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.
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.