Not sure if you have children, but this is exactly what a healthy government regulatory framework looks like.
You might as well have said that you need to be a police officer to make sure your child isn't hit by a drunk driver, kidnapped by creeps or attacked by someone on the street. Children are under the care of parents or guardians for a reason. It's not to fist fight criminals or design their own security system.
With tech, we've largely abdicated that, placing the entire burden on parents to defend against industrial-scale manipulation.
Expecting individual parents to successfully counter industrial-scale behavioral engineering is a systems failure, not a parenting failure.
Surely, HN of all places recognizes that the EU fines Meta/MS any time they have a shortfall in their budget.
I'm trying to imagine how you envision regulation without going after the biggest individual apps that enable child financial fraud & sexual grooming.
Am I supposed to be upset at this?
The tools currently exist to "protect" children in game. Abdicating your responsibility as a parent is not a problem for the state to solve.
It says that the parental settings (when enabled!) are just letting children do whatever they want by default:
- buying overpriced objects - chat without any restriction online - play without interruption for long time
I think the first one is probably the most poignant: piping children into disguised gambling addiction by default seems like a major fault. Borderline illegal, if you ask me.
It looks a lot like a phony feature "let's add a parental control, it will make people feel like we're trustworthy and bring back more revenue. And please don't disable ingame purchases by default, this is our cash cow".
You seem to be forgetting a crucial part of this. The parent. If a parent is buying their child a gambling game then that's on them. Not on the government to force everyone to submit their IDs and face scans to play a game for adults.
Parental controls are not a phony feature at all. That's like saying accessibility options are phony features. It's an option for people who need it. Just because it isn't default in every scenario doesn't mean it's disingenuous.
Which government's way of doing things would you suggest is "healthy"?
Hopefully you're not serious saying the US [appears to be healthy]?