Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

What is your objection to the California law?

A summary for those not familiar with it:

• Operating systems on devices whose primary user is a child must provide a way for the parent to provide age bracket information about the child.

• They must also provide an API that apps and app stores can use to find out that age range if they need to have limits on what children can do with them.

• They amended it to not apply to most open source operating systems.

Note that there is no actual age verification. It just uses what the parents put in. It is really just requiring each OS to have a standardized parental control system.

View on HN

Among many other things, privacy. If you know an age range that's more information about the user than you should have, and you can use it for marketing. And if you can ask for an age range, then in practice you know a birthday; just keep asking until the range changes and record when you saw it change.

It's also the wrong way around: apps shouldn't ask for an age range, apps should provide one and the OS should do the checking.

I also object to it because it's a foot in the door for demanding that websites and apps care about that age range.

And most importantly, devices already provide parental controls in practice, and this law doesn't make those any better, it just unnecessarily cements one aspect of them into law. You can, already, on many devices, say "don't allow installing apps without permission", or "don't allow installing apps except those with this rating".

The only age range you get for adults is 18+, I think. For children, I don't think we should let companies retain that data.

> it's a foot in the door for demanding that websites and apps care about that age range.

This has been the case for literally decades. Social media sites aren't (technically) supposed to allow users under 13, and porn sites have obviously had this concern since forever.

This law does in fact make parental controls better by forcing the social media companies to change how they present content to minors.

I don't totally disagree that the impetus should be on the social media companies instead of the OS but i also genuinely don't see a problem with a voluntary adult/minor flag with a consistent API either

Social sites aren't supposed to knowingly allow users under 13, but they're not required to proactively exclude them either, nor should they be.

And addictive feeds are a problem for everyone, of any age.

Why shouldn't they have to exclude them? Cigarettes and alcohol are addictive for everyone but we require vendors to proactively exclude minors and only minors.

I mean look, up to me, sure, ban Facebook entirely or whatever, but i genuinely don't get why they shouldn't be required to exclude kids if they're gonna exist?

A headless server operating system does not need those steps. It does not need the bloat of prepping an API to communicate with websites.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com