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Comment by txrx0000 | Hacker News Reader

I also have a proposal for lawmakers. It's simpler, and it will address the digital parenting problem from the root, and also solve a bunch of other societal problems in the process: use antitrust to force hardware vendors to ship their smartphones without an operating system. End the mobile OS cartel and let there be competition.

This digital parenting problem would have been solved long ago if hardware wasn't locked down to oblivion. Kids nowadays use phones and tablets for the most part, so there should be a bunch of toy forks of Android with child-friendly features builtin as a result of natural demand, and some might not even have a browser or app store. There should also be scam-proof OSes for the elderly. But those don't exist because the mobile operating system duopoly is forcing the entire population to use the same two OSes, stifling software competition that would normally respond to user demand for different feature sets.

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Your proposal doesn't even attempt to solve the problem these laws solve. If I'm a parent, how do I prevent my kid from telling some website that they are an adult? AB 1043 solves this by letting me set this on their OS account, which all other services will query.

AB 1043 doesn't solve anything. It just delegates parental responsibility to the tech companies - you're giving them your child's age and letting them decide what's good for the kid.

> If I'm a parent, how do I prevent my kid from telling some website that they are an adult?

You don't need to because all content filters and permissions can be implemented on the client-side at the OS and app level. Rather than every service taking your child's age and deciding what to filter, you decide what to filter based on your child's level of maturity. You'll have total control over what runs on the hardware. Think: user accounts and permissions, local firewalls and traffic inspection, executable permissions, app installation locks, stripped down browsers and apps, small local neural networks, bootloader locking with custom password, etc. The market will follow the gradient of user value and spawn a bunch of OSes with different feature sets, probably better than what I can come up with, and you pick the OS with features that suit your needs.

> you're giving them your child's age and letting them decide what's good for the kid.

No. It solves exactly the problem I described. Age-restricted services currently ask users for their age at signup. With AB 1043, it asks the OS, which was given the age at account creation time. Your solution doesn't do anything for this.

If you buy an Android device, you can already do everything you proposed, but that doesn't solve the problem that parents have. Parents want some way to hold services legally accountable for COPPA violations without all the hassle of 100% device supervision. The only way to do that is to require a standard that service providers and OSes can both implement. Just changing a few OSes with low usage that service providers don't know how to integrate with does nothing.

> No. It solves exactly the problem I described.

The problem you described is the wrong problem to solve. Not all parents want to hand over parental decision making to the corporation or the state. And even if you do, there's a better way to delegate that without building the instruments for top-down authoritarian governance. Someone else made a well thought out comment about this on one of the other replies, if you want to read it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262748

> If you buy an Android device, you can already do everything you proposed

That's just blatantly false. Most Android devices are incredibly locked down nowadays, they're approaching iPhone-level. There was a brief period in Android's infancy where we were close, but the market wasn't allowed to develop before they started adding anti-competitive barriers at every layer of the stack.

If you want to understand the full scale and scope of the problems we're facing, see this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49118578

> Not all parents want to hand over parental decision making to the corporation or the state.

That's not what the law solves at all. Android already solves for parental controls. The law solves for holding service providers accountable.

> That's just blatantly false

Clearly, you have never used Android. Your linked comment even gets the simple fact that Android is a multiuser OS wrong. You don't even have to fork Android. Your proposal can be implemented entirely in userspace. It doesn't solve the problem that these laws solve.

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