Or, just incentivize or mandate stores to sell "child-certified" phones with parental controls pre-configured (along with a physical plug-and-play usb key for parents disable them when the child is old enough).
Exactly! We already have content tags on TV/Movies, just extend it to the web and make mandatory.
I imagine it could be not trivial to enforce (esp. for offshore web) - but definitely easier than enforcing the same sites to implement much more complicated identity verification (while preferably also not leaking this data).
But that might not even be necessary. A small on-device AI can probably do a decent job classifying pretty much everything we don't want children to see - with and option for parents to override it when needed.
I know! What puzzles me is responses every such article gets even on HN - let's build some cool tech that 95% of the general population and 100% of politicians won't even understand not to mention agree to.
Yes, government want to end anonymity and that's clear to some. But governments enjoy on a pretty broad support for this and many people supporting this believe it's a real problem. Suggesting to leave it unsolved or solve it in a way they can't trust or understand is only going to alienate them, making the government job easier.
I think suggesting a simple, cheap and effective solution to this problem that has no impact on privacy is a way better way to counter that. I think local parental controls fits the bill.
There is a much easier solution that already exists - parental controls on children's devices. I honestly don't understand why is it not solving the problem?
Yes, parents are responsible to set this up. But parents are also responsible to lock their alcohol, drugs or guns, condoms, etc., and many other things.
Perhaps parental controls are not good enough? That's where the regulation could genuinely help - require child-certified devices to implement minimum set of parental controls, and make them easy to use.
We're already been protecting children from printed porn, alcohol, drugs (legal or illegal), guns, etc. Children don't even have to buy those items, sometimes they can get them from friends or even find at home. It's always been parents responsibility to protect from that, and the Internet doesn't change that.
What the Internet does change is granularity of controls. With physical goods, parents can choose to give children travel magazines but not porn magazines. With Internet, parents don't always have a choice to give children a device to read travel websites but not porn websites.
Solving that granularity is all we need! And the good news - it's already largely solved: just give your kids one of the locked down phones/tables with parental controls (i.e., almost any phone/tablet today).
The law can and should make a few things better:
- introduce minimal requirements for parental controls, certify devices as kids safe (i.e., implementing these requirements)
- ideally, require websites to tag content - same way we tag it on TV for ages; this one is harder to enforce in practice (what about offshore websites?) but also not really needed - AI can tag content pretty well as part of parental controls
I know all of this was said before many times, but somehow it feels not enough people understand it.