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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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?

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.

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