Worth noting that there's no security in a system that abusively collects your data. That goes for children as well.

> Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.

This makes very little sense. People sometimes appeal to the safety of children cynically, but it's very often sincere, since parents genuinely do worry a lot about their kids.

You can tell people to ignore these appeals, but it won't work, and you'll be leaving better arguments on the table.

> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security.

The immediate reply is the accusational: "why are you trying to trying to prevent safety for kids".

It's a simple next step to accuse you of hiding your own child abuse ring.

This sounds like hype, but it's the normal path here in Australian.

> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom for security

That argument loses you most of the population in a vote, myself included. Parents may disagree, for a start; I reckon most women (especially outside of tech) read that and mark you down as "creepy man I don't want near kids".

It's also wrong, as there are lots of rules that are in fact designed to protect children. I recommend reading up on the history of child abuse in the Boy Scouts of America (now Scouts BSA), FBI agent Kenneth Lanning's investigation, and the safeguarding and leadership training that scout leaders must take today.

The UK has a system, I think it's called the DBS, which depending on the level of check ranges from "is this person a convicted sex offender?" to "non-crime hate incidents". One can argue a lot about what the correct level should be, no-one has yet convincingly explained to me why specifically "non-crime" actions should be in a secret police record. But I am on board with someone convicted by a court for child sex offences not being allowed to become a schoolteacher.

We should not ignore it, but firmly dismiss it with reason. The recent Illinois law that applies to all Internet-capable operating systems is blatantly unconstitutional. People should not be forced by law to disclose their age (or anything) in order to engage in digital communication. That forced utterance of your own age is compelled speech, a violation of the First Amendment.

For parents who are genuinely concerned about child safety, you are being used to push an agenda. If we want to solve the digital parenting problem, we have to understand how the problem came to be in the first place and why there isn't a good solution at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578

In the modern discourse and context, 99 times out of 100, indeed they are, and indeed it should be.

Comes down to something I have said for a long while. Anyone that wants power, who is saying it, why are they saying it and why do people believe them.

That one can get deep really quick.

The worse is - we say it's about child safety - but that same rhetoric is actually defending kids to have a smartphone.

You're straw manning most people by trying to insist upon this, as most Americans support a ban on social media for children. [1] That turns into the overwhelming majority if you consider only Americans with children. And the percent of Americans that oppose things like age verification for the usage of social media sites is in the single digits.

So it will most likely happen especially because you are certainly right, in part, that no government has ever said no to actions that'd give them more power, let alone ones that are widely supported. But the point of this is that rather than having this as some sort of red-line no, I think it'd be much more pragmatic to try to argue for identity verification regulations that would be most palatable.

[1] - https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/54969-eight-in-ten-parents...

"The government says all children need to show an ID when browsing the internet in order to be safe"

"The government says all children need to be vaccinated in order to be safe"

I'm not saying these arguments are equivalent, but they seem equivalent because they induce the same feeling of loss of agency. And one cannot simply ignore and dismiss something like this.

Note how they always ignore parental controls, and skip straight to deanonymize everyone.

rhetoric all the way down

> Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you into giving up your freedom

These are NGOs not parents. And "child safety" is often a euphemism. The point is it's hard to argue against child safety. For example, if opaque NGOs demand deanonymization to stop CSAM, I am assuming most people would not want to seem like they are in favor of CSAM. So you need an organized effort to argue in favor of privacy and even then anyone who does it can easily be smeared as a CSAM user. So child safety can backdoor something else.

This but unironically.

Same for the environment and construction. And there’s a correlate for rhetoric too, such as comparing people to Hitler or Stalin.

Sounds like a good way to cede the argument to the opposition and let those that do believe them make up the rules.

> These NGOs have converged upon a unified strategy ...

Not just for the war on anonymity. NGOs, often funded by government money (so missing two third of their name), have unified on other topics.

One example that comes to mind is teaming up to organize the biggest influx of migrants into the EU following the arab spring movements: there have been hidden camera recording NGO employees explaining how to dodge controls, how to answer questions (by lying), and they've been actively helping sneaking people illegally in the EU.

A good question one could ask itself before downvoting me is this: if it's a fact that NGOs are teaming up, worldwide, to lie using the rethoric of "child safety" [1]... On which other topics did NGOs lie?

Or are we to believe all NGOs are good and well-meaning, except those working to end anonymity?

And before I forget: in Africa for example it's fully well known that NGO typical means "DGSE":

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

There are french "doctors" in some of those NGOs who know less about medicine than what I know about medicine by having ex-girlfriends that were doctors.

By squinting one's eye just a little it look like NGO is not that far from a synonym of "shady undercover gov op".

And btw why should any of my taxpayers dollars go to even a single NGO if it's non-governmental?

And another big one: while some of those NGOs have been hard at work passing legislation which as a a result gets people arrested for "hate speech" (or even just for saying "christian prayers in their heads") in the UK, other NGOs are even harder at work making sure that the absolute most horrible of all hate speech cannot ever be criticized "because it's religious".

The double standards are literally insane.

If I was in the UK, I'd GTFO. And not to the EU.

[1] speaking of which, btw, there are serious allegations about NGOs participating in child trafficking, for example in the Haiti SNAFU

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“Anyone who brings up kids is trying to manipulate you”

Any argument with such blatant oversimplifications is almost certainly lacking in nuance and can be ignored and dismissed.

I get what you’re pointing at: politicians regularly abuse these arguments, but that doesn’t mean it’s 100% of all arguments involving children.

There's an ongoing debate in Australia to ban gambling advertisements. One of the arguments that is supportive of a ban says that children shouldn't be exposed to gambling advertisements during sports broadcasts, as they should be family friendly.

Should that argument be ignored too?

In the inverse, none of the opposition matters until it can solve the problems the universal surveillance approach doesn't even solve anyways. Whatever argument they make should be simply ignored and dismissed.

It's a tradeoff situation and nobody wants to leave it as such to find an answer which serves the best balance. Instead, we are doomed to discuss the absolutes of freedoms vs the absolutes of child safety.

I'd really like to see something like a required parental controls architecture products had to support (but not every device had to force universally). These kind of solutions only goes as far as the problem is a technical one, e.g. a kid on their dad's office computer they weren't supposed to access can still see things they shouldn't, but such is the truth with any pure technical approach to the problem which is not actually fully technically bound.