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Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

There’s no such thing as children’s devices. Everyone uses the same smartphones. Optional on device restrictions don’t matter as long as your peer group is on the platform, kids will not stop using it. People are not asking for biometric scanning, but I believe the vast majority would be OK with some sort of ID based authentication system. Now there are ways we can do that in a decentralized way where neither of the parties have total information and I fully advocate for that.

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Are you saying parents would choose not to block it, or children would get around it? Like you say people want to block it, but currently it's very hard while allowing access to Google and other resources, or it's easy to get around. Why does this require server verification?

For example, all devices could require your ZKP ID attestation to be usable unfiltered. Then the relevant apps/sites would be equally inaccessible to children. And then you remove the ZKP ID attestation because the device owner (parent, school, etc) already knows when the user is a child.

The on the ground reality is that now most social interactions at schools and the content for those interactions happen on social media and apps/private chat rooms. If you don’t have a smartphone or not using those platforms, you’re just left out. There’s going to be serious social cohesion issues for the kids that don’t have access to them. It’s also going to cause continuous pressure throughout your schooling years to circumvent whatever restrictions your parents are putting on and to be in constant conflict with them because of that pressure. That’s life altering stuff.

ZKP ID would work but that’s essentially deanonymization because you have to provide your ID to someone though no one has total information. Also just checking for its absence doesn’t work because that’s opt in and less than 5% of parents would do it. Every individual, irrespective of age would have to have a valid one.

I know, but I think the reality would change if it took 10 seconds to reliably block everything. It would also be the default if you enter an age below 16 at setup (tap a second device or scan a distinct face id to act as guardian). It should also be enforced in schools (and made possible to enforce by schools) as part of their filtering of explicit/harmful content, maybe they can even deploy their own policies eg blocking most phone use during school hours.

I think an equivalent thing would be to look at adoption of V-chips and how few parents turned the feature on. This version of parental control was a failure> I don't expect other versions to do a better job.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-chip

This would be for harmful websites like ones that show pictures of ICE shooting people, Thai citizens making fun of the King, or Chinese folks posting pictures of the tank person, for people under the impressionable young age of 999 years old, right?

We have to protect our citizens, after all.

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