Young people have a right to speak and access information online. Legislatures should remember that protecting kids' online safety shouldn't require sweeping online surveillance and censorship.EFF reminded the New York Attorney General of this important fact in comments responding to the state's...
The “you’d have to prove to someone that you’re an adult” is where we disagree. I was talking about parents setting a “user is a child” flag on the devices they let their kids use. They already know who their children are, no proof is necessary. The device can then send an http header to websites for example indicating that it’s a child user. That part could be mandated and standardized by law. It’s 99% of the problems solved (in legal theory; obviously not every website and app in the world will choose to participate in any of these schemes) with 1% of the dangers.
So long as they don’t go overboard with misguided efforts to make it impossible for children to defeat the thing, it seems fine. It’s dismaying that all the proposals end up with all these ridiculously dysfunctional ideas instead.
That isn’t sufficient for the people trying to pass these laws. They’re trying to get the government to enforce parental controls, not the parents. Those types of controls already essentially exist and yet they were deemed insufficient.
This is mostly because these people are not interested in protecting children, but rather shutting down anything they don’t like. The same way they tried to shut down abortion clinics by attempting to hold them to full blown hospital building standards. It wasn’t because it was unsafe, it was a way to harass the clinics they disapproved of.
Yeah it’s important to keep in mind that while some of these people are just concerned about children, many ultimately want some content topics to be illegal that are currently legal. And for those funding and enacting such things such content is often all of pornography (as per their definitions) and all of queer content
Well yeah, the problem of the government wanting to govern things it shouldn’t.