Comment by pocksuppet
5 days ago
Sometimes even things that are good for Meta are good for the rest of us. This law, and the one in California, mean that liability is disclaimed as long as the parent selects an age above 18 for the child. It's like a section 230 for age protection. Meta supports this because they won't be liable for wrong age inputs, and we should also support this because it doesn't verify age in any other way.
We should support something that does the minimum to accomplish the goal. As luck would have it, we don't need to do anything because parental controls already exist, and apps like YouTube already have a "kid mode". But for some reason, people are very attached to the idea of getting that number. Your age. It isn't enough to have a boolean isAdult. Oh no, they want to know how old you are, and they want that number to follow tou everywhere you go. View a site on your PC and then load it in incognito to create an account and comment? Oh look, this person we've identified as pockauppet age 99 or whatever viewed the page, then someone registered aged 99 and commented on that same page. This is a data goldmine. But I guess we're not against sharing data anymore.
Have you used parental controls? They're complete and utter shit. You cut your child off from almost all of the internet, or you may as well not have any controls at all.
Have you? What makes you think they can't be improved? And what do you think will happen when people set the age in this new system?