And instead of an age you could even make the indication about what is potentially objectionable so that parents can choose when to allow their kids to see what - and adults can also choose to avoid certain things.
I think this means any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset.
I'm in my mid 30's. When I was very young I remember my Dad semi-regularly having to email or even fax off permission slips to websites aimed at kids before they would create an account for me.
Then we certainly shouldn't be passing laws mandating age verification. If parents want to abdicate their responsibility over their children, it's not the role of government to enshrine that abdication into law and take over the duty of parenting from them.
If regulation is to be had, then it should take the form of mandating websites and services provide privacy preserving tools for parents to use, if they want to use them. If they don't, that's on them. Everyone else needn't suffer because a subset of the population has chosen to offload their responsibility into the government and web services.
> I think this means any solution which involves active parent participation is going to get shunned by a vocal subset.
I don't think that's a fair assessment personally, rather you've missed a key detail that things are significantly more complicated than they used to be, it's not just an 'effort' issue. There is no universal "user is age X" setting that applies to everything everywhere, rather everything has a different system and pretty much all of them are terrible in various different ways.
I'm very tech savvy and I still struggled just to set up a Microsoft/XBox account for my daughter so that we could play some computer games together. Access to all the different age rating settings is spread across something like three different apps and websites and in my experience they don't even all work consistently. That experience is also not dissimilar from the experience with other types of accounts. For people I know who are less tech savvy it honestly doesn't matter how much time they put into it, eventually they give up and turn off age ratings because something isn't work and even if there's a solution it would take them hours to figure out.
Point being, if the existing tools were much better I don't think we would be having this kind of conversation.
That, in the end, will hopefully kill these idiotic attempts at dystopia enhancement, because when people discover that “think of the children” makes their day to day life more difficult, it’ll lose support.
My parents when I was young ended up having to figure out how to use digital cameras, scanners, printers, fax machines and then print, sign and sometimes even post off a letter for me to access one website which I wanted, which could take hours of their time in a process that took literally weeks. This was in the early 2000s, when scanners and digital cameras weren't exactly user friendly. They had to do this sometimes multiple times a month. Every website was different, there was no universal permission slip. But they did it. Eventually, they too got bored and gave up, or maybe I just grew out of it.
Point being, the tools have always existed, and always felt inappropriate or convoluted, but my parents at least were happy to do it for their kids 20+ years ago. From what you're telling me, they're now a lot faster and easier to access and use.
Even if the tools were made to take only a few minutes to setup, there would still be a vocal set of parents unintentionally arguing that everyone should suffer with overbearing ID tools so they can spend less time supervising their kids internet usage.
No they're not, the systems that exist today often don't even work and there's no alternative of "just mail a letter to Microsoft and they'll sort it out for you".
"Faster" is also a frankly a silly point - it's not like your parents were waiting at the mailbox until the letter came in the mail, the important question is the amount of time actively spent dealing with these things.
My point is that - overall - clicking some buttons and waiting a few hours is far more accessible, faster, easier and less disruptive than what my parents had to do 20 years ago:
It required far, far more effort and thinking and action to find some physical, expensive, modern hardware, digitise signatures, and the post things off.
"Faster" is very relevant in a discussion about convenience and effort. The important point is how convenient it is for the child and the adult. Now, a child has to sit for an hour watching you fumble around on a screen. I had to wait for days and days whilst my parents fumbled around with cables and when to the post box and other stuff.
> the amount of time actively spent dealing with these things.
My parents used to have to spend more time actively dealing with me and my things whilst I was waiting for the post.
We're not going to agree here. You're a parent, complaining about how much time you have to spend supervising your kids. I sympathise for you, the modern world has a whole lot more expectations of your time which my parents didn't have. This is one of the many reasons me and my partner chose not to have kids, sorry.
> you’re handing the power to
(This includes giving the option for “everything is allowed” without any kind of verification. You bought it, you own it.)
It would be awesome.
One spot where it's a bit weird is for utility apps that don't have any "mature" content but that obviously isn't intended for kids, so e.g. your tax prep app gets rated as "Ages 4+".
It should indicate notable features that influence the rating, like PEGI includes "online content" "gambling" and so on