Comment by cosmic_cheese
1 day ago
I don’t agree. It’s still ultimately up to the parent to keep an eye on what their kids are up to, talk to them and prepare them to handle ugly things (which they will encounter at some point whether you prepare them for it or not, no matter how hard you try to keep them in a bubble), and if they feel necessary impose restrictions on a household basis.
Even if I did agree, the implementations being rolled out present far more danger to adults than requiring an ID to enter a physical establishment ever could. Internet ID systems are rife for political abuse for example, and requiring age attestation at the OS level endangers general purpose computing, adds yet more hoops for free open source OS projects to jump through, and risks making FOSS OSes illegal to use for those who need an escape hatch from their commercial counterparts the most.
I agree with you about the proposed implementations. I don't think ID checks are justifiable and I definitely don't think attestation is acceptable as a public policy under any circumstance.
I agree with you that it's up to the parent to keep an eye on their children. But I also think that society has a duty to facilitate that. To that end, I think some minimal regulation regarding self reported content ratings for websites would probably be a good thing.
> But I also think that society has a duty to facilitate that.
I don't think anyone disagrees with that. The disagreement is around how intrusive the government should be in facilitating that. And some people (myself included) believe that these sorts of age checks and attestation are too intrusive, even if the stated goal is a good one.
Did you perhaps miss the part in the comment you're replying to where I said that I disagree with both attestation and ID checks? I went on to suggest a concrete method of facilitation whereby websites are legally mandated to self report content ratings.
Notice that the context here is a comment farther up the chain decrying the enablement of totalitarian parental control.