• 20 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • 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.






  • 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.










  • Home routers have something called parental controls which can help parents block certain websites and platforms at the home network level.

    This together with parenting and education of ones children can help, all without sacrificing and giving away our privacy to third party corporations.

    At a regional and country level I would suggest a government funded public service similar to a library to index the internet. Similar to how books are classified by age and genres.

    These lists can be provided within each home router by defult for easy selection, or made easily available for upload by parents or users into existing routers.

    These government funded publicly curated list can help parents offloaded a little of the “curration effort”. This can then simply be a setting or toggle in the router setup, applying the proper age appropriate whitelist and blocking everything else that is not on the “approved list”. The setup can even help parents classify specific devices on the home network as “child owned” so the list only works for those devices.

    This would be the most “privacy respectful” option IMO over things like “age verification” or any other alternatives being suggested by corporate tech firms at the moment.

    The tech for this is already here, where we are lacking is:

    1. A government funded public curation effort.
    2. Goverment funded public education campaigns and education programs.
    3. A incentive for router manufacturers to make home router setup as simply and straight forward for non-tech or non power users.

    As for power users and tech literate individuals, public lists curated by individuals online already exist. For example Pihole and Adguard lists, these help people block and whitelist websites at the home network level.