THE DAD THIS IS ALL SUPPOSEDLY FOR
On Monday the government gave Apple and Google three months to make sure phones in this country can detect and block nude images on children's devices. Scanning, built into the phone itself. Starmer announced it. Signal — the encrypted messaging people — responded with a statement calling it dystopian, and said the thing that's meant to protect children endangers everyone instead.
I'm the person this policy is for. The worried dad. The exact constituency every announcement like this invokes.
So let me be honest about what happened when I read the headline.
Relief. Actual relief, for about four seconds. Someone is finally doing something. My kids' phones are the thing I worry about most, and here was the state saying: we'll handle it.
Then the four seconds ended, and I started thinking about what "it" is.
A scanner, on the device, run by the same handful of companies whose algorithms I started this newsletter to worry about. The government decides what it looks for. Today, nudity. But the scope of a thing like this is whatever the people in charge say it is. And the people in charge change.
There's a quieter problem underneath it too. For a phone to know it belongs to a child, everyone has to prove who they are. That's the mechanism. Protect the kids, ID-check the country.
This is the convergence I keep going on about. The companies that built the attention machines my kids live inside are now being handed the job of policing them. Same companies. More access. Permanent infrastructure. Whatever you think of the intention, the scanner doesn't get uninstalled when the policy changes.
I read the coverage and the Signal statement with AI's help, by the way. Machine to understand the machine, as ever. I did notice that I was asking a chatbot to help me think about whether machines should be reading my children's photos. I've stopped pretending that's lost on me.
What I haven't found anywhere, in any of the coverage, is anyone asking parents what we'd actually trade for this. We get invoked constantly. Consulted never.
And I genuinely don't know where I land. Four seconds of relief is real information. So is everything that came after it.
So here's the question I'd ask you, since nobody official is asking either of us: if it were your choice alone — your kids, your call, nobody watching — would you switch the scanner on?
Reply and tell me. I read everything.
— Dad