It's not Australia saying it, it's a specific person, though.

Bet these are the same people that put the pressure on the porn games a bit ago

Who is american...

From what I remember, I believe it was an Australian "moms group" that pulled that stunt.

The gap is parents supervising their children if anything.

they're not wrong, but cutting kids from the internet will do nothing to prevent their abuse, quite the contrary, because it will force kids to be even more dependent on the people who are most statistically likely to abuse them...

I bet she used the internet as a girl when it was 100x less 'safe.'

Now wants to pull the ladder up behind her.

I mean, child mortality from plastic bag suffocation dropped after they started printing those warnings so I'm not sure why that'd be something to fear.

FUCKING

SUPERVISE

YOUR OWN

CHILDREN

Look at her picture, based on her apparent age i doubt that's correct

EDIT

Yeah i looked her up on Wikipedia, and while it doesn't say her age explicitly, the pic there makes it clear that she didn't use the internet when she was a kid

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

Collective Shout.

Fucking cunts and the payment processors that went along with their bullshit.

...well if we're going to legislate something out of gaming 'fOr tHe kIDs' let's start with the slot machine bullshit and other gambling mechanics seem in things like loot boxes.

At the very least, the presence of that stuff should be an automatic Adult rating. With less predatory (but still predatory) things like subscriptions being rated as Mature.

Guessing that's not what the dickhead in the article is talking about, but I'm not gonna bother reading another rant from some pearl-clutching cunt imagining a bunch of fake problems caused by video games.

Agreed! The solution is so very simple. All Australia needs to do is assign one jack booted thug to each child in the country, with orders to hold the kid's head underwater for a few seconds if the thug thinks the kid is visiting Steam or Roblox. If the parents object, hold their heads underwater too. As a bonus, the kids will learn to fear opposing the Australian government. It couldn't be easier.

They want the government to raise their children. Not parents. Goodness me, that would be silly.

It's easy to look back at history and say "what a bunch of idiots", but it's important to remember that there was once a time when having plastic bags all around your home wasn't such a ubiquitous thing like it is today. The things that seem obvious to us now were still new and untested at one time. The rise in plastic film suffocation started around the rise of dry-cleaning; until that point, there wasn't much disposable plastic film in people's lives, at all. Society had no prior experience to learn from, in this sense.

What we're seeing here isn't too dissimilar in this regard. Up until fairly recently, the concept of a globally-connected, unmoderated network that was accessible by children and predators alike just didn't exist. That network existing in literally everybody's pockets 24 hours a day is an even newer idea. And it's not even just one network, it's in almost every facet of kids' lives these days.

We can all sit around and say "wow what a bunch of bad parents for allowing this to happen", but many of those parents didn't grow up in a world where this was a reality. While many of them grew up in a time where online predators existed, they didn't grow up in a time when those predators could interact with children directly at any time and any location. They grew up in a time when you had a PC in your room, which you didn't take with you, and that your parents could physically access; kids these days take their phone everywhere at all times, parental controls today are more useless than when we were kids, and it's trivially easy for kids to hide their online presence from their parents now. Today's parents, by and large, just simply do not have the experience needed to address this on a large scale.

The morbid reality is that the only reason it seems obvious not to let children play with plastic bags is because nearly every single plastic bag you've ever seen in your entire life says "this bag is not a toy". You grew up in a world where that problem had already been solved, and at the cost of dozens of dead children.
This is not yet a solved problem.

Yankee go home.

I gotta be honest, I understand this position. I have a real difficult kid. We're working on building trust, but it's a process. The fact of the matter is that he seeks out inappropriate content and he can't seem to help himself, just too impulsive.

There's a reason for these behaviors, and like I said, we're working on it. But in the mean time, we've had to completely lock down all technology in the house. And most of it is complete garbage when it comes to parental controls. Stay away from Roku for instance, that device is fucking horrible, just the worst.

Anyway, the thing is, sometimes parental controls are in fact necessary, but as long as they exist, things are fine. Steam for instance has a great system, you can control what aspects of steam a kid has access to, multiplayer functionality, the store, online content, etc. a all that can be switched on or off. And for games you can use their general rating system (which is imperfect) or you can manually whitelist individual games. Finally, you can lock it all behind a simple pin code. Honestly, this is how all such platforms should work, it's manageable.

I don't think there's really any legitimate reason to complain about the systems steam currently has in place.

Roblox on the other hand... That's a shitshow. We don't touch Roblox. And it probably shouldn't be allowed to operate the way it does.

Australia is pathetic when it comes to freedom of speech. The media censorship is outrageous, meanwhile the far right has captured journalism

Oh fuck off. You can't build a foolproof solution and you know it, you're just asking for more power over our data and I'm so tired of it.

This is being said in a world where parents just give their kids tablets so they can keep quiet/busy. IMO the real danger is kids having "smart" tech at a young age. I almost think it's borderline child abuse to get them hooked on tech that early on.

I was going to argue but actually yeah that's about right. That's a real shame.

The article also says:

After graduating from university in the early 1990s

Yeah. Out of touch old person not getting how important the Internet is for young people and their happiness and social development. Can we get people like that out of positions of power finally please?

Does she even know what she is talking about? Steam isn't allowed to be used and registered by childs (note, "Subscriber" in this context means Steam user account): https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/

You may not become a Subscriber if you are under the age of 13. Steam is not intended for children under 13 and Valve will not knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 13. Additional age restrictions may apply in your country.

Oh it just occurred to me why Minecraft and Roblox aren't on Steam (besides the 30% price cut). They can't, because the games allow children to login and play, while this is not allowed in Steam.

In my age it was the TV. So not really much changed. We had this discussions decades ago. Edit: BTW I agree with you. And If I think about it, with internet its worse for obvious reasons, predators, uploading personal media, data collection in general, and for the algorithms of social media and sharing platforms. And available at anytime and any place, so you are hooked without oversight. Alright, a lot has changed!

Yeah but research shows that even TV isn’t great for young kids. Especially if it isn’t supervised and time limited.

These people are NOT talking about parental control, they are talking about taking control over what children have access to regardless of what specific parents think. If your child were less impulsive, as most children are, you wouldn't have to be that restrictive - some common sense rules and limits would probably suffice, and these things are important to both build trust and develop responsibility in most children.

But they want to do the same with children online as they did with public spaces starting decades ago - taking away the possibility of experiencing the world on their own terms in adequate environments for those children who are capable of it. They are already taking away their communication channels on a large scale in addition to deanonymizing their citizens on the internet, and now they are still pushing for more.

The parental controls on Steam are absolutely fine, and there's even the possibility of setting the account into offline mode or needing approval for every single login on the parents phone if they want to. Roblox... is a completely different can of worms, and i would never allow my child a roblox account, because normalizing what is going on there is a very bad idea.

Don't let yourself get fooled. They want to decide how much you can trust your children, regardless of how good a parent you are or how well behaved you child is.

I fully concur that the onus is on the parents first, not the platforms.

However I also think that there should be proper tools made available for parents to simplify managing what their kids can access.

No, not the Orwellian surveillance crap most politicians try to push. Those don't help.

But having a proper parental control system that has pre-made filters and is straightforward to use would get us ahead quite a lot.

About ten years ago I had to be the "parent" for my youngest brother on a number of platforms because our parents speak no English and parental controls were all... only in English.

Just last year I did the same for my nieces. And let me tell you... in ten years there was exactly zero progress made in parental control systems at Google, Microsoft and Apple. No ways to make it easier to control what your kids can access, no improvements in UX, it's still a hidden, tucked away, third or fourth thought menu.

Maybe start focusing on that instead of trying to use your incompetence to strongarm governments into handing you even more data? Just an idea.

Exactly. This is what has been told for decades since I was a child. But back then most households had only one TV, at most two. Today I think its just worse in every way.

Does Australia not have parents?

No, parents don’t parent anywhere anymore. It is the government’s job now.

Sadly I think you are right about the majority of people.

Personally I try my best but it's exhausting :/

Maybe you should try parenting???

Also: Little kids aren't even allowed to use Steam, check the TOS. If parents abandon their responsibilities to their own children, that's hardly Steam's fault.

For anyone that doesn't know, currently because of stuff like this, people in Australia can't even access their Steam games that they've already bought unless they have a credit card, which I've learned most people over there don't. Valve isn't allowing the third-party 'steal your data' options like face scan and government ID, so Australian folk without a CC are out of luck.

Australians, please fight back against these anti-privacy laws. If these are successful, they'll come to other countries.

You have my sympathies. My country is worse, I’m sure.

People will do anything these days to avoid actually parenting.

If people care so much about their children they should probably focus on actual problems that are threatening their entire futures…

I cared so much about my kids’ futures I didn’t even have any. It was the only way to ensure their happiness and safety.

Total tangent here... austrailians don't have credit cards? Tell me more, I am very curious.

Okay so... all the people who are saying "supervise your kid". Keep in mind that a lot of parents aren't tech savvy. So often they don't know the difference from a basic single player no online game and something where you interact with strangers. And the parental controls on every system are different. So it ends up being an all or nothing choice for these parents.

Add to that, kids these days socialize online a lot. My teen plays lots of teamwork games with her irl friends. And that is great for the development of social skills.

I happen to work from home, and in tech, so I am usually in the same room on a computer. Easy supervision. But other parents don't have it so easy.

I'm not an expert, I'm just being told this from an Australian. They do have credit cards, but it's not as much a necessity to do things as it is in North America. So, from what I'm told, a lot of adults don't have one.

Credit cards are mostly a US thing. Most other places you just use debit cards.

Credit cards are of course used worldwide but most people don't own one and those who do use it rarely, since why would you borrow money to pay for something unless it's an emergency or some big / long term thing (at which point an actual loan is probably better, so again CC not needed).

Ah fair enough then, let's instead have invasive ID checks on every single online thing so nobody can have privacy online.

At least in my corner of the world, debit cards can be used anywhere online that requires credit cards, but at least some banks disable it by default so you have to enable online payments. 15 -20 years ago it was different and you HAD to have a credit card to buy shit off Amazon or Steam so most kids couldn't get shit.

Keep in mind that a lot of parents aren’t tech savvy

This is a choice that they make. Just like they choose to have children, they could choose to educate themselves on how better to supervise them. But they don't want to, because it's easier to blame externalities.

It's fucking 2026. Not tech savvy? That's on them.

You are completely wrong.

Credit cards are very common here. Also, I don't have a credit card and I haven't lost access to any of my steam games.

I've played games like Wuthering Waves and VPN'd to America and the game has asked me to verify my age then I've disabled the VPN and started the game again and magically it's not now.

You do realize plenty of them were born and raised without the internet, right? There is a big difference between people raised with the internet and those not. Plus, parental controls are not even an after thought for must companies. They are a "we need something to claim we have parental controls". Most of them just plain suck. Then you have different controls for different games, and different devices... even the tech savvy struggle. Plus the controls often have easy workarounds.

Yeah. No. Not everyone has the ability to be tech savvy.
On top of that, the controls are very weak. I'm very tech savvy, and there are things I can't stop my kids from doing on their devices. Mainly because the device maker isn't incentivized to make it possible for the control software to stop those things.
It always sounds good on paper, but when you try to actually use it, you find out how bad it really is. Plus, each game has it's own set of controls, and then each device....