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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

This could have been an http header. It's hard to identify people, but blocking child-locked devices should be easy, since the devices can be built to cooperate.

Then it's up to parents to give their kids child-locked devices and for stores to not sell unlocked devices to kids.

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There is just such a HTTP header, for adult sites. It's not granular enough to set individual age ratings, just to mark a page as 18+.

<https://www.rtalabel.org/page.php?content=howtofaq>

Is that the "don't put my website into Google Safe search because it's porn" header?

Maybe we need a "it's not for kids but it's not porn either" header.

People keep saying it’s the parents responsibility to keep their kids safe, and don’t give them the tools! This is such an obvious one. I should be able to lock down a laptop for a child, and then have the browser limit websites to those that are actually child safe. I don’t care if a government agency is the one issuing “child safety certs”. This gets around the whole “identify everyone no matter what” thing, and it means that parents don’t have to run an entire IT department level of security infrastructure to keep their kids safe online.

There's a reason why nobody is giving the parents those tools.

And it's the same reason why everybody keeps pushing the stupidier, most obnoxious and invasive tools to "protect the children".

my kids are not teenagers yet, what am I missing? the iPad I let them use has child safety enabled and it seems to do exactly what the comment above you is suggesting.

Apple does parental controls right. The easy path is parental controls.

Companies like epic and Microsoft dont. The easy path is just a default install

I suspect this is by design.

What you are missing is that it's not enough for a fraction of devices to have parental control.

If you want kids to not access social networks, you need to have most of them out. If only a minority is out, they will just be outcast.

That said, "everybody must do that thing that Apple does" may be a very good example of good regulation. IDK what Apple does, though.

> If only a minority is out, they will just be outcast.

My kids do not have a social media presence, we have parental controls set on their devices, and the router only lets them online for a small window of the day. They still manage to communicate with friends via email, shared Google docs, phone calls, and actually meeting up. (Remember when people would agree to meet at a particular time and place, and then just show up with no further discussion? It still works.)

I think they'll be fine.

Wait till the school, wife, neighbors, and friends, all undermine that.

Child-locked devices can already whitelist/blacklist sites and apps. The issue is not capability.

And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.

I wish we would just pull the plug on ad-based social media altogether. The incentives add up to destroying society.

"parents will always be shitty"

Maybe cut nontechnicals a little slack? Their adversaries have invested literally billions of dollars in R&D.

This isn't a question of technicality....

Ok, what is your stack? Which MDM did you put on your tween's devices? What about the 15 year old who really wants Graphene OS? Do they VPN back to your home network to ensure your DNS and IP block based filtering applies to their mobile usage? Are you caching the teachers' recommended YouTube videos to Plex from the YTDL container or just monitoring their watch list stats of brain rot shorts?

He’s saying that parents will always allow their kids to see, think, learn, and say things that he believes should be off limits, with government stepping in to decide that.

I mean I think we can all broadly agree that showing snuff and hardcore porn to 11 yr olds is objectively bad. There is a line, we just might not agree on exactly where it should be placed.

Are you saying that most parents show this stuff to their kids?

> And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.

This is what I was referencing. Your reply is a non sequitur here.

I'm saying most parents are perfectly powerless to prevent their children from seeing shit like that on the internet. Hell there's snuff on YouTube. Hardly a non sequitur.

It’s still a non sequitur because it’s not the argument I was responding to (which I found bizarre). I’m not really interested in rehashing general “must protect the children” arguments, sorry.

Some parents will berate their kids or discipline them inappropriately and instill stress and anxiety in them that causes them to seek out things that should be off limits. It's easier to see a solution for the second issue when the first is not socially acceptable to talk about out loud. Nobody wants to be told they are parenting their own kids inappropriately. But in some cases, that just reality. Tech CEOs are a 100% reliable source of blame; parents - the people who are physically around their children the most - are not. (Source: myself. The best I managed to escape childhood with was C-PTSD, and I have had to get therapy to be able to manage my digital device usage ever since.)

So rather than work on the first problem, which is admittedly difficult, you want to remove the outlet that helps them cope? What do you imagine to be the most immediate consequences?

Except technicality absolutely factors in. Sure there's mouthbreathers out there that exercise no oversight at all over the content their kids are exposed to but there's also a large group of well-intentioned parents that would likely do a much better job at this if the bar wasn't set quite so high.

I don't think passively assuming you'll end up on the relevant lists is going to do it for websites that need to keep kids out for whatever reason.

Regulating such a list seems like a very backwards and expensive way to do this when kids will just use their parents identity (or make up one wholesale). Surely this is really about trying to hold people liable for speech politicians and lobbyists don't like.

> And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.

...huh? This is completely backwards. We should be making laws that punish parents for failing to parent properly. Not laws that punish everyone.

If we pass a law that children under a certain age may not use social media, then giving your child a non-child-locked device should be treated the same way we treat giving your child alcohol or cigarettes.

I get what you're saying but

> should be treated the same way we treat giving your child alcohol or cigarettes.

In many (perhaps most?) places that's completely legal provided you're the legal guardian, you're present, not in public, etc, etc.

> And before anyone blames the parents, parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.

Zuckerberg was not a parent when he conceived of Facebook and "society" as a whole is pushing social media on kids, not parents.

Parents generally have their own children's best interests in mind. If you personally have kids, feel free to delegate responsibility to someone else, since you believe that you're shitty to your own child. But you do not get to decide how to parent other people's children.

> parents will always be shitty. They are an impediment to children's health society must work around.

The health of kids with parents is infinitely better than those without. Just saying

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