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Comment by deckiedan | Hacker News Reader

From reading the article, it sounds like an enforced standardisation? Like, asking for account age bracket and then having a standard API to ask for it would be easy, right? Just write it to a root owned `~/.age-bracket` for each user or something (obviously something better).

It's a feature many apps implement in all kinds of ways already, especially games and social media stuff, so this, in theory, just makes it easier and consistent?

I'm against leaking our kids ages, and all the privacy and other concerns as much as anyone, but are we just getting overly angry too quickly on this one?

I get that it's a slippery slope too.

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It passes responsibility and accountability from the large platforms to the open-source communities and to parents who are most likely tech illiterate.

Facebook, etc. can wash their hands when they "accidentally" serve gambling ads (or whatever) to children and say "well it's not our fault the parent has the laptop misconfigured"

It's classic blaming the victim.

I disagree. The parents are the ones who should be supervising. The work should not be pushed off to OSS devs or random website operators. Facebook is bad, but I'd rather deal with one Facebook than kill 1000 normal sites with bad legislation.

> The parents are the ones who should be supervising.

Ok. When Alice & Bob come home from school what steps should every parent take to supervise A&B's phone and device usage over the past 48 hours?

Internet history, of course - for all the browsers, including those hidden away? But what if the logs are wiped or the second BraveFoxChrome installation isn't obvious?

Must every parent have an IT degree?

What if the parents are very good plumbers and car mechanics, should they also be expert in software design and installation?

> What if the parents are very good plumbers and car mechanics, should they also be expert in software design and installation?

You know who else are not experts in software design and installation? Fossil politicians and slimy bureaucrats.

Name one public sector state or local website that isn't utter garbage and a nightmare to use. Go ahead I'll wait.

They need to get their sticky donut-eating fingers out of my personal computer.

I renew my tabs online a few times a year. Site is state wide and works great. Take like five minutes and it's super manageable. Seattle city light works well and has a solid outage map when there's bad weather.

capitol.wa.gov is really informative and easy to use and looks nice.

Is three examples enough? You only asked for one. But I figured a few extra would help you.

Gov.uk

This is a really weak argument. High-quality government websites exist, most notably the British gov.uk system. All this is beside the point - the current age verification proposals are wrong, and attempt to solve the wrong problem in ways that look very much as if they are primarily intended for surveillance rather than child protection.

'Child safe' internet access by default with a very low bar to let adults enable their devices to access the public internet is the solution. The UK's mobile providers already offer this by default - all you have to do is to call your network provider and ask for the restrictions to be turned off, and you have full internet access. Any legislation to create 'child safe' filtering should mandate that vendors provide ways for adults to turn the filtering off, easily, quickly and no questions asked - and that it should be viewed as the responsible moral default for adults to have full access to the world in order to be able to exercise their responsibilities as citizens, not some sort of option for degenerates. Whether you do this device side or network side is a technical detail.

The other sane way to do this - and what we should have done from the start, instead of providing kids with full access to the adult world by default - would be to have created 'child safe' devices to provide children with filtered access. Parents could then be in charge of whether they want their children to have that access and at what age. However, that boat has sailed.

The politicians and bureaucrats aren't generally the ones making the web sites.

Never mind the fact that Facebook, etc. has BILLIONS OF DOLLARS WORTH of software engineers, designers, psychologists making absolutely damn sure that little Alice & Bob keep their nice little eyes glued and their little thumbs scrolling.

If their eyes and thumbs are that little perhaps you as a parent shouldn’t buy them devices, but let them play outside.

Our family computer when I was a kid was in my parents bedroom. There was only one one. Kids should have dumb phones not supercomputers in their pocket connected to everyone everywhere all at once.

I had one in my bedroom but it didn't have the internet. I had a box of appropriate games on CDs.

The same steps you take to make sure they are not smoking in a back alley on the way home.

You sniff their clothing for evidence of a porn site or chatting with a predator?

You teach them the harm of smoking and online grooming. You teach them to not accept cigarettes or sexual advances from others. And you build a trusting relationship with them so in the unfortunate case they do mess up, they trust you enough that they tell you what's going on, instead of hiding abuse they suffered from others so their parents don't berate them for going unsupervised online.

Idealistic, I know, I know. But so is the idea that you can seal your kids in an airtight bubble and never risk any harm without the harm avoidance becoming harmful in itself. Or that the lawmakers in this country and elsewhere actually care about child safety at all, when they will not move a finger to prosecute those who hanged out with Epstein on his island.

That one is actually enforced by police, by general society that calls police when they see junkies. Limits on smoking and alcohol are enforced by sellers who cant sell to kids and regulators who punish sellers who do.

Parents are not expected to follow the kid home from school and watch it every second. Parents are expected to have general talk about drugs.

Oh yeah, and it is illegal to maket smoking to kids. Meanwhile, facebook spends billions on A/B testing increasingly sophisticated addiction builders ... and you expect the kids and parents to just be able to win over it with no support.

If the kid's old enough to be hiding their internet history from their parents, they're old enough to have some privacy.

and if they're just old enough to follow instructions from an older cousin, an online predator, or to hand over their phone to a candy waving dubious third party for a "roblox coin hack" ?

How did we get here from OS age reporting? I don't see how age reporting is going to stop any of those 3 things - or indeed any technical set of controls.

If the fear is kids communicating with people, I might suggest giving them a phone and an internet connection is a poor start whatever happens next. They're communication tools. They're going to use them to communicate.

If the kids are clever enough to have a second browser the parents don't know about, I'm pretty sure they'll find a way to bypass this. For example, who's stopping an older sibling giving remote desktop access to his browser?

It's the same as age limits on energy drinks, alcohol, tobacco etc. More of an inconvenience than a restriction if someone is determined enough.

We should focus on having parents teach their kids what they should and shouldn't be doing, instead of "blocking" them and pretending that solves the issue.

Inconvenience rather than a restriction is the point though. Less kids smoke because of the inconvenience, and the world doesn't have to become a panopticon like it would to get 100% enforcement.

There should be parental controls that disallows installing apps, so there is no hidden browsers. Google and apple has an entire walled garden infra setup that they are using for control and hoovering up all the user data, the same infra can be uses for this.

Winner winner, chicken dinner.

This, and more - device makers and those upstream of the parents need to make "child safe" phones .. and probably (uh, oh) make them that way by default so that tech savvy types can disengage restrictions (and have that restrictions lifted state glaringly obvious for non tech savvy parents).

The raison d'etre for my above framed question was to highlight that non tech parents can not be expected to IT-child-safe phones and then monitor risks w/out assistance from vendors.

That's basically what this law is, but it's not saying there has to be a wholly separate phone model, but it's saying every phone (or desktop or laptop or tablet or ...) must have a child safe mode.

You don't need to look at their internet history. You talk to your kids about safe behavior. Then you're somewhat around when they're using the computer/device (until you feel they're of an age where that's not needed). The very knowledge you might see their screen at any moment will moderate behavior.

And properly working parental controls don't let the kids install another browser without permission.

I bought my niece a Chromebook for a specific purpose (she needed a device to do vision therapy with). I installed FamilyLink on my phone.

In FamilyLink I went through each setting and put everything as restrictive as possible. She can't install apps. Only the vision therapy website is whitelisted. If she tries to go to a different website or install an app it gives her a prompt letting her ask an adult for permission.

You don't need to be a software engineer to do any of that, you just need some basic reading comprehension. Eventually when she's older I can make things more permissive.

Now that said: the FamilyLink software could be much better.

It seems to be mainly designed for kids on android phones, not chromeOS Chromebooks. None of the screen time monitoring features work. I can lock her Chromebook but I can't see how much time she spent on it or set time limits on apps. I can't put a time limit on the Chrome browser (or any default apps). And if there is a way (outside of adding the device to an organization like a school does w/ Google Admin/Workspace), the documentation is not great at saying so.

Why exactly are some of you guys advocating for platforms to have increased responsibility for verifying the age of their users? Why exactly do you want platforms to collect government IDs or contract with third party ID brokers? How is that an improvement over the user agent attesting to the age of the user?

It's liber-contrarianism, they hate when the government does stuff so they instinctively oppose it even though the opposite is worse.

Isn't that a good design though?

And it isn't blaming anyone, it's a design.

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