Hacker News

The "online safety" of kids is just an excuse, I suspect.

Australia really wants to be able to identify and track the ID of all their citizens online. No more Internet anonymity for them.

I am old enough to remember how hard it was to find access to adult mags.

I understand that they want to make it harder for kids to access the flood of material that will destroy their brains before they even realize it.

Unlimited access to materials not intended and understandable by evolving kids’ brains is not really good.

BBC Channel 4 had a documentary in which a psychologist described 16-year-old boys with erectile dysfunction coming into his counselling room.

Of course, it depends on how to do it technically, face id is maybe unnecessarily too much... and also the question is whether we want to pass more data to the FAANG giants…

Edit: Ok, not hard…But access was not instant and ubiquitous as it is now. IMHO that makes the difference.

Newsflash: pretty much every site like Google already knows exactly who you are. We gave up anonymity a long time ago in exchange for "free".

Because we could see the direction this was going, for well over a decade now I have been slowly stepping away from internet use outside of what is absolutely necessary or just mundane.

Considering how we have gone from barely any form of tracking only 25 years ago to this. It will get worse.

It's hard not to see how this could erode anonymity and free expression over time

The aim is to achieve a panopticon.

With a panopticon it doesn't matter whether you are actually being monitored (although it is conceivable that all online data could be reviewed by AI) - the mere idea of being monitored changes behaviour. Loss of anonymity in public spaces, the concern that one's citizen score could be impacted by arbitrary rules, changes behaviour. Everyone will act unnaturally; some people will even cheer on these actions for bonus points.

People should be highly wary of ceding further freedom/authority to government, regardless of the 'children/terrorists/drugs/etc excuses'. The government desire to have order, should not be prioritised over individuals right to live freely. Freedoms are not re-granted by governments - getting them back will mean a fight, not a petition.

Kids will just ask strangers to verify the age for them or use a strangers token. I can see the WhatsApp token swapping groups already, you know just the sort of place children will meet actually dangerous people.

This kind of regulation always seems to underestimate two things: how resourceful teens are, and how easy it is to route around controls like this with a VPN or a fake birthday

It will be interesting to see this in action. It could be like any jail breaking scene, becomes an arms race between the jail and those trying to escape it.

As interesting as it is, it should have never come to this.

This isn't just asking for your age, its going to require verification of that through ID.

Devil's advocate position:

If you can shepherd the majority, or at least a larger percentage, then the leaks can be ignored (until they get too big, at which time then consider changes and tweaks).

For the likes of us on HN bypassing these things is a bodily function, however I believe there's a large cohort "out there" for whom it could be a bridge too far. Eg. I doubt too many degrees of separation outside of HN even know of the existence of Marginalia.

Having said that, the existence and purpose of a VPN is probably pretty well spread "out there in the world".

(ignoring the effectiveness of the topic of this thread).

Yandex is goated for stuff US companies and their "partners" don't want to show you search results for, esp WRT politics and world events,

I assume that Russian dissidents must ironically use google et al for the same reasons.

I would refrain from referring to it as incompetence, as I feel that ignores the true nature of the system.

The problem is that the Australian political system needs to appease to the centre. That's how parties get into power. As long as that's the case, it doesn't leave a whole lot of room to meaningfully tackle the problems plaguing the country (in particular, housing).

This policy exists because parents won't do parenting anymore. Take away the phones and put a PC in the living room.

I was having a similar conversation yesterday, and my stance is that the political grand-standing like this is worse than doing nothing because it gives the populace the sense that something is being done, although very little is likely to change. Resources are being applied far from optimally. Funding that could be useful is being spent on the useless. As such, it's taking things in the wrong direction whilst still costing more than what previously existed and also impinging on other areas of literally everyone else's lives.

I believe that acting locally, funding child protection services, providing more boots on the ground, is actual progress (I mean, these organisations are literally called "child protection services", who else better, then?)

I've mentioned this a number of times before: my wife is a teacher and therefore has 'mandatory reporting' responsibilities. The frustration is that, with the resources currently available, they're only able to intervene where a child's life is in immediate danger.

I'm not sure if the bar could be any lower.

I should also make the disclaimer that what I know is second-hand information from my wife, and may be out of date and / or biased due to frustrations due to the misalignment between 'mandatory reporting' and 'what can actually be done'.

Whenever a measure is instroduced in law to austensibly "protect the children", it's just merely an appeal to emotion and in fact, is not meant to do what is being advertised.

It certainly is meant to increase the power of law enforcement, gov't overreach, and intrusion. It is used to add a chilling effect on any sort of dissent.

The same could be said for any measures to protect you from "the terrorists".

Well, childcare is easy to measure. It's easy to see whatever it sufficient or not so it's a bad topic for politicians.

But you can “save the children” as many times as you want and there will always be another thing to save them from. And it's impossible to measure because obviously you can't go and ask children what they do on internet or what inappropriate content they found intentionally or not.

So perfect topic to work with even without conspiracy to invade grown ups privacy.

Heh, stop thinking of porn and similar stuff that a teenager will find a way to circumvent.

It's "normal" sites that are so crippled for minors for fear of liability that you end up telling your kids to just lie they're 24 when signing up.

Google et al want it because it finally gives them a way to wall off AI scraping and prove their usage/impression/etc statistics reflect human beings.

It's also clear that this data itself is valuable in the first place, and any company ever would love to be handed it for free mandated by law.

I agree, and most the comments here also show a lack of awareness of how much parents really don't want their kids running across Andrew Tate-esque material online and think it's okay for the government to regulate things in some way so that kids don't just accidentally run across that.

And yes, I think barely anyone exists who hasn't functionally identified themselves to Google. And I'd venture nobody exists where Google hasn't already built a shadow profile on them (for ad networks); how exactly do people think they've been using Google for "free" all these years?

[dead]

Australia has "the vote" for that.

The majority of the Australian population would agree with the introduction of such laws. It is the minority (such as those of us here) who disagree. So the people have been "heard" and they are getting what they want. It's the rest of us who suffer.

Theoretically: Vote for parties that are not actively hostile towards the people.

Practically: nothing.

Democracy has largely failed and in many countries you can, at best, pick between right wing assholes that work against your best interests and leftwing idiots that work against your best interests.

There is a frame of thought that goes like this. With any mass technology that has the ability to do harm, there are only two likely outcomes. Either you let the technology go free in which case the self terminating phase of blow back becomes a reality. Or you have to track is relentlessly/set rules in place that can be enforced, thus you bring about an authoritarian state dystopia.

This allows both sides to present an angle of resistance to the opposite. The freedom people will push back against control. The control side will push back against the worst outcomes.

I say this as somebody who is very much against this roll out. There is the middle way of rules and regulations but this is dependent on how you can allow some freedom without becoming too restrictive. This is a wild over correction but I am not surprised. This is, yet another typically aussie politician move. Slowly stepping into authoritarian state behind the guise of jingoistic "she will be right" attitude.

The general trend is not toward _more_ parental autonomy; it’s towards kids being property of the government and parents serving as keepers at the government’s pleasure.

Because it's not about minors or pornography at all. It's about ending online anonymity, democracy enabled by the Internet, and ultimately to pick out dissidents to eventually disappear them.

All of these laws (the US has some now) are designed to set up a censorship regime that can control speech or oppress undesirable groups (Project 2025 calls out LGBTQ+, for example).

The age verification also will inevitably let the authorities create a list of adults to persecute.