Maybe it should just be an HTTP header. Shift the responsibility for enforcing age restrictions to the client side; anything else is likely to be highly authoritarian and/or a massive privacy violation.
It’s obviously parents leaving their children out in the cold if a 10 year old is given unrestricted access to apps and the internet.
There are abundant and powerful options to track, monitor, and censor content that your children are exposed to on their devices, assuming a parent chooses to provide their children access to such a device.
Asking every single service everywhere to somehow gatekeep when the client-side can do it simply and easily is such a bizarre approach to solving the problem that I can only see it as an obvious and bold-fisted attempt to clamp down on anonymous speech, which is entirely essential for a functional democracy.
If you don't want your kids to view such content, the only realistic solution is to not give them internet access. Supply them with a library of books, DVDs, etc. of your choice. The only way to manage the content your child sees, is to manage the content your child has access to.
> One wrinkle is the goddamn schools sending home devices I can't administer. Hate, hate, hate that.
This makes things harder, but one option to not give them your wifi password so that these electronics can't be used. If the child needs to use these electronics to complete classwork, then complaining to the school that they are supplying kids with devices that they use to watch porn will probably elicit a strong response.
1. https://www.zdnet.com/article/teen-cracks-au84-million-porn-...
> This makes things harder, but one option to not give them your wifi password so that these electronics can't be used. If the child needs to use these electronics to complete classwork, then complaining to the school that they are supplying kids with devices that they use to watch porn will probably elicit a strong response.
Yeah, they do need them to do homework and check assignments and shit at home. Schools have made things like that more complicated and computer-dependent in the name of progress. Another way this whole computerize-everything craze has been a step back, I suppose.
Overall I'm not sure landing at "literally be someone with college training and work experience in network security and still find all this a needlessly-complex pain in the ass" is going to be where people end up wanting the state of things to settle. Here I am running an extra router on my side of my ISP's because Google's router doesn't give you MAC-level time-bounded blocking, which is pretty much what you need with school devices. And it's less porn than mindless not-actually-educational faux-edutainment web games that the school's introduced them to, for god knows what reason. I'd rather they be in the Switch than playing that crap.
... except maybe other parents they actually won't care how hard this is, since they mostly seem to have given up. Most parents seem to be giving their 3rd graders smartphones anyway. Then act like I'm the weirdo when I suggest maybe letting kids have such phones and carry them at school is batshit crazy, even in high school. Though not, I've noticed, at the not-quite-fancy private school we have some affiliation with, where smartphone ownership among even 6th-graders probably doesn't even hit 20%, way under local public schools (I have insight into several of those, mostly the middling-nice suburban sort)—I think we may be looking at a whole new kind of "digital divide" in the coming generations, and it's the ones who didn't have unlimited access to the Internet at a single-digit age that'll have the advantage. That certainly seems to be what the Fussellian upper-middle is favoring: later, more-limited access to electronics and the Internet. IDK if the climate's similar at actually-fancy private schools and among those parents, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is, and maybe even more pronounced. Meanwhile at the public schools "your family must be poor" if you don't have a smartphone by the time you hit middle school. LOL.
I think the bigger distinction is that I had a desktop PC not a smartphone. Parents can much more easily regulate computer use with the former, and withhold access if their kid isn't getting good grades. I think desktop PC use also lends itself to hacking and promoting exploration of technology. Modding and cheating in games is how I got into tech. What I'd do is give my kid a desktop and a USB drive with Gentoo and let them do whatever they want - I'm mostly joking, but only mostly.
And yeah, giving kids smartphones for use at schools seems extremely bone-headed. When I was in school, teachers were all about keeping phones out of the classroom not brining them in.
I'm not even necessarily saying the government should step in with heavy-handed regulation, but "parents should just manage it and leave the rest of us alone" gets less reasonable with each passing day.
So Safari knows that a user is under 13 (due to information entered at sign up by guardians) and will block the user from creating an account if a page has the appropriate HTTP header. Or iOS could do the same for app signups.
1. Sites have no reliable way to determine a user's age without massive privacy violations. (E.g. To access this site, upload a copy of your driver's license.)
2. Making the government the final authority on who is allowed to access the adult internet would enable way too much authoritarian abuse. (E.g. Sorry citizen, you have been deemed a dissident, and will therefore now be treated like a child by every website you visit.)
The solution to 1 is to handle the age verification part on the client side, so sites don't need to know anything about the user except whether they're old enough to access the content in question. And the solution for 2 is for parents to enforce access at the household level rather than governments doing it at the national level. (E.g. Don't let your kids use devices/software that lies to sites about their age, unless you're there to supervise.)
The exact details of how that gets implemented at the protocol level aren't as important as the overall principle. (Though I have a few ideas.)