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Comment by Bender | Hacker News Reader

A server header exists to say something is adult and could be used for user-generated content as well. [1] It just needs legislation and an afternoon from interns at assorted companies. It's not perfect, nothing is but could easily trigger existing parental controls and parental controls that could be added back into user agents. No third parties required. I think I've beat this horse into dust [2] so I should just hire kvetchers to politely remind congress at this point.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152074

[2] - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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I like the first part of the idea, which is the header. Heck, even enable it by default. As long as the tracking of the toggle isn't a thing its a perfect compromise. While we're at it, respecting do not track headers would also be nice.

This completely leaves it up to the families / parents to control and gives some level of compliance to make the effort worth while.

There may even be a way to generate enough noise with the request to prevent any forms of tracking. This sort of thing should really be isolated in that way to prevent potential abuses via data brokers by way of sale of the information

As long as the tracking of the toggle isn't a thing its a perfect compromise.

This concept does not involve any tracking if implemented as designed. The user agent detects the RTA header and triggers parental controls if enabled. Many sites already voluntarily self label. [1] Careful how far one drills down as these sites are NSFW and some may be malicious.

[1] - https://www.shodan.io/search?query=RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-R...

They tried this years ago with ICRA and others. Long gone, but it worked by the webmaster adding metadata to self classify a site. Browsers and other agents could then allow/deny after inspecting the tags.

https://sk.sagepub.com/ency/edvol/childmedia/chpt/internet-c...

I remember labeling all my sites with PICS ICRA using the header generator. For my SFW sites it was mostly straight forward. For my adult forum it was a pain in the ass. My forum members managed to come up with so many categories that the header at some point should have just said "ALL THE THINGS AND THINGS YOU DID NOT KNOW EXIST" hahaha... I can see why adoption was low. There were a couple of browsers that recognized ICRA PICS for a little while but there were no laws to make it stick.

That's why I am pleased with RTA. Just add one header, done. Most admins and developers could do that in their sleep.

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