Comment by jacobgkau
6 days ago
Yeah, the laws in CA, CO, and now IL are essentially just mandating generally available OS's implement a standardized, local parental control system.
Detractors will say parents should just install existing parental control software, even though it's existed in its current form for decades and is obviously not effective. And they'll say it should be the parents' responsibility to enforce what their kids are doing with computers, while ignoring the fact that these laws provide tools allowing parents to do just that (the parents are the ones responsible for supervising their kids when they create accounts to ensure they're not lying about their age-- if the kids lie during setup, it's on the parents).
Anyone with kids will probably acknowledge that it's much easier supervising your kid once when they first set up an account on a new device than it would be to supervise them 24/7 when they're using the internet. But for some reason, lots of people without kids are in a panic about having to type in any date older than 18 years ago. The arguments I've heard against it are almost all slippery-slope (e.g. "they're gonna do this first, and then add ID requirements next year, because that's what I fear will happen.")
> The arguments I've heard against it are almost all slippery-slope (e.g. "they're gonna do this first, and then add ID requirements next year, because that's what I fear will happen.")
Because that's exactly what will happen. This is battlespace preparation for the destruction of anonymity on the internet, because politicians find this inconvenient.
> Yeah, the laws in CA, CO, and now IL are essentially just mandating generally available OS's implement a standardized, local parental control system.
Except what about my OS which doesn't have parental controls and can't reasonably be expected to provide them because who's gonna do it and be responsible for it?
Your attitude is exactly why it's gotten to the point of being proposed as law.
Of course, nobody can ever stop you from running anything you're building yourself, privately. But you might end up finding that you need to implement additional APIs anyway in order to access what you want to on the internet, just as you're expected to have some sort of HTTP support and HTML rendering in order to get that far. The part you'd be able to "cheat" on in your own custom OS is just reporting a higher age bracket without making you type an age in first.
> The arguments I've heard against it are almost all slippery-slope (e.g. "they're gonna do this first, and then add ID requirements next year, because that's what I fear will happen.")
And the arguments for it don't promise to fight tooth and nail not to make sure it's not slippery. If the slope does turn out to be slippery, today's proponents will be tomorrow's Hindsight Harrys (e.g. "the cat's already out of the bag, if you cared so much you should have fought this back when we all saw it coming").
The argument about the California bill is not that it is a slippery slope, but that it was drafted by people with zero domain knowledge. It applies equally to toaster ovens as well as iPhones.
It only applies to toaster ovens that can connect to the Internet to download third-party apps.
> while ignoring the fact that these laws provide tools allowing parents to do just that
These tools are called "parental controls" and already exist - we don't need laws to compel their production.
...unless, of course, the true aim is to use this as a beachhead for further expansion of privacy-violating requirements.
You write this off as a "slippery-slope" argument, but given that there are already quite a few tools that do what this law aims for, what's the point?
Because the tools don't work, and are too fragmentary and burdensome.
Would you prefer to inform each movie theater in town which movies your child is permitted to watch? Or just rely on the rating system that applies to most movies and is honored by most theatres?
Parents want one setting that says "this is a child" and then expect online platforms to respond appropriately. As we expect and mostly have in the real world.
> Parents want one setting that says "this is a child" and then expect online platforms to respond appropriately.
This law does not do that. It breaks the age of children into several buckets so that platforms, websites, and advertisers can target specific demographics. They won't "respond appropriately" they'll just use this data point as another way to improve how they exploit children online. Now every pedo with a website can tell how old the kid is so they can better adjust their grooming for that age bracket.
If parents want that solution, then the proper thing is for someone to build that solution and make a fortune selling it, IMO.
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Sometimes it's good to standardize things. Existing parental controls are a hot mess and they mostly work by completely blocking sites/apps, not giving them an age category.
The parents can already do that. Its called "parenting". The fact that they won't even though there are (non-required!) tools they could be using to do so is baffling to me.
> if the kids lie during setup, it's on the parents
Pretty much a "Yes, and?" scenario. See above.
> The arguments I've heard against it are almost all slippery-slope (e.g. "they're gonna do this first, and then add ID requirements next year, because that's what I fear will happen.")
I get where you're going, but precisely this. These things always start slow... then fast. The old adage "first they came for x, then y" is not a joke or an exaggeration. It is pretty much historic observation. I've lived long enough to know that whenever someone invokes the "think of the children" defense, there's always a catch.
> Its called "parenting".
I hear this and it makes me wonder if you have kids. Do you really have the ability to supervise their internet access at all times? Mine are in the next room, I check in on them regularly, but that still results in them being up to no good. Conversations on the topic are a regular thing, losing privileges as a punishment for breaking the rules is happening all the time, but they still always want to push up against the boundaries of what's allowed and what isn't.
And they're not even teenagers yet, with hormones and thirst-traps and whatever else there is to watch out for.
A little bit more control within the house would be useful - I don't want it to come in the form of anything that impacts anyone else, though. I don't need draconian laws, I just need some voluntary, owner-informed device controls that aren't completely trivial for unprivileged users to bypass.
I already responded to what you're saying in my initial comment. I'll expand for you.
> The fact that they won't even though there are (non-required!) tools they could be using to do so is baffling to me.
My parents set me up with an AOL account when we first got a computer and dial-up internet. At first, I was kind of required to go through the AOL desktop application to browse the web since that's how we connected to the dial-up. Sometimes a website would be blocked through AOL, and I'd have to have one of my parents come and sign in to allow me into it.
But once we moved onto broadband DSL, I eventually figured out I could just open Internet Explorer instead of AOL to bypass the parental controls without having to get my parents to come allow a website. Of course, a few years after that, I was secretly browsing porn... at 10 years old.
As a parent today, what non-required tools would you suggest I use to effectively filter NSFW content from the internet for my kids? Network-level methods don't work in the age of laptops and smartphones. Any on-device software you might suggest would probably be for iOS/Android or Windows, not both. And which software supports Ubuntu, or do you think I shouldn't let my kids use it? Yes, it's probably possible to lock things down eventually (for me, as an IT professional). The parents next door probably have no clue about half the stuff I'd use, and my kid's gonna end up having access to whatever their kid does. Even if everyone does everything perfectly, all it takes is a slight paradigm shift or new piece of technology to sidestep all of it-- like when my parents did their jobs setting up AOL parental controls but then switched our connection type and inadvertently broke them.
The value of this legislation isn't necessarily making parental controls technically possible. The value is standardizing and normalizing it. As someone in another comment chain brought up, you're not expected to individually coordinate with every movie theater or every liquor store, or to helicopter your kids IRL with it being your fault if someone sells them beer when you let them go out with their friends. There's a basic societal understanding that certain things aren't available to kids. The internet being "wild west" for a few decades doesn't invalidate that, imo. This isn't parents not parenting, it's adjusting the level of burden we're expecting to come with parenting to a more reasonable level.
OK, I'm going to ask a potentially-dumb question: why are we trying to stop kids who want porn from getting it? As I see it, part of parenting should be telling your children what's not good for them and why. As a kid, if I had seen a case of beer left out I wouldn't have gotten drunk because I wouldn't have wanted to. Likewise I wouldn't have gone to porn sites because I wouldn't have wanted to.
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