepared when they get out on their own, and IMO that makes you one of those “negligent” parents people are complaining about.
Either way, they’ll have internet access eventually 99/100 times.
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True, but I think the argument @nateb is making (correct me if I’m misunderstanding) is that not all parents have enough understanding of these topics to know how to set up those controls, in which case the answer is “then don’t give them the device”.
Then you need to take the time to be a parent to them and educate them as they do so. Just like anything else your kids need to learn to grow up and become adults, your job as a parent is to guide them on that path. If you can’t take that responsibility on, you shouldn’t have kids.
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And now we’re back to my original post about how not every parent should be expected to be an expert. Did your parents have medical degrees? Or economics degrees? Did they teach you biology and calculus? Or how elections work? I’m willing to bet you learned a lot of this stuff in school, in math classes, health classes, economics and government. Maybe not all of it, and maybe your parents helped instill specific values such as being conservative vs liberal or the value of saving money. Likewise, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect parents to have a comprehensive understanding of every possible digital threat. It’s not completely unrealistic to suggest a similar balance here.
My main thing is to stop demonizing parents for not being subject matter experts. That’s not fair to them, it’s not realistic, and it sure as hell won’t convince them to care when they find a community who tells them they’re bad parents. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Unless you don’t actually care about winning them over, in which case ignore me.
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You don’t need a medical degree to know how to set up Apple parental controls. I’m not sure if you’re arguing in bad faith or if you think so little of the average parent that you think it’s beyond them entirely to take an hour to learn what options are available to them to control what their kids do with their iPad.
And usually kids ask their parents for help with their homework, and when the parents don’t know the answer we wouldn’t say they should tell the kid “sorry, do you expect me to have a medical degree?”
Who is doing that?
If you are unwilling to spend the time that’s required to properly parent your kids you are a bad parent.
I don’t care what bad parents do with their kids, just don’t make it the rest of society’s responsibility through legislation to compensate for it.
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This is like saying 95% of this forums users consented to data collection/retention. Don’t they know about Snowden etc.
The spirit of this forum is fighting against a system of intrusion with everything stacked against us. You shouldn’t blame another forum member for being overwhelmed about how much there is to learn and choosing a more lenient threat model.
Stop blaming parents unless you’re willing to blame privacy guides members for living in a society.
Parents choose to have children. People generally do not choose to exist.
You cannot shift responsibility that you have as a result of your choices onto those who did not make the same choices.
What gives parents the right to blame society, if we’re not allowed to blame parents?
If you want to introduce laws to give parents better tools or easier access to education on how to manage their kids in the electronic age, that would be great. Making everyone else’s lives more difficult is not the answer.
Where did I do that? I don’t have a problem with parents who accept the consequences of giving their kids unrestricted internet access (I do disagree with it, but that’s not my problem), the issue is the ones who don’t want that for their kids but expect it to be everyone else’s responsibility to prevent it.
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Maybe I’m the asshole then but it sure seems like everyone here does a lot. “Parents are so negligent because they don’t monitor everything their kids do online, set up DNS-blockers, switch all their devices to Graphene, etc.”
I’ll shut up.
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I don’t think so, I could buy that others are doing it, but I was asking because I felt like you were saying I was and I would disagree with that.
I mean yeah that’s extreme. But are you negligent as a parent if you give you child an unfettered gateway to the internet with zero restrictions at all? Sorry, yeah. Do I particularly care or think you’re a bad person because of of it? No. Just don’t try and give everyone else the responsibility of changing because of your negligence.
I think the bare minimum to clear the negligence bar while still giving your kids internet access is to give them an iPad or iPhone with Apple’s parental controls on, and I don’t think that’s asking a lot.
If you are unwilling to do that and you’re unwilling to let your kid live without a device and you try to pass laws to introduce controls on the internet you weren’t willing to set up yourself without affecting everyone else, then sorry but yeah, you suck.
(I am using “you” here rhetorically, not referencing you @nateb)
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I guess this is really my issue - I dont see a practical means to place any responsibility on the government without overreach into the lives of me and my family. I can only see policing that ultimately and inevitably infringes on the privacy & anonymity of adults in good standing
If I’ve got no tolerance for federal intervention into my family’s online habits, the issue does seem reduced to a binary decision that places all burden on me as a parent. This POV does not harmonize well with your (FWIW very reasonable & compelling) case for parental leniency
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I think a conversation on how to make sure parental controls are as easy to use and understandable as possible is warranted. I just don’t see a lot of that, it’s mainly either saying the government should ban all adult content or parents just shouldn’t give their kids technology without a reasonable middle ground. If you set your kid up with a new iPhone as a child account it’ll already by default give you some sane defaults and tries to have a simple interface for you to change it how you want.
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