Somehow everyone has forgotten about parental controls that have been apart of consumer grade home routers for years.

Parental controls are there specifically to help parents. These settings allow a parent to block everything online only allowing access to approved lists of websites, generaly done through a whitelist or approved websites.

What is missing at a government level is a “curation effort” of websites, similar to Libraries that classify books by genres and appropriate age levels.

I would propose a government fund where Librarians or similar organizations can start this effort, and make these lists easily accessible within routers for non tech individuals, together with local initiatives and programs for parents that have a interest to learn more.

For power users lists like these already exists curated by public individuals very similar to pihole block lists and whitelists.

This concept would be the most privacy respectful IMO giving parents the most power to parent, while respecting everyone else’s privacy online including children.

But somehow we all know this is not about “protecting the children”, but really about mass surveillance for the public at all age groups, and yet this topic keeps coming up.

People have been forgetting that home routers come with something called parental controls.

This is the most privacy respecting solution that puts all the power of parenting into a parents hands.

If the government were really “thinking of the children” I would propose a group of bipartisan curators to curate the Internet. Thinking of how libraries function, we have librarians that classify books by age and genre. The same can be done for websites, and these curated lists be made available to parents. This can be funded by local government and be region and country specific.

These lists would effectively function as whitelists, blocking everything that’s not on the whitelist. Parents can then turn on a specific whitelist for their kids if they so choose, and they gain access to a curated list of age approved websites.

Parents can then, if they so choose, add or remove items form the list to grant their children access to specific sites.

All this tech is already available and it would prevent children and adults from having to provide a website any extra information. It would also mean websites would now not need to build infrastructure to collect this information.

Could you imagine a publisher of books needing you to send them a picture of your face to verify your age and identify before you even opened a book? Why are we proposing the same equivalent concept for a website or “digital book”.

True, though CCTV or Closed Circuit Television used to be “fully local” and “closed”. Tapes and recordings were only available or accessible to the property or person in most situations being recorded over older recordings.

Newer tech now is interconnected with companies trying to infer extra information from full databases of recordings from multiple different locations all around a town or city, or state.

CCTV used to be like a security guard sitting on a lawn chair. Where modern security cameras/systems are like having a personal tail following you all day and night.

You are correct, the only thing worth mentioning is when the laws were created/written it did not account for someone creating a database that is easily searchable/queried to infer all these extra habits of people.

Its one thing visually seeing someone over and over walk or drive by your house while you sit on your porch. It’s another thing to now know where they came from and where they went if you were able to sit on every porch at the same time in a town or city.

This is why police tails need to be granted by a judge, but a interconnected network of cameras at the moment does not recieve the same scrutiny.

People should be fighting to oppose this more then trying to figure out ways to circumvent this at the moment.

Bingo! And this is why we need to remind our governments that if this is really about “protecting the children”, we should not be sacrificing our own children privacy and safety, in the name of their safety!

Somehow everyone has forgotten about parental controls that have been apart of consumer grade home routers for years.

Parental controls are there specifically to help parents. These settings allow a parent to block everything online only allowing access to approved lists of websites, generaly done through a whitelist or approved websites.

What is missing at a government level is a curation effort of websites, similar to Libraries that classify books by genres and appropriate age levels.

I would propose a government fund where Librarians or similar organizations can start this effort, and make these lists easily accessible within routers for non tech individuals, together with local initiatives and programs for parents that have a interest to learn more.

For power users lists like these already exists curated by public individuals very similar to pihole block lists and whitelists.

This concept would be the most privacy respectful IMO giving parents the most power to parent, while respecting everyone else’s privacy online including children.

Don’t forget home routers have something called parental controls.

This would put all the power of online safety back into a parents hands and maintain all privacy online for the general public and ones children as well.

Gemini is a hot pile of garbage.

When I ask Gemini for directions it starts to give me a definition, as opposed to opening maps and showing me the way. If I ask to turn off the lights I get a conversation and I end up walking to the light switch myself.

If I were to send a physical letter written in code that can only be decrypted with a cipher would I now be breaking the law?

What about radio or telephone conversations in code?

Can I still password protect my zip files or encrypt my NAS or PC before boot?