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Comment by throwaway87543 | Hacker News Reader

Authentication & Authorization is a OS feature. But instead of the OS collecting everyone's age, just give parents the ability to verify their child's phone is in child lockdown mode. Then the phone narc's to the website: "the user is under age". Not "the user was born on Feb 29 2001." We can rely on parenting to ensure a child doesn't have a non child mode phone. Enable parents, not control everyone.

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Colorado is trying to do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47097904

It's just terrifying to think of an internet that goes from open & usable, to requiring only approved government devices & systems. Within a very brief time.

You could call it something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_controls

This sounds like a very neat guideline. I'd like to see this fleshed out further, but not at the cost of freedom (ie locked bootloaders etc)

Oh I would absolutely love this.

It would prove that many, many parents are incapable of being the responsible adults they should be and will just cave to their kids tantrums about their phone being unlocked so they can watch tiktoks for (sometimes more than) 8 hours a day.

Everyone in the UK is now using a vpn for everything because of these "won't somebody please think of the children" smucks. Now let's see if they make good on their end and lock their child's phone...

OS vendors don't want to add this feature, though. That could be because they make their money from a percentage of IAPs and ads.

And when they are mandated, like in Brazil, we HN commenters hate that even more, because apparently in Brazil it's illegal to sell a phone without locked bootloader, or an OS that can run software from outside of an app store, because the user might install an OS or an app that doesn't comply with the child-lock law.

FOSS doesn't mean that you get a right to break the law. Just because software patents exists in a society, that doesn't mean that FOSS does not.

Well yes, they are actual real risks - a badly thought out law can literally make it illegal for a device to allow an adult to, say, unlock a device's bootloader to install open source software (EDIT: this example was in my comment before the OP edited theirs to add it there as well), because the device vendor can't guarantee that it will comply any more.

I don't think anybody is actually opposed to parental controls being mandated to ship in commercial operating systems, as long as it doesn't restrict the freedoms of adults to completely disable them or to install software that removes them or doesn't have them. The problem is when these features are forced on adults and restrict devices or computers 'just in case'.

IMHO a better approach would be two-layered tagging to indicate traffic from children.

Firstly traffic can be tagged by ISPs/cell phone companies, at the bill payer's behest (whose name and age has already been verified). Secondly, smartphone OSes can tag traffic at the behest of parental controls (which already exist).

The US also locking the bootloaders has been extremely extremely extremely saddening. Just remarkably shit turn of events.

It's a feature that has existed for years. And is built into every OS.

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