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Comment by tomth | Hacker News Reader

Age verification through the OS could make parental control much easier. Just set the age of your child on a given system with your own account, and apps and websites can signal what the minimum age is, and then the OS can decide to block it or not. Could be very privacy friendly compared to the current online methods, like what Discord did.

Of course, I'm not in favour of actual verification of the age attribute. And I've heard the slippery slope arguments. But if I were a parent this would be great.

Problem with setting up parental controls currently is that it takes some effort and knowledge of these tools, not every parent has that. I mean, even people who do, are usually chaotic in the digital domain, like for example, (re-)using very bad passwords. So why expect people to do better with parental controls?

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What age should I put for my daemon accounts?

Just 01-01-1970 :)

Just yesterday I finally got tired of all the browser security warnings and decided to buy a domain name and set up SSL in my local network. I spent like 10 minutes flummoxed by why my reverse proxy couldn't get a new cert from Let's Encrypt until I looked in the logs to see that Let's Encrypt refused because the account my reverse proxy had been using since I set it up had the email address as "admin@hostname" because this was all for my own personal use and my local reverse proxy doesn't need an actual email address, it just needed some value for some entry in some database.

This is my long-winded way of saying, "Who cares?" Give it whatever age you want. When people object to these type of initiatives for political reasons, they should state the political argument for why they are bad. But rebelling against them for practical technical reasons always seems a little silly to me and can end up being counterproductive when it shifts the conversation away from the central issue.

666 years. It's in the name :)

useradd —-system flag shouldn’t ask for one

56 years and 81 days. If you get this reference I tip my hat.

A reasonable implementation of this would make the age field optional, and only set it on interactive user accounts. An app that requests the age field and gets no response grants access. i.e. it's not set up to restrict access unless a user is explicitly set up as a child, in which case you're obligated to deny access to sensitive content.

Sure, as something parents opt into and where the local OS is the place where age and content rating are compared it could be a useful parenting tool. As something that lets big social media companies shift responsibility onto everyone else and opens the door for more user tracking and targeted advertising, it's not doing me or my kids any favors.

We could set some sort of standard, eg using the <meta> tags on web pages to set an age bracket? (or better, include actual fine grained content warnings like PEGI provides?) , now the parents can control what the kid sees; or even the kids themselves at times, which is probably much closer to what is desirable.

Legislating it in the OS takes power away from parental controls.

What you actually described, however, is websites and apps reporting information about their content to the OS. That would indeed give more power to parental controls. But what's being legislated is reporting age range to platforms.

Doesn't make much of a difference, the former is just slightly more privacy friendly than the latter. Which is preferable of course, but no big difference compared to reporting an age bracket to platforms.

I also don't see how it takes anything away, you could still set stricter policies with those tools, or more mild ones if you set the age to 18.

Sure, if it's not verified then parental controls could skip the feature entirely and still do whatever blocking they want as normal. This is a terrible argument that it doesn't take anything away from parental controls. It's literally pushing the decision away from parental controls onto the platforms and legislators, with an opinion that it should be based on specific buckets and content that have been legislated, and now parents and developers have to think about both the local blocking and remote blocking matrix.

Maybe I actually like the defaults for some age range blocking and want to make an exception. So, what, parental controls that would like to support this now must implement lying to each app or website individually?

If OS report age to platforms, the platform can target specific brackets like age[9-13] during christmas without the parent being the wiser. If the platform were required to provide age rating for their content, you (as the parent) may have a higher visibility on what they're pushing to a specific age group.

We have age rating for movies and games and the labels are very easy for parents to discern what to buy for their kids. It would be easier to set preferences on an accounts like steam to filter out games with nudity and brutality, than to let steam know that the user is a 14 year old child.

My guess is this is why Meta spent billions lobbying for age verification legislation. They don't want parents making decisions about which content to block or allow for their kids. The form they want this to take is that they get some buckets to optimize engagement within.

You probably shouldn’t have kids if you’re not prepared to look after them.

I would agree when it comes to the most basic real-world skills, but even then you cannot prohibit it. When it comes to digital skills, no, you cannot expect everyone to understand it. Even when it comes to GUI tools. It's just not realistic.

ban the selling or providing of general purpose computing to children. we can already do it with alcohol and cigarettes.

any parents caught providing such things to their children go on a register and have mandatory courses on parenting.

This could be an option with children under the age of 12. Maybe only let them use a computer or gaming console in the living room, or something like that.

that's exactly what I'm referring to, see my new post on this same sub thread.

Sounds like a great way to stunt development. Alcohol and cigarettes are unambiguously harmful to children. Computing is not so unambiguous, it has a lot of benefits. How many of us here would lead very different lives if we were treated that way?

did you miss the word "general"?

you can provide gimped versions. micro controllers, school laptops that don't go places they shouldn't go, gimmicky age checks on anything they can use outside of adult supervision.

Define 'gimped', microcontrollers are able to play NSFW games in Spanish/English for the Z-Machine interpreter. An ESP32 it's more than enough. A Game Boy it's more than enough, too. Ditto with 8/16 bit microcomputer out there. I can even run these games under FreeDOS. Good luck implementing accounts on that.

And the example it's I-0, (I-0.z5, Interstatal Zero) both in English and the faithfully Spanish translation done from the Spanish IF community. Both games are nearly 30 years old.

if a kid manages to play nsfw games on an esp32, he deserves to enjoy it.

A minor it's legally a kid even if some guy at 16 has nothing to do with an actual kid aged 10-11. The goverment shouldn't do what the ISPs should have been doing if 14yo get smartphones: locked down DNS' -no porn, no gambling, no violence, no AI-, and browser settings plus no permissions to install any software modulo a curated set for everyone at F-Droid.

With no smartphones until they hit 14-15 you don't need no stinky 1984 like laws; ISP would just comply with restricted DNS' per device and that's it. Ah, modern wireless networks such as the ones from town halls and the like? These should already have restricted DNS' for porn and the like.

Next, a PC it's a totally different device, you as a parent should be the accountable one and not the goverment. Your kids want to set a Minetest and some private server to play games and chat without groomers stalking them? teach them.

Enforcing computing stuff it's impossible, with libre software anything can be a general purpose computer. A PSP with a bluetooth keyboard, a PocketCHIP, any smartphone, even the mentioned Amiga FPGA computer, where can connect and use far more modern services than anything you would expect in 1994.

There's really a wide range between "not looking after kids" and "watching them every second." Unlike the physical world, digital items allow kids to transition from a totally safe space to an unsafe space within seconds.

For example, I can have my kid do whatever he wants in his room. I know what's in there and while he may have the occasional stupid idea, it's all fundamentally safe.

But even a tablet breaks that barrier. It's entirely safe for him to listen to music and stories and I want him to be able to do that unsupervised. But solid control over content on Spotify isn't a thing. The catalog contains things that I consider not appropriate for him. And they've lately been adding vidoes to the feed and while I know he tries hard to resist, they deliberately push videos further and further up. So we're back to "I can turn on the story for you and you can listen.", which is super stupid and could be much better if I had solid controls that I can trust.

Yes, I know I can talk to him about not watching the videos. How can an 8 year old compete with the combined effort of the Spotify team paid to make him watch videos? That's just not feasible.

If Spotify doesn't give you the controls you want... Don't use Spotify?

If my local park had a series of rotating knives and the council refused to do anything about it, I wouldn't let my kids go down there, supervised or not.

I agree parenting in the digital world is harder. You either learn how to do it to your standard or you don't allow the child to be part of that world if you are incapable or don't want to.

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