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Comment by josh_p | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the other commenter who replied to you. I don’t think this comes from actual parents. And the article suggests this latest push is from right-leaning groups whose goals are surveillance and censorship.

That said, I’m a father of 3. I’m a millennial and tech worker. I have the digital literacy to teach my kids about the internet and its horrors in a safe way. Not every parent does, so passing this off as a “parent better” issue doesn’t solve anything either.

I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”, but I’m open to similar ideas so parents can get some support without compromising on privacy.

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> I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”,

If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag. Lock it behind the most basic parental controls that can be protected and remotely monitored. There are some loopholes with kids downloading apps that allow custom web requests without the flag being sent, so there probably needs to be an app allowlist or special App Store category to match.

Carve out some legal exemptions for Linux distributions that no kids are using and leave it to the iOS, Android, Windows, and Macs of the world. Any parent who doesn’t like the idea doesn’t have to enable it on their kids’ devices.

> If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag.

Parental controls already exist. Lawmakers want to step in and parent peoples' kids for them by removing these freedoms from everyone.

just add a flag to the OS

What a fucking stupid, impossible, idea.

Like, explain to me how you think this could be done meaningfully other than some setting that can just be arbitrarily flipped without adding massive complexity.

How is it impossible? The OS already advertises which codecs and cyphers it accepts. Is adding an age flag a bridge too far?

And arbitrarily changed? Can a regular user arbitrarily change the super user password?

What complexity do you imagine here? Put it behind ACLs or some other permissions scheme. I could almost believe you’re being sarcastic or trolling.

Why would you exclude the obvious implementation from consideration? You missed one point though: you have to be superuser to change the flag.

This is literally already the law in California and Illinois.

It doesn't have to be sent anywhere, websites should send a flag when serving various types of content, so parental controls has the information it needs for filtering. Websites could still infer what's being filtered of course, but doing the decision on the client allows for much more granular/extensible categories of content, as well as allowlisting, time limits, etc. Some sites/proxies won't be marked properly, but 99% self-categorizing would help a lot, and it's not like making them do ID checks or attestation is easier than setting an HTTP header or something

Filtering on the app side is more flexible. A game that has some levels not suitable for children could when on a child's device still let them play most of the game.

I think the most useful flexibility is for parents to do more specific categorization, eg allow violence on netflix but not youtube, block some game that would be allowed, request access to something that wouldn't, set time limits and times of day, etc. It's easier to enforce this stuff on the client than try to send the relevant parts to an app or site, but yes there are times you want the latter too.

Several of the laws TFA complains about are literally what you just asked for. Like the California and Illinois laws. They are literally that.

No they are not. The Illinois law fails to include any of the exclusions I mentioned. None of them enforce the parental password controls or remote monitoring.

Please read my full comment before jumping to respond.

Why would the laws have to enforce that? That should be left to the implementer. All the law needs to do is require that there be a place for a parent to set the age.

Huh, you want more mandatory mass surveillance?

> I don’t think this comes from actual parents.

Why would you think that? Most of my friends are parents now and all of them are quite concerned about the effect of social media, phones, and technology more broadly.

Basically all of them are planning to delay exposing their kids to phones and screens for as long as possible.

I am also a concerned parent. And I acknowledged that I have the time and priledge to parent my kids through this.

The sentiment of "keep my kids safe on the internet" definitely comes from parents. Yes. We agree.

How we actually get there in a privacy-respecting way is the issue.

We know what good UX is already from history. Movies for example have an age rating system that clearly lists the ages the movie is suitable for. If you look underage, you get asked to provide ID.

Parents do not have the time or energy to configure modern parental controls which work more like tuning firewall rules.

The other part of the problem is you need collective action, if you ban your child from Facebook, they won’t get invited to parties anymore. If all children get banned, the parties will be arranged over sms or some other non social media. As it is today, banning your kids from social media is overly punishing since all the other kids are using it.

That was my point though.. showing ID at the door doesn’t translate well to the Social Media landscape.

If we actually cared about supporting children and parents as a country, parental controls and access, and making sure that systems were actually safe and protected privacy, would NOT be an afterthought.

> I don’t think this comes from actual parents.

The polling I have seen from Germany and Australia of a social media ban for children was quite in favor of it. Sentiment here on HN and on Reddit was the polar opposite. We are in a bubble.

Okay, that's probably true..

I'm not trying to call everyone else voting for these things dumb, but does the average person who doesn't think about this stuff for a living actually know what they're voting for?

The average person cares less than you think and also assumes the implementation will be better than it will actually be.

Sentiment here is the same mostly. It’s just guised in an inability to handle the obvious next step. E.g. when a mentally ill person uses ChatGPT and harms themselves, the question asked is “why did we let this person use ChatGPT?” There’s no way to do this allow/deny functionality without an extensive ID service. “Kids are using service A or service B and the social media companies aren’t doing anything about it!” Well, it’s not possible to offer something to a person and determine that they’re not a child except with some service that identifies child/adult.

The answer every time is “well then Google/Apple/Facebook/Shopify/mcMaster Carr shouldn’t exist as a business” and if I’m being honest that is not an achievable target so you’re going to arrive at the attested internet.

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