Comment by wcarss
3 days ago
Attestation of age should suffice; no one in a building somewhere needs to verify my age. If I tell you to treat me like a minor, you do it. Operating systems and browsers can work together to send this as a header. If you're a concerned parent: set your children's ages in their device accounts.
Done. This alternative solves the whole problem and it's been brought up a million times, but it doesn't matter, because this isn't about protecting children or anything about ages. It's about locking down anonymity, and money for a few interests who want to be the verifiers and craft a future where they hold the keys.
I don't agree with age verification, but there isn't anywhere 'set your children's ages in their device accounts' that limits their access to inappropriate content and social media.
You can set age in Google Accounts, but they can access pretty much anything when they reach age 13 (which is about the age a lot of these things start to become a real problem) and as a parent you don't have any way to limit that. They don't even need to ask to install new phone apps.
Children also use computers as well as phones and you don't want to stop them using a web browser! You also obviously can't supervise them every moment they are online even if you wanted to.
In moments where you can not supervise them, do not let them play with the dangerous device anymore. You wouldn't leave a kid alone with a gun either.
I think there are many ways to limit that. E.g. Google Android parental control https://support.google.com/families/answer/7103028?hl=en#zip...
I understand technological advancements can be overwhelming for older people. But that does not warrant giving up on kids...
I have a hard time calling it a technological advancement, that's what it was when we had bloggers and forums some 20 years ago. Until we all collectively agree that kids should not have smartphones and iPads until they're maybe 17, or come up with a solution where they do have them but will only be able to use them for Maps, Books, Word/Excel, the Chrome Dino game, Tetris, and obviously messaging/calling with parents - without being the weird ones in the classroom. Until then, it's one ugly experiment which got completely out of hands.
Agreed. Many parents I've spoken to want operating systems to provide a standard set of age and/or content flags that app stores and websites are required to respect.
But various groups are deliberately conflating that desire for self-attested flags with verification: Politicians who want to police speech, companies who want to advertise to verified humans, and privacy advocates who want an easier strawman to attack.
> If you're a concerned parent: set your children's ages in their device accounts.
And if you're a concerned government, make OS vendors support it and make parents criminally responsible for not setting it.
Aren't parents already responsible for protecting their kids well-being legally?
There is nuance here, especially when it comes to schools. And it certainly depends on what country/jurisdiction we're talking about, in terms of actual legal duties of parents.
The school admins and teachers act in loco parentis when the child is in their custody, on their property etc. So, schools are often tasked with making difficult parentage decisions for children, and sometimes before the parents themselves can be looped in.
A notable tension today exists with gender identity, and whether schools should be compelled to always share the student's secrets with parents, or if the schools have a solemn duty to try and protect children's confidentiality and safety in this regard.
Another tension exists with medical care in hospitals. Once a child is admitted to the hospital, do the parents still have 100% control over life-saving treatments? Can the parents withdraw ordinary life-sustaining care? Can the hospital tell the parents when the child is "brain dead" or in a PVS, and can the parents go find a second opinion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Ann_Quinlan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahi_McMath_case
The problem is that not all parents are "concerned parents" and children dont deserve to be taken advantage of by trillion dollar corporations for the crime of having bad parents.
That's the classic question of when the state should step in to correct bad parenting, and when it should leave well enough alone. I'm sympathetic to the idea that this is one of the "step in" times, but I think the negatives for doing so seem far too costly.
At any rate, with age verification, un-concerned parent will likely just want their kid to shut up, and will verify using their own details to give the kid the (adult) access they want. So I don't think that changes much here.
> That's the classic question of when the state should step in to correct bad parenting, and when it should leave well enough alone
Well, no, this is the slightly different classic question of whether, in order to prevent (or, more realistically, on the pretext of preventing) bad parenting, the state should impose a universal totalotarian papers-please approach to basic life activities which requires everyone to prove identity to refute the assumption that they are a child so that it may impose its own (also bad, because totally one-size-fits-all and corcumstance blind) parenting on every child, without regard to the imposition on the liberty of every adult necessary to do so.
Stepping in to correct bad parenting happens when there is a system to identify bad parenting requiring correction and intervene only where such is identified, not when you are imposing a universal regime on everyone on the justification that without it, some will act as bad parents. While both are approaches frequently proposed, they are different and should be distinguished.
What are the negatives for doing so?
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These parents will do age check themselves on kids devices. Why? To not be bothered or to elevate the kid in peer group.
No system is going to fix "unresponsble" parents until we end up with a state completely replacing parent like in Brave New World.
You should look into Paul Krugman’s research on nudges, and how he won a Nobel prize showing that extremely small changes can have significantly beneficial effects across an entire citizenry.
You’re the person saying that we shouldn’t be default people to contributing to their retirement because people may choose not to. It’s not about perfectly capturing every possible person - you’re running a country, not a concentration camp.
> The problem is that not all parents are "concerned parents"
Unfortunately, this doesn't address that problem.
Children also don't deserve to have uncaring parents