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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

TBH, OS based parental filters are the optimal solution here, especially if implemented in a proper way.

Kids don't buy phones and computers, parents do. When setting up the account for the first time, the parents could set the account to be an "underage one", all the apps, browsers, etc., would get the USER_IS_UNDERAGE flag and filter content according to that. No need for every site to ask and verify the age, just set the date of birth at the time of purchase, set a parental password (for possible future changes, reselling, etc.) and prohibit formats/wipes/factory resets without a parental password being entered. The clerks in telco stores could even help with the first setup of that.

Same could be easily implemented in linux, via some user flag set by the su/sudo user during the first eg. ubuntu install.

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Yeah, there’s negative backlash against the age gate stuff but as long as you’re implementing it without privacy concerns like ID collection and verification it’s actually a really good idea.

A parent can change the setting in the OS and have every website and app comply with the OS setting is such a better situation than having to deal with a patchwork of content blockers, social media account settings, and parental controls that leak like a sieve.

Realistically, parents often don’t really have a good way to know what websites and apps you sign up for if you don’t have a crazily locked down device. Parental controls are complicated for non-technical parents and they usually know less than their kids do about the Internet.

A global OS age gate solves a lot of those problems, especially since OS-level controls are way easier to enforce and lock down compared to other methods.

on-device filtering is the right way to go, but it shouldn’t be a matter of sending metadata about the user to a service- instead services should provide standard metadata about the content to the device and the device can choose what, if anything, to display.

This preserves privacy better by keeping more information about the user local, and gives people better tools to decide what metadata categories they want to filter- for their kids and for themselves.

That's much harder to implement. If you ban advertising eg. online casinos to underge users, the service would have to send two different ads (one 18+ and one for younger people too), and the browser would have to decide which one to play. Same for eg searching on google, browsers would have to filter out every <div> with adult content, meaning half the page would be empty, but with a browser "underage" flag, google could just turn on safe search and not allow turning it off.

Plus, as soon as the user clicks on one of these optionally filtered elements, the service will know how exactly what browser is filtering.

That solution doesn't actually work, and it angers me that people can't see why it doesn't work. That solution requires that the entire website must be child-safe or none of it. That solution requires that Tumblr must ban porn if Tumblr has any underage users. The alternative would be that Tumblr would randomly not load for underage users because some recommendation or ad would be over 18, and so it would rapidly have none.

Why must an age rating apply to an entire website?

As one example, the Internet Content Rating Association (ICRA) (and to a lesser extent the prior Recreational Software Advisory Council (RSACi)) had a rating scheme that allowed sites to provide a default rating label that was then overridden for individual pages and resources using <meta> tags and RDF-based labels. For example, Tumblr could set a family-friendly default rating and append a different rating on specific user pages, images, or ads.

An even more granular scheme could be applied via HTML attributes which would allow an individual section, image, link, or text snippet to be marked e.g. as "sexual", "violent", "substance use", "spoiler", or even "unknown" for unreviewed user-provided content. Then leave it up to web browsers to choose whether and how to render elements with these attributes. (Hidden entirely? With censor bars? Pixelated?)

There would be substantial logistical and regulatory challenges to get websites to comply, but it doesn't seem substantially harder than the current age verification schemes.

Because let's say you have a website like Reddit with a mixture of 18+ and 13+ stuff. Something that's 18+ but not explicit gets really popular. Pornhub will now livestream congressional debates, someone posts a link to this, and it gets fifty zillion upvotes as people can't resist commenting "wtf". Now you have a dilemma: do you show it on the front page or not? If you show this on the front page and it's 18+, it'll lock children out of the front page, which for many of them means they're locked out of the entire site because that's the way they know to access the site. But if you don't, then the law is forcing you to censor your front page for everyone, even for adults.

The solution is obvious: you show it on the front page if the user is 18+. However, your proposal deliberately forbids this and says the front page must be the same for everyone. Which leaves the other two bad options.

Haven't paid video streaming services solved that one already? Admittedly not with age verification, but you can set up child accounts. I presume Disney+ is ok here as they want to be in the family-friendly market but also offer content meant for young adults.

That's exactly what the law will do, but on the device. The parents will input the child's age during device setup, and then every service will query the age range based on that and work in "child account" mode.

Without any requirement for verification, it'll be completely up to the parents to decide what their child will see, while the services will only get the minimum information needed. It'll basically make parental control easy, but still in the parent's control.

> If you show this on the front page and it's 18+, it'll lock children out of the front page

I don't understand why you think this is true when I specifically described a label that is applied to "an individual section" of the page.

To be more explicit: Today, each post on the Reddit front page appears in its own container element. If an 18+ post's container element could have some kind of "adult-content" attribute set then some web browsers could render the whole front page normally with the exception of that individual element. Perhaps they could black it out, collapse it, display it with a pixelated overlay and a "Request Access" button, whatever the browser supports and the device administrator prefers.

> The solution is obvious: you show it on the front page if the user is 18+. However, your proposal deliberately forbids this and says the front page must be the same for everyone.

Why do you think that my proposal requires that the front page must be the same for everyone? Providing different views to different users is the entire point of every child safety law and rating scheme I've ever seen. I'm merely saying that my preferred approach would be to mandate that potentially objectionable content is semantically annotated in the HTML somehow, so that each user's browser can apply whatever view restrictions (if any) the device's owner wishes. I think this is better than mandating that web browsers send personal information to every web site they visit and also mandating that sites pre-filter the content they send back.

Won't that effectively leak the user's registered age bracket anyway? And if so, what advantage does it has over the current law?

Good questions!

First, leaking a device's content filtering settings is not the same as leaking a user's age bracket. For example, if the server identifies a web browser that isn't loading tags annotated with "sexual-content" that might indicate that the user is a child but could equally well indicate that they're a corporate office worker, religious, or anyone else who prefers not to see such content at the moment.

Second, if the standard defined multiple semantic tags or levels (e.g. violence, extreme violence, substance use, unknown, etc) then this gives more granular control to device administrators who may care more about some types of content than others.

Third, web browsers wouldn't even have to leak the content filtering settings. For example, perhaps an administrator could configure the web browser to render content overlaid with a semi-opaque blur, in which case the server would not know.

Fourth, and this is more philosophical, asking websites to provide more information to the device so that an admin can do their own filtering leaves the choices to them. Whereas if the only way a device admin can filter content is to submit the age of the device's user to a third party so the third party can decide how to pre-filter the content it sends back, that gives an uncomfortable amount of control to platforms and regulators.

I think that the V-Chip shows that when parental controls are available, most parents will not use them.

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

This assumes the parent knows a little bit about computers - as opposed to the child being the one that's constantly helping the parent out.

That era is over.

Exactly like GDPR shouldn't have mandated millions of websites to pop up a consent form, as a global browser setting could would have set consent as a user preference.

But the objective of these regulations aren't what it says on the tin.

The objective is exactly what it says on the tin. The malicious compliance is someone else's objective.

The GDPR doesn't directly mandate cookie banners though. It wants consent from users prior to processing their data.

Also, the browser flag that indicates no consent already exists: https://globalprivacycontrol.org/faq

I agree the legislation simply makes consent a requirement, and browsers could have implemented a flag from the get go for websites to read from.

Glad it is now in place.

That’s pretty much what the law does

I would absolutely support that position if it were compatible with observable reality.

My family and school failed to stop me getting my hands on booze, fags, drugs, and porn. Teenagers are fundamentally not controllable. The Amish and the Mormons are having some success, but that's likely not what libertarians want to hear.

What you describe is the status quo. Parents and schools are already, variously, giving The Talk, confiscating devices, enabling internet filters. Society deems these measures ineffective. In tiny part, that's a skill issue, but mostly it's just trying to cut down a tree with a herring. Again: teenagers.

You may, of course, sulk about age restrictions on alcohol. Prohibitionists would like that. Keep your out of the contested zone, make them look reasonable.

If you want to stand on your principles, try seasteading. But I'd appreciate coherent contributions to the debate, to offset the excesses of the pearl-clutchers and the spies.

Yes. It's extremely sensible and I believe opposition to it is a shill campaign by companies like Meta.

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