The EFF's first article objecting to these features objected to the parental control on the grounds that if, say, I send your 12 or under kid a sex photo and your kid elects to continue after being warned the image might be harmful, and then elects to still continue after receiving a warning that if they do so their parent will be notified and see the image too, it is violating my privacy because I did not consent for the parents to see the sex pictures I'm sending to their kid.
Now their objection seems to be that if I'm, say, a 12 or under gay kid who is not out to my parents, receive a sex image on my phone that might reveal I'm gay, and I elect to view that image after being explicitly told my parents will see it too and confirming that I still want to view it, I might get outed to my parents.
Note that in both these scenarios the child knows their phone has parental controls enabled, has to go through two full screen dialogs that try to discourage them from viewing the image to view it, both of those have rejecting the photo as the highlighted option, and the second explicitly reminds them that if they view the photo their parents will be notified and shown a blurred version of the photo. And note that if they choose to reject the photo rather than view it, there is no parental notification.
For years, privacy advocates (including the EFF) have said when governments wanted to legislate controls server side or at the ISP level to provide a safer net environment for young children that the right approach is to give parents the tools to ensure a safe net environment for their children.
So now we are getting a parental control that goes out of its way to not notify parents or share a blurred photo with them unless the child explicitly chooses to view it knowing that this will happen--and they are objecting to that.
After this it is hard to imagine any parental control system that the EFF would approve of and that is actually even remotely effective. It makes them look like an organization that is just going to raise knee jerk reactions to every proposed solution, nor matter how reasonable.
When an organization raises objections to every attempt to solve real problems at some point policy makers stop caring what they have to say, and the EFF has either reached that point or is real close to it. They need to start suggesting alternate solutions to those problems if they want people that matter to listen to them.
This is rapidly becoming a topic not worth reading more about due to the misinformation and shilling from all sides.
I’m still a fan of the ACLU, even with their spotty record on gay rights, but it might just be a matter of time.
On top of that, at some point they must have asked if it was okay to contact me, and I must have inadvertently said yes, and now I get regular text messages from random people across the country asking if I will help out. About half the time it's for something in a state (like Georgia during the election) which is several thousand miles from where I live. No amount of begging has gotten this flow of unsolicited text messages to stop.
"Regardless of popular sanction, war is mass murder. Conscription is slavery, and taxation is robbery. The libertarian in short, is almost completely the child in the fable, pointing out insistently that the emperor has no clothes. Throughout the ages, the emperor has had a series of psuedo-clothes provided for him by the nation's intellectual caste. In past centuries, the intellectuals informed the public that the state or it's rulers were divine. Or at least, clothed in divine authority and therefore what might look to the naive and untutored eye as despotism, mass murder, and theft on a grand scale, was only the divine working it's benign and mysterious ways in the body politic. —Murray Rothbard, For a New Liberty"