Mozilla, the non-profit tech giant behind the Firefox browser and has warned regulators that age-restricting VPNs “would undermine the privacy and security of all users”.
In a formal submission to the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, Mozilla pushed back against a recent consultation that considers age-gating the best VPN services to stop minors from bypassing age checks mandated by the Online Safety Act.
I’m sick of this. If it’s that big of a deal, we just need to ban kids from the internet. Full stop. No intermediary measure will be good enough.
Sounds like a good idea. Now we just need a way to determine which users are kids and which are adults. I’ve got it! We can use age verification for that, and we’ll probably also need to ban vpns to stop kids from getting around it.
Kids can’t actually get access to the internet on their own. You have to purchase an internet connection of some sort via a provider and kids can’t do that. Public access, like libraries, would have to use ID/age verification in person, sure. But not the general internet. That responsibility falls to the parents of the children and you can create whatever punitive laws you want to punish and hold parents accountable for preventing their kids from accessing the internet.
It’s literally the same thing we do with prescription drugs and alcohol. Some people have to lock them up, but mostly those bottles are unlocked and accessible to kids all over the world and we expect the parents to do the gatekeeping and then punish/hold the parents accountable when they don’t.
No no no. Just take the American approach. Shoot the kids in the schools! What? Is that a bad idea?
Oh, it is?
Well so is age verification.
How do you propose to enforce such an idea? Some sort of… birthday testimony? Some sort of… oneness corroboration?
The parents have the responsibility of enforcing it and that’s it, that’s enough.
If you want to add laws to say that parents that fail to keep their kids off the internet can lose their kids, fine idgaf. Create whatever you want to hold parents accountable but as parents, this is THEIR problem.
How do we enforce such an idea? I don’t know, maybe, we can create some kind of “parental control” software, and if parents don’t use it, then we can pass something called “child neglect” laws and punish them with that?
We just need parents that can do the parents, it’s not the government resposability to watch out for people childrens on internet to that extend…
It was never about the children
I actually like this approach. Better than the wackamole approach of pRoTeCtInG tHe KiDs
I was gonna go with banning all UK regulators.