There has been a lot of swirl around various pieces of age verification legislation and how different platforms and operating system developers are responding. I believe strongly in privacy and that the responsibility for the online activities of children is that of the parents. That said, as a parent, I think we need better tools available, especially for those who are less technically inclined. Here are my ideas:
- A standard needs to be established that is open source and cross platform.
- It should run at the OS level.
- It should be controlled by someone with administrator access to the device / OS (a parent in the case of devices used by children).
- It should be completely optional for that administrator whether they want to turn it on or not.
- The only input should be birth year of the child whose account is being set up. No other personally identifiable info should be included.
- All relevant sites/apps/platforms such as social media and NSFW sites should be required to honor the age indicator.
It needs to be assumed that at some point, any kid who really wants to learn will find a way to circumvent any controls but parents do need better tools.
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Aren’t parental controls already in place on most mainstream things?
I’m not sure how much more accommodating for the less technically inclined it can get than settings > parental controls > enable.
afaik parental controls do not exist on degoogled android. windows has it with third party tools, linux does not have any
Plus it’s 2026 not the 90s. No more of this “teehee I’m a technologically illiterate cutie pie and I don’t want to make an oopsy on my computer settings.” People need to figure out how to use these already user friendly parental control settings/apps and stop putting the onus on everybody else and the govt to keep their kids away from bad stuff on the internet.
What is to be done about parents who do not give a shit about what their children are exposed to on the internet?
They’re not technologically illiterate. They’re neglectful shitheads.
Do we mandate adult controls on machines and punish the parents that don’t use them? Because that’s actually not all that different from age verification laws.
Child neglect is not a problem that can be solved in software.
Holding parents accountable for what they allow their children to be exposed to would, in fact, reduce the number of children being exposed to harmful things. The question is, do we focus on the punishment side or the prevention side? On the punishment side we find the parents that let their children watch idk ISIS gore videos and imprison them. On the prevention side we force parents to install parental control software, like mandating locks on gun safes if there are children in the home.
not imprison them, but maybe taking away or limiting child support. but that will 100% not work with the rich.
forcing the parents to install parental control software… that would be like, here are these approved options, and you like it or not you must use them despite their privacy policies.
instead commercial operating systems (windows, googlified android) could be required to have parental controls built in, and free software systems could apply for funding to implement it, or some other kind of collaboration.but this is not capitalistic so it wont happen.
You seem opposed to the idea of parents doing actual parenting.
But for that matter, apparently so do many parents. They’d rather outsource the issue to the government, the operating system, the operator of whatever platform the kids happen to be using, complete strangers, literally anyone but themselves.
Anything to avoid talking to their offspring about porn, violence, drugs or whatever else.
I think you described what Apple implemented for its Declared Age Range API. The API has one additional privacy protection, which is that the API only gives age bracket information rather than precise age.
100% for better tools for parents. I helped set up the Google parental control on the phone owned by my ex’s sister and it was so buggy with the app not even scaling properly on their mum’s iPhone 6S back then.
There are numerous options to choose from already existing… Yet, some should just consider that the recent “age verification” were initiated for another purpose than a general age verification process. Have you checked out the recent Persona source code exposed?
Regardless, some civilian approaches to be mentioned is how the verification is handled in Baltic countries, that is Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, for example:
Smart-ID is the easiest, safest and fastest way to authenticate yourself online, register in e-services and sign documents…
Smart-ID can be used to log in to e-services, for online banking and for signing documents.Source: https://www.smart-id.com/
-–
Smart-ID itself has no age restrictions for its users – but age limits have been set by identity providers and depend on the Smart-ID account type and authentication method chosen…
Creating a Smart-ID account for a minor requires a parent/legal guardian to authenticate their account…
Don’t just click “continue”: read the instructions on the screen carefully and double check that all the information you enter is correct, and the whole process will be easy and stress-free… The child cannot continue with their registration until we’ve got one parent approval…
For the API, for instance:
# Where can I find users date of birth?
Birth of date is encoded into personal identity code. Latvian new personal identity code format is exception though. Special birth of date field will be added to Smart-ID certificates in stages and only for Qualified accounts.
For convinience
smart-id-java-clientandsmart-id-php-clienthave special functiongetDateOfBirth… for that. For getting that info directly from certificate seegetDateOfBirthCertificateAttributeandgetDateOfBirthFromCertificateField.Similar to Latvia, the number of Estonia and Lithuania has the date of infinitely magnificent event as someone’s date of birth, too!
The ways in which such a system is implemented vary among countries, but in most cases citizens are issued an identification number upon reaching legal age, or when they are born…
In Estonia, a Personal Identification Code (Estonian: isikukood, abbreviated as IK) is formed on the basis of the sex and date of birth of a person…
In Lithuania the Personal Code (Lithuanian: asmens kodas) consists of 11 digits, and currently is in the form G YYMMDD NNN C, where G is gender & birth century, YYMMDD is the birthday, NNN is a serial number, C is a checksum digit…
/* ... */ C = lt_nin_checksum("3840915201");Therefore, there should be an option to verify the age without the personal identification code. And if not, just a personal number got within the age verification scope, transferred within secure government session channel, should be enough. The government, in turn, won’t share such information with untrusted services - access to the API.
Related: Age verification online (…can be done safely and privately. Here’s how…)
Your last link gives a 404 error :/
Thank you! Fixed!
It had a redundant characterin the URL path I accidentally added during the formatting.
Make 3 non-profit companies that provide verification but just always return true
we can barely get adoption of nsfw tagging/metadata…
that said, this is prolly somewhat already trivial by setting an os/global environment var. and just having that bubbled up to the browser/app level. theres already paths for this to be used, but again… adoption is far more difficult than the technology required.
