Comment by lern_too_spel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lern_too_spel | Hacker News Reader

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> 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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