it's supposed to be a computer alright

i just messed up the meme

Apparently they want everybody to get some sort of "EU wallet", that is, some digital signed identity which sounds super dystopian. But that's just what I read. It sounds like a complete disaster.

I feel like a productive way to address this would be to make a child mode mandatory for all operating systems, as some EU countries already did, and then to give parents a better incentive to actually enable it. For example, all end-user devices could be pressured into prominently showing an option to enable it when first booted up (without forcing your hand either way) so that it's hard to miss. There are so many other ways to improve this situation.

I found out recently that every android device asks if you will be using the device, or if a child will, as soon as you log in to the device for the first time. The funny part is that it asks AFTER you sign in, effectively linking to to that device, even if you're giving it to a 15 years old teen.

And that's why my kids only have Linux PCs, and phones that they use that belong to me, so I can take them away in case it's necessary (spoiler, they try to stay away from those phones as much as possible, lol).

Absolutely, it is a useful feature for technologically challenged parents, no doubt. However, this way of doing it (using any GAFAM related company or similar) exposes kids to data mining since way before they can make this decision (which most will likely choose to do it anyway, but that's besides the point). Now, what if these kids grow up to be privacy-minded adults? Their data is already in the hands of others without their consent, and we all know that once data is out there, there's nothing you can do to reel it back into privacy.

This issue is right up there with parents, or any acquaintances for that matter, uploading photos, videos and PII of our kids with titles like "my awesome nieces and nephews". My wife's sister was kicked out of my house because of this, and was banned from interacting with my kids for almost 2 years. The reason? I told her I do not allow my kids' pictures in social media, and she still did it (maybe thinking I would just bend over and take it).

It's up to each parent to protect the privacy of their children until they're old enough to choose for themselves. We are raising privacy-minded kids, but that's no guarantee that they will be privacy-minded when they are adults. The opposite also holds true. We should not expose our kids to any type of surveillance outside the parents, and even the parents' surveillance of their kids needs to have limits.

This is why I believe all of us with a little more sense and knowledge, should strive to advocate against this system. All it takes for bad people to win is for good people to do nothing.

Sorry for the slight tangent, but I agree with your response. Perhaps the best approach for technologically illiterate parents might be a child mode that runs a local filter list where it doesn't send everywhere your kid goes to some online service, or simply not allowing kids to go online unsupervised when they're not even teens yet. This is a solvable problem however, I feel like, at least more so than the server-side age checks.

It seems like the UK is now trying to make the nanny surveillance state part of all web forums, even outside of the UK: telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/… Apparently, lemmy.zip is now even blocking UK users. I wonder if it would help if more forums did that, to show where we are heading if nobody is standing up...

This article is interesting as well: eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/just… My favorite quote is this one, "All methods for conducting age checks come with serious drawbacks. Approaches to verify a user’s age generally involve some form of government-issued ID document, which millions of people in Europe—including migrants, members of marginalized groups and unhoused people, exchange students, refugees and tourists—may not have access to. [...] Age assurance methods always impact the rights of children and teenagers: Their rights to privacy and data protection, free expression, information and participation."

Hundreds of websites to shut down under UK's 'chilling' internet laws

Community pages face closure as lengthy new rules ‘create disproportionate liability’

^{James Titcomb (The Telegraph)}

Thanks so much. It's refreshing to see how some people still have common sense.

In all honesty, I'm very tired of these invasions. But the reality is that this was created by us, parents, families, and tech corps and governments just saw the opening and walked right in.

Tech made us lazy, we fell into the bliss of convenience while entirely dropping our rights on their laps to do with as they wish. I'm guilty of that myself. I allowed Google home and Alexa devices into my home and used them all the time. Then it all clicked when I started seeing information on subjects that interested me, my wife and my kids all over the place, without even looking for them. I panicked bad when I realized something was very wrong, but the damage was already done.

This is what got me into the Privacy and security wagon, and it took me almost 8 years to revert that as much as possible and finally have some sense of safety (because some of that stuff is out there for good, and there's nothing any of us can do about it).

Now I keep a sort of digital fortress around my family and myself, and I not willing to let it go anymore. This has made our family much more interactive in real life while at the same time harder targets for tech corps and governments.

Evidently, there are some of these that are unavoidable for us common folk, but we can compartmentalize our lives in ways that it's harder, if not impossible to tie everything about us together into a single fully integrated profile. Yes, it requires work, time, money and missing out on some convenience, but the alternative is infinitely worse, full of unknown dangers that can affect us now or later.

Until most people are fully pushing back on all these dangers, it will only get way worse over time.

I believe that removing the possibility of profit for tech companies is the only way to effectively reverse this trend, however, most people are too distracted by all the screens around them and the carefully crafted content made precisely for this purpose to figure out what is really going on, and by the time we all end up figuring it out, it may very well be too late.

So, I would like to see less excuses by most people on how "it's too hard for most people", "some parents are not as tech savvy" and similar BS. That only helps keep the myth of "there's nothing I can do about it" I alive, which is what all these institutions are banking on.

If electronic in any way, the item must be open source

That sub should be ruled out then

Thanks for asklemmy, will check, though it doesn't seem to fit

Hi, mod of Buyitforlife here!

The rule you quoted only applies to people self promoting their own products to sell there, they do not apply for recommending something or asking for suggestions for something. Feel free to make a post there about earbuds!

Thanks

Already knew it and community names aren't straightforward sometimes, so I was looking for somewhere to ask people

the left side of the meme:

elciudadano.com/en/nato-and-it…

not too familiar with the right side tbh

NATO and its links with Nazism

Some of NATO 's senior commanders came from being senior military commanders of German Nazism and very close to Adolf Hitler.

^{Ronald Ángel (El Ciudadano, Noticias de Chile y Latinoamérica para el Mundo)}