> Apple’s parental controls predate HTML5 (literally, XHTML 4.01) and regularly don’t work, sometimes even by their own admission. It also forces the parent to be in the role of a tech expert. That argument also falls on deaf ears.
The solution, then, ought to be to pass a law requiring some sort of standardized parental controls that allow trivial set-and-forget management. Require device manufacturers/software distributors to sort out a "child mode" switch you can flip upon device initialization, in-your-face and unmissable, and then have apps/webpages be able to see whether the device reports it's in child mode. Does this not solve the "prevents 95% of kids from accessing pornography" threshold of effectiveness while being infinitely less invasive?
> Require device manufacturers/software distributors to sort out a "child mode" switch you can flip upon device initialization, in-your-face and unmissable, and then have apps/webpages be able to see whether the device reports it's in child mode.
Wouldn't even need to develop anything new for this outside of a simplified UI over an MDM. Devices already support an incredible amount of monitoring and control, even iDevices, via MDMs.
But MDMs are for now only business/enterprise products, and are priced as such.
Makes me wonder if there's a market there for someone to just package up a consumer-focused, dead simple to use MDM. Enroll with QR code, set up some default policies, etc.
> The solution, then, ought to be to pass a law requiring some sort of standardized parental controls that allow trivial set-and-forget management. Require device manufacturers/software distributors to sort out a "child mode" switch you can flip upon device initialization, in-your-face and unmissable, and then have apps/webpages be able to see whether the device reports it's in child mode. Does this not solve the "prevents 95% of kids from accessing pornography" threshold of effectiveness while being infinitely less invasive?
This feels like an idea out of a previous era; where a lone family computer sat in the living room. There are so many devices now, we can't assume we control or know about all devices our children may have access to.
> There are so many devices now, we can't assume we control or know about all devices our children may have access to.
This is specifically a solution for a world with many personal devices. The devices a child has access to are their own (in child mode), someone else's being lent to them (the analog loophole, not solved by child mode or proof-of-age), and public devices at schools, libraries and the like, which are typically locked down.
Not at all, it's extremely forward-looking, due to its distributed nature, clean separation of responsibilities among sites, manufacturers, and parents, each doing their part to influence the end result to the appropriate extent. Sites should inform clients about the nature of the content, clients should be configurable to accept or reject various kinds of content, and parents should enforce configurations on devices their children use.
Parents cannot abdicate responsibility for what their children are exposed to.
It’s a better argument, and would gain more political ground, than do nothing.
However, there’s one major problem: Most families aren’t actually using the multi-user capabilities of their devices. Many devices, like iPads or iPhones, just don’t support multi-user at all.
The result? Either parents are tech experts again, or have deep pockets to get everyone a device, or you’re going to have a bunch of kids logged in as their parents on their devices (as is already the case). Of course, that defeats the policy goal. That’s a non-starter, unless we agreed that a device manufacturer could force a biometric check when accessing an age-verified device account.
Nobody has proposed such a thing; but if there was a good way of making sure that the age-verified user is the actual person engaging with the age-verified account, then we might have progress in that direction.
Personally though, I would really prefer to not have the government get any ideas whatsoever about dictating firmware or OS security or OS parental control requirements. Do you really want your Linux distribution mandated to implement an age check firmware with phoning home requirements to a government parental control server?
That's not a major problem. Also, how does age verification fix things in that scenario if a child is using their parents device?
If a parent can't be bothered to pin-lock their device or flip it into child mode then there is no technological solution. Now you're the one looking for the perfect solution that doesn't exist.
> Also, how does age verification fix things in that scenario if a child is using their parents device
Because the age is verified at the time of access; instead of once during initial setup. Odds are that the former will catch far more flies than the latter.
Your employer probably does the same. Do they have you log in once when you set up your laptop, then comfortably happily say it’s you for the next three years; or do they have you sign in every morning?
> Because the age is verified at the time of access; instead of once during initial setup.
Is that really how it works? Every single time you visit any website on the Internet or launch any app it's going to age ID you? I don't think that's right. You validate your account and then you login and you're good. If someone else uses your account, they are you.
And as you said, people share devices but it's also usually one account per app per device. You have to go out of your way to sign out of each individual app or website.
The solution, then, ought to be to pass a law requiring some sort of standardized parental controls that allow trivial set-and-forget management. Require device manufacturers/software distributors to sort out a "child mode" switch you can flip upon device initialization, in-your-face and unmissable, and then have apps/webpages be able to see whether the device reports it's in child mode. Does this not solve the "prevents 95% of kids from accessing pornography" threshold of effectiveness while being infinitely less invasive?