Kids can’t buy their own phone. So parents can always enforce stuff at a hardware level if they set it up properly. It would be much better to just mandate that phones set up with a kid profile cannot access social media.
Addiction is the worst part and that is only going to happen on your own device.
> This assumes that it will actually solve the problem anyway
I wouldn't expect any policy to _solve_ a problem in such a way that the problem completely disappears from the world, much like theft being illegal doesn't eliminate theft, but it sure distinctiveness it for a lot of people.
Even the big commercial providers that are advertising all over YouTube are constantly changing IP space so they can keep their customers able to pop into another Geo region and still get Netflix.
Source: I was a kid once, we had no cell phones. Porn on 5.25" floppies was a thing.
I haven't found a parental control feature that works: we've tried several, but, generally, nothing survives the 'Hey, I'll just factory reset the device and start with a clean out-of-box-experience' bypass. Kids can figure this stuff out.
Even when we thought that things were under control, kids can easily procure new devices. Many families don't dispose of their old phones; it's not too hard for kids to find an older model that's been sitting around collecting dust, bring it to the schoolyard, and trade it like a baseball card.
I wish I had a good answer, and, distasteful as the age-verification might be, I'm open to such draconian measures at this point. If you say there are better ways to enforce this, I'd honestly love to hear the specifics.
People can bypass these restrictions with video game character creation tools, with generative AI, with a VPN (something that's very hard to ban in practice because corporations rely on them, and of which some are free), with copy-pasting random ID photos from the internet, with borrowing a parent's or teacher's or other adult's ID, with using a website scraping alternative (some of which can be self-hosted, or hosted by one child for many others) instead of the website itself, and so on. Heck, they can use websites hosted in Russia (or other countries), like a lot of pirates do.
And whatever the easy bypass method ends up being, they'll all end up knowing it, because they go to school and talk to each other, and because they'll always have at least some access to some parts of the internet no matter what.
Meanwhile, these age verifications laws are labeling all the children (who don't bypass it) as children, and that information WILL be leaked, inevitably, as it already has been (from Discord, for example - a service that shamelessly retains and processes every message it hosts, even after the user 'deletes' it).
When ID info is leaked, it leaks the child's age, their real name, and (often) their real address, their phone number, and their appearance. A surprising amount of information might be deducible from any selfie or video that was required. And in combination with an app's other data (or other data about them that has been included in databases and/or leaked and/or shared on the internet previously and which can be matched to them based on email or phone number or username or browser cookies or IP address or etc), it can leak their interests, hobbies, hopes and fears (discussed with friends), favorite hangout spots, the name and location of the school they go to, their regular routines or travel schedules, etc - anything at all that they might have discussed via the app, or whatever might be concluded just by their proximity to their friends (e.g. maybe they don't directly know that a kid lives in X location or plays Y video game, but if every day they talk to a bunch of other kids who definitely live in X location and play Y video game, then they probably live in X location and play Y video game too).
When all that data is leaked, all that data is now available to predators. And it's very, very hard to remove it from the internet after it's out there.
That data, even just from a single leak, could make it so easy for someone to target a specific child, contact them, tailor their lies to seem as trustworthy and likable to the child as possible, anonymously harass them online, threaten them, stalk them, or attempt to persuade them that yes, he does know their parents, and they definitely sent him to pick them up from school.
To me, all these laws seem realistically likely to do is unintentionally but significantly endanger the children they claim to protect. I don't see how it can be anything but a devil's bargain, even if we only "think of the children" and disregard other concerns.
At the least, it should have been proven to be more effective than regular parental controls before even being considered as an option, but so far, it doesn't seem to be so at all. And if there's little to no additional benefit, or we're not sure if there's a benefit or not, or if it's shown to be less effective, then why ever choose it over the regular parental controls that don't carry this huge additional risk?
As to enforcing age limits otherwise, well. I confess I don't think there is any way children won't just find a way around. I think the best defense is just educating children about how to navigate the internet and its potential threats, making sure the children don't see their parents as distrusting of them or oppositional (so that they feel comfortable enough to go to their parents for help or reassurance if there's a problem, instead of hiding the problem because they don't want to be yelled at for being on the internet or such-and-such website at all), and - an element I think a lot of parents miss - making sure they have a lot of appealing options for things to do or ways to socialize outside of the internet. If you occupy their time by indulging their non-internet-focused hobbies and interests (and maybe engaging in them with them, to spend time with them), or letting them visit friends in person, then that's time they're not on the internet and likely don't even want to be. I think that this is the option that best sets up the kid to continue having a healthy relationship with the internet after they turn 18 and are even more out of your control.
That said, as far as device parental controls go: instead of focusing on phone-level controls, I recommend using your router's network-level parental controls, as well as the phone line controls for whatever company you get your data form (if they have a regular smartphone, as opposed to a more limited one, which do exist as an option). For your own wifi network, you can even set it up to use a whitelist of devices so that your kid can't even connect to it from a non-approved device. That doesn't stop them from potentially still sometimes accessing the internet using a friend's phone, but it'd cut down on how the amount time they have that access, and do so more effectively than government age restrictions. And in any case, you also can't always stop them from looking at a dirty magazine that they find at a friend's house, or from reading a hateful tract that someone hands them on the sidewalk, or from watching a terrible channel broadcast on a TV in a diner. But you can potentially influence how they handle it when they encounter these kinds of things.
Fuck you and and fuck your unwillingness to parent your god-damned kids
And you are an irresponsible parent for allowing them to be
The person selling the age gated item needs to take lawful measures to ensure they arent selling it to a minor. Their parents have nothing to do with it.
Your solution would be that if a 14 year old walks into a liquor store and doesnt have a note from their parents saying that they arent allowed to drink alcohol, then the store should be able to sell it to them.
Again - apple’s on device verification is a good idea for this. Apple just sends a ‘yes this is an adult’ message to reddit for example and now I can again participate in chrome up discussions.
it's the old 80s/90s bead curtain separating the adult movies area from the rest of the video store. it keeps kids reasonably separated, and leans on parents making their kids mind. I think that's a reasonable target.
it would work without forcing every internet user that wants to use a given service from having to submit government identification, go through interviews, or sign up to massive centralized identification systems that will inevitably track every movement people make online.
if history is any indicator, those things will lead to breaches and abuse, and people's privacy will be violated.
if there's a legally mandated way for parents to stop their kids from peeking through the internet's bead curtain, that should be sufficient for most purposes.
if the argument is that bad or foreign websites might not implement it, it's not wrong, but that same problem exists with the mass-surveillance methods as well.
if you keep going down the path of forcing everything, eventually you end up with a national firewall, vpns are illegal, anything that can provide anonymity or pseudo-anonymity online is illegal, no one has privacy, and busybodies will spend all their time hunting folks for liking things they don't want them to like when the inevitable breaches come.
to your last point, sure, a 14 year old shouldn't be able to just wonder into a liquor store, but a 40 year old should.
This is literally what is being written into California law. The OS will have an "age flag" that is configured at device setup that passed to other apps. The law explicitly was written such that it wouldn't need identity verification, but that isn't stopping scaremongers claiming it as such.
If it’s a kids device, then it should just block social media as required by the law. I agree that right now it’s difficult to set up - but this is a choice from Apple and Google. Just mandate sensible defaults.
A hardware block is much more effective than anything else that can be faked.
Just have the phone ask ‘is this a phone for a child’ and if you select ‘yes’ then it’s done.
That would easily be enforceable by making a "kid mode" enabled and locked down by a parent with a password mandatory on devices. Then you could have something like this:
Adult-Content: true
Age-Threshold: 18
eMediaMark is now Internet Content Rating the stuff I was remembering can be seen here: https://icr.chit.eu/
You can just take that, it's been there for decades.
Kids have their own account on the computer.
Make it the law that if a computer account is set up as a kids account it must send some kind of not-adult header with all requests. Enforce that in the OS so it can’t be messed with.
Leave non-kid accounts alone.
Make it the default thing that happens if you set it up as a kids account so anyone can do it.
Other parents are the problem, not technical setups.
If parents can't take care of their kids they clearly should be taken away