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.
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.
We already outsource parenting to the government when we send our kids to public school. We send children to complete strangers to be educated because we don’t have time to do it ourselves.
Are you opposed to school too?
Nice attempt at reductio ad absurdum. Here, let me try, too:
Since we already outsourced all the parenting, I guess you think we should all proliferate like rabbits to further feed the machine. How’s that?
OK, now that we got that out of our respective systems, no I’m not opposed to school.
I think as a species we’ve moved well past the point where a single person could reasonably possess, let alone teach all the knowledge that might be relevant to any single person’s life.
I’d also argue that, while adjacent, education is not parenting. Someone can be a teacher to someone without being their parent. Literal well as figurative.
But educators definitely require parents’ help and support, otherwise teaching easily turns into an uphill battle against unwilling brats.
The point I was alluding to is, that I think it’s impossible to shield children from all the “harmful information” on the internet. Not without turning it into a totalitarian nightmare, and even then I’m not convinced you could fully prevent children occasionally setting “something bad”. But you’d surveil the entire population and criminalise perfectly harmless actions in the process.
Instead I think it’s the parents’ responsibility to prepare their children and contextualise the information they’ll doubtlessly come across. They can maybe delay the inevitable with parental control software, but that’s their responsibility and if they’re technologically inept that’s also their problem. Existing laws are perfectly sufficient, if not already overreaching.
I refuse to give up civil liberties because you’re afraid to talk to your kids about porn.
how will the parent do the parenting when the kid can do whatever on the phone given to them when the parent is not around?
parental control software is (supposed to be) what it says it on the tin: software that lets the parent to set up limitations on the device.
built in parental controls are supposed to be options, that the owner can opt into and out of it.