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