A lot of parents sadly lack any kinds of skills to use those tools nor even know that they exist. I’m not inherently against the approach where user agent sends some rough age (allowed R-rating or something) to the website which can then block minors from accessing porn/violence/whatever. If it was just that, locally stored info if the user is minor or adult, it could be a pretty decent approach to even technically less inclined parents to give some limits on what their kids can do.
But as with nearly every ‘protect the kids’ thing, it’s a pretty damn slippery and steep slope. If adult verification requires something more than a local variable that’s the point when the whole system becomes a tool for surveillance instead of a helpful thing for parents/schools and all of these “solutions” worldwide seems to be going in that direction.
A lot of parents sadly lack any kinds of skills to use those tools nor even know that they exist.
As far as laws with potential to repress freedom of expression go, wouldn’t public government programs or campaigns to train & educate parents be a less compromising way to meet such needs without raising issues of liberty, privacy, coercion?
If they actually worked, sure. I’ve been a parent for nearly 20 years now and at least in here there’s always been some kind of programs, information campaingns, news articles, tools and pretty much everything you can imagine to help keeping your kids safe. You obviously don’t buy porn magazines for your teens and don’t show news from war zones to your young kids and keep eye on the movies/shows they watch, but somehow every precaution is lost when it comes to the internet. I don’t know if it’s lack of understanding in general (as in what you can find from the net) or if it’s just the easy way out since you don’t need to learn how to apply limits on devices, but somehow (at least in here, based on what I’ve seen/heard) it’s not taken as seriously as PG-ratings on physical media.
And in that a system-wide setting on devices which would include allowed PG-rating on HTTP-headers (or equivalent) might be a decent solution. Obviously parents still need to pay at least some attention on the devices their kids use, but that wouldn’t require setting up a pihole on your network which blocks tiktok. However, as I said, that’s helpful tool to the parents only as long as it’s just a field on a local user account for the device, not something you’d need online services to verify.
Technically that would be pretty easy to implement and even if it’s just an extension to HTTP headers that would cover nearly all of the use cases today. Sure, the kids interested in tech could bypass that pretty easily, but that applies to nearly all of the parental controls anyways. But all those benefits obviously vanish if the age setting needs verification from someone else than the parent and it’s not stored just locally in the device. Building systems for adults to verify their age in order to look some bare nipples is a colossally stupid idea, but I’d guess nearly all of us here on fediverse already understand that.
A lot of parents sadly lack any kinds of skills to use those tools nor even know that they exist. I’m not inherently against the approach where user agent sends some rough age (allowed R-rating or something) to the website which can then block minors from accessing porn/violence/whatever. If it was just that, locally stored info if the user is minor or adult, it could be a pretty decent approach to even technically less inclined parents to give some limits on what their kids can do.
But as with nearly every ‘protect the kids’ thing, it’s a pretty damn slippery and steep slope. If adult verification requires something more than a local variable that’s the point when the whole system becomes a tool for surveillance instead of a helpful thing for parents/schools and all of these “solutions” worldwide seems to be going in that direction.
As far as laws with potential to repress freedom of expression go, wouldn’t public government programs or campaigns to train & educate parents be a less compromising way to meet such needs without raising issues of liberty, privacy, coercion?
If they actually worked, sure. I’ve been a parent for nearly 20 years now and at least in here there’s always been some kind of programs, information campaingns, news articles, tools and pretty much everything you can imagine to help keeping your kids safe. You obviously don’t buy porn magazines for your teens and don’t show news from war zones to your young kids and keep eye on the movies/shows they watch, but somehow every precaution is lost when it comes to the internet. I don’t know if it’s lack of understanding in general (as in what you can find from the net) or if it’s just the easy way out since you don’t need to learn how to apply limits on devices, but somehow (at least in here, based on what I’ve seen/heard) it’s not taken as seriously as PG-ratings on physical media.
And in that a system-wide setting on devices which would include allowed PG-rating on HTTP-headers (or equivalent) might be a decent solution. Obviously parents still need to pay at least some attention on the devices their kids use, but that wouldn’t require setting up a pihole on your network which blocks tiktok. However, as I said, that’s helpful tool to the parents only as long as it’s just a field on a local user account for the device, not something you’d need online services to verify.
Technically that would be pretty easy to implement and even if it’s just an extension to HTTP headers that would cover nearly all of the use cases today. Sure, the kids interested in tech could bypass that pretty easily, but that applies to nearly all of the parental controls anyways. But all those benefits obviously vanish if the age setting needs verification from someone else than the parent and it’s not stored just locally in the device. Building systems for adults to verify their age in order to look some bare nipples is a colossally stupid idea, but I’d guess nearly all of us here on fediverse already understand that.