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Comment by adverbly | Hacker News Reader

Interesting idea... Opt in to opting out of adult content... Some potential issues:

1. Might be hard to enforce the safe content header... They have a hard enough time with copyright content, and there's a much larger financial incentive in that case.

2. Need to agree on what is safe and what isn't. Bit of a can of worms there...

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You're right. Safe content header is a relatively weak solution. Strongest solution is either Microsoft or Apple stepping up to develop a child designed device from the ground up. It would have access to a limited walled garden of the Internet. The device itself is marketed specifically to children and has no advertising allowed on it. It also incorporates health guidelines and screen time limits, etc. that cannot be changed by the device owner or user, only by Apple/Microsoft. It is essentially a fascist phone. Admittedly, this would make an adult, unlocked smart phone a hot item on the youth black market, but hopefully most kids will be too lazy to save up the money needed to buy a black market unlocked phone before they're ready to watch porn and be inundated with endless advertising and doomscrolls.

Neither MS nor Apple will want to spend lot of money for designing devices where they cannot even show ads.

I agree with the former but I definitely wonder about the latter.

If anyone can do a secure, child-safe device that’s so expensive they don’t need to show ads to be profitable, it’s them.

> so expensive they don’t need to show ads to be profitable

Yes, but there is no company that feels they are profitable enough so they still shows ads. Apple shows ads and makes decent profits from it, they are just a massive company like all the others.

> Might be hard to enforce the safe content header...

You don't need to enforce it. Sites without this header will not be accessible from a browser when "safe content" setting is active.

> Need to agree on what is safe and what isn't

There are ratings for games and movies, let's consider "safe content" to be a content which a 12-year old can watch.

And when sites outside of the jurisdictions that can take legal action put "safe-content: very yes" on whatever non-safe content?

Let there be an government-assigned organization that verifies website owner, content and issues a cryptographic signature proving that the site has been verified. The browser shall not open any page without the signature.

This is what I mean by enforcement though. It is going to be hard to enforce for that government assisted organization. They either allow everyone who wants to set the header to do it, in which case they need to spend a lot on policing, or they need to actually have someone review. Either case, it is a huge undertaking with a lot of staff and regulations and decisions to be made about how to handle gray areas. Additionally, things can change over time and sites kind of evolve . You need to decide what would trigger a new review.

> There are ratings for games and movies, let's consider "safe content" to be a content which a 12-year old can watch.

The existing ratings are terrible, though, and as a parent I think they allow things that I very much object to my children seeing, and prohibit things that I don't.

Having imperfect restrictions for children is better than having none.

That's a bit of a false dichotomy. The choice doesn't have to be between blanket restrictions that are bad or no restrictions at all. There's also the option of giving some sort of mechanism to allow parents to set the restrictions they consider appropriate.

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