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> Those school ipads could also have YouTube locked or restricted to a whitelist of channels.

There's so much wrong here.

A) there's ways around that stuff that any child can figure out.

B) schools aren't in fact obligated to enable those, and some don't.

C) who decides on what channels are allowed? The school does. But teachers are basically people off the street that did some basic training and (from my experience) have zero critical thinking. This are not the best and brightest.

D) big tech will tell you "this is age appropriate" and the only thing that means is that you probably won't see porn. Anything else, including gambling ads on youtube, you do see.

You see, you're trying to discuss the specifics which in this case is a losing approach if your goal is to protect your chidlren from being victimized by the attention economy. The reason is that those benefiting from the attention economy have more lawyers and more engineers to deploy than any individual parent.

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>A) there's ways around that stuff that any child can figure out.

No, there are not for hardware locked devices with the proper controls (what apps, websites, etc to allow).

>B) schools aren't in fact obligated to enable those, and some don't.

The technical problem is solved, if they don't want to implement the solution that's on them.

>C) who decides on what channels are allowed? The school does. But teachers are basically people off the street that did some basic training and (from my experience) have zero critical thinking. This are not the best and brightest.

Again, irrelevant. A common policy can be created (e.g. by ministry of education experts) and shared with schools.


> > B) schools aren't in fact obligated to enable those, and some don't.

> The technical problem is solved, if they don't want to implement the solution that's on them.

Just to be clear - do you not understand that a parent might be parenting, but some times their children is in care of a school? Your focus on "a technical solution exists" is missing the real issue here, and it's not a technical one.


>but some times their children is in care of a school?

And not only that but some of those times are dinner break, on a school campus with a thousand other kids and barely any supervision. Even if phones are banned, it's easy to hide one and for a child to be showing their friends unhinged stuff they found on 4chan.

And some of those times are on a bus carrying at least 50 kids when they're 'supervised' only by a driver ... and so on.


That's a good point.

But you know, I find it frustrating that the people we're talking to clearly have no experience with the subject but they come in here and state with confidence they're opinion on something which is for them a hypothetical. They don't know what's going on.


>Even if phones are banned, it's easy to hide one and for a child to be showing their friends unhinged stuff they found on 4chan.

That would still reduce ther exposure by 1-2 orders of magnitude, which is perfectly acceptable.


I mean, we all saw the occasional heinous stuff, goatse, lemon party, etc, that doesn't ruin you. I don't think preventing them from ever seeing anything disturbing is a realistic goal. It's more an issue when kids are allowed to be fully addicted on an ongoing basis instead of spending their time doing things that help them grow. I think keeping them from spending all their free time on youtube or in Roblox is more the goal.

This, it's the stupid addictive games like Roblox and social media like YouTube. Circling back to schools (not-UK), here even teachers let them play Roblox sometimes in primary school on school hardware. The problem as a parent is that you cannot get upset and fight about everything, you need to pick your battles. This is made worse that you are most likely a minority, most parents will say/think a little Roblox or Tik Tok at school is harmless fun.

IMO the problem is twofold: first, younger kid's brains are not developed enough to deal with games and social media that are intentionally made to be addictive. Heck, even a lot of adults have issues limiting their time. Addictive games and social media should just be forbidden under 16 years. Currently our government has only issued a recommendation, which does nada. Second, teachers and parents need to be educated better. Many have no idea that these addictive apps are an issue or just don't fully realize the damage they do.


> Even if phones are banned, it's easy to hide one and for a child to be showing their friends unhinged stuff they found on 4chan.

Age verification doesn't solve that though.


I'm talking about both parents and schools: the technical solution exists. If parents/schools don't want to implement it, that's on them.

This answers your objection A and B. C is also a non-probem with a trivial fix, as I showed.

What we're discussing is whether age verification is needed. Based on the existence of other, perfectly fine solutions, it's not. "But schools don't bother implementing those other solutions" is not a counter-argument to this discussion.


> If parents/schools don't want to implement it, that's on them

Well that's not much of a solution is it now? More like an attempt that we all can see will fail.

Harm reduction is not the same as a solution.


I'm not sure why I need to debate against obvious illogical positions, but here we go:

> Well that's not much of a solution is it now? More like an attempt that we all can see will fail.

Some entities not wanting to implement a perfectly fine technical solution is not the same as "that's not a solution". If schools not bothering is your issue, just like the state can mandate a "age verification", it can also mandate schools add such parental control locks to the devices they give to kids.

>Harm reduction is not the same as a solution.

It absolutely is, and that's what any solution will be anyway.

There's no perfect solution short of throwing kids in some kind of restricted area without access to any devices. And even in prison prisoners get ahold of startphones.

Age verification can be beaten even more easily, getting access from some older kid for example, borrowing or buying verified accounts, getting an older/hacked OS that doesn't check, and countless other holes.

The difference is that the parent controls case directly affects the device the kids have, let's the parents set the policy based on their beliefs and the child's mental maturity (not authoritarian one-size-fits-all approach), and doesn't add OS mandated id and age tracking to everybody regardless if they're kids or not.


> There's no perfect solution

A solution—ie, solving a problem—does in fact imply perfection.


Only in mathematics or in some rigid aspie conception of the term "solution". But we're not debating about solutions in cartoon land.

If real-world solution implied "perfect" there would be no debate regarding better and worse solutions concerning their results - which is what social and political and team and inter-personal and even ...spousal debates are all about.

And that's about merely inherent issues, before we even come to how a proposed solution interplays with other things (e.g. mandatory age verification vs privacy, or policing vs personal freedom, or censorship vs innovation and authoritarianism).

In real life practical solutions always have tradeoffs and weak spots, but can nonetheless make the problem much smaller as to effectively be irrelevant or at an acceptable level.


But it is an argument against age restrictions since you could just as easily pass a law that instead required schools to enable various filters. You could even require mainstream devices from major manufacturers to support certain filtering standards. And you could require websites to send self categorization headers.

There is no valid argument for why ID checks are necessary if the goal is simply to get filtering implemented in places such as schools.

If instead the goal is to entirely prohibit all children from using social networks regardless of parental consent then it makes sense. It also makes sense if the goal is actually to violate privacy or something similarly sinister.


I don't really give a damn about the freedom to say stuff on the internet, so you're trying to convince the wrong person.

You just want censorship and state control. So perhaps you have the wrong ideas. Your "solutions" are worse than the problems.

That's unfortunate, but what I said had nothing to do with that. I merely refuted the basis of your prior objection.

But this thread is discussing the technical solution and how many jurisdictions are pretending there’s no technical solutions just so they can pass surveillance legislation?

Same argument(s) can be applied to age verification.



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