Create a standard header with a "Parental Advisory" PG kind of label. Then let the consumer decide what to do with it. The web is "content", and it is up to the parents to decide how to police their kid's content consumption (same as with music, video, etc).
Then we can start talking about Operating Systems, Browsers or Access points features allowing parents to block pages with specific PG ratings.
Lack of label should be equated to UNRATED, just like for movies. By _default_ the Internet should be for Adults who have their own right to choose what they see or don't see.
Let the OS / browser / etc WHITELIST things based on a claim something is safe for children, or rated in an academic context (E.G. Wikipedia / medical / etc).
Also interesting is this site: https://www.doesthedogdie.com/
Maybe this could go beyond parents. There are whole classes of image that I'd like to have to choose to see. E.g., if I'm eating breakfast and scrolling through Twitter, I don't need to see, say, mangled flesh in an accident photo. If there were standardized content tags, then parents could tell browsers to block outright and adults could make it click-to-view.
As a parent, I wholeheartedly agree. It's not the government's job, or anyone else's job besides mine, to determine what content my children see or do not see.
Congratulations, you've now managed to leak enough datapoints to be deanonymized.
Do not do this.
It is also a super terrible user experience, since now, changing the driver of the web browser requires what amounts to a login.
I repeat, do not go down this road, there are bad things there.
I don’t think we should have books moderate their content for children. The library, parents, teachers and everyone else responsible for children should take the responsibility to restrict these children’s access to material deemed inappropriate. This is how things have worked for countless years, and worked reasonably well. I don’t think controversial shoehorn legislation is going to work any better, but it will come with some downsides.
Things have never worked that way for any other medium. Mass internet access has only been around 15 to 30 years, depending on how you count it and arguably it has had disastrous impact on the well-being and mental health of children.
Yes, parents shouldn't be leaving their kids alone with the internet, but:
1. Many parents are going to a bad job at monitoring their kid's internet and if we can create rules that will leave their children less messed up, we should do so. We all pay a price when parents raise messed up kids.
2. Even for strict parents and well meaning children, it is so, so much easier to access poisonous things on the internet than on other mediums. It is hard to keep it out 24/7, it needs to be harder to access bad things.
3. As a strict parent, it sucks being stricter than all the other parents, sucks having to battle with kids about why their peers can do something they can't. Without common norms and common rules, their is an incentive for parents to defect by being the "cool" parent. And the reality of life is that no matter what parents do, teenagers are in large part "raised" by their peers. Teenagers view their peers as a source of authority because they have to live with their peers of the rest of their lives, peers represent the new generation. So what indulgent parents allow their children to do matters for my ability to parent my own child.
they've been working that way for every other medium. Some movies are good for kids, some are full of sex and gore. Parents have the responsibility to keep their kids from watching movies with content they don't want their kids to see. It's the same with TV shows and video games and books and music and plays and puppet shows. All of those mediums exist, and some content will be good for kids and other content is not intended for them. It has always been the job of parents to make sure they aren't sitting in their kids in front of things they don't want them to see/hear.
>Many parents are going to a bad job at monitoring their kid's internet... As a strict parent, it sucks being stricter than all the other parents,
"Being a parent is hard and some people do it better than others" is not a valid reason to censor content for everyone regardless of their age, or for forcing everyone to hand over personal information and identify themselves to access uncensored content.
Neither Comcast or HBO are going around checking IDs before airing Game of Thrones. I'm curious about which countries would require such a thing.
Ratings and V-chip use aren't enforced by law however. Ratings are intended to help parents decide what to allow their kids to watch, not to make the choice for adults or require adults to prove they are over a certain age to access content. V-chips give parents a tool to help block some things when and if they decide to, but most people never use it.
> Comcast and HBO refuse to sell their services to minors
ISPs don't sell their services to minors either. Adults sign up for services and it's their job to decide what their own children see on those services.
> Brick and mortar stores open to children do not display pornography
They do in the US. Any child can walk into Barnes & Noble and see porn on the shelves for sale, or open a book and read graphic descriptions of any number of sexual and violent acts. At the Barnes & Noble near me, porn is kept closer to the children's books than bibles are. Actually, any kid can walk into the store and open a bible and read descriptions of sexual and violent acts.
Libraries also do not police what content children can access within their walls.
> Providing this material to them is a crime.
Not at all, as shown above.
> Some places in the US did have laws regarding ESRB ratings on video games until SCOTUS recently overturned them. etc.
Another example of an overbroad and dangerous California law designed to "protect the children" and it's a damn good thing it was struck down by the courts. The government has no business policing what media I can see as an adult or in policing what media I can show to my own children.
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/v-chip-putting-restrict...
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/obscene-indecent-and-pr...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1470
https://law.justia.com/codes/new-jersey/2009/title-2c/2c-34/...
Movie theaters and video rental places tend to refuse to serve minors for X or R material, and (if they look quite young) even PG-13 films. Stores may and often do refuse to sell R-rated films to minors. It may require active parental assistance for a minor to see those kinds of things (before the Internet, anyway—which is kinda the point of this whole discussion) and, even if enforcement is imperfect, surely serves to limit how much of that material even a very motivated kid can practically see (again, pre Internet, I mean). Also, kids have to get to those kinds of places, which can be pretty damn hard for them to do without a parent at least knowing they're out doing something, if not specifically what.
Broadcast TV stations risk FCC action if they show anything too outrageous when kids may be around, and have further restrictions even in night-time hours.
These behaviors are due to a combination of actual government regulation, and ongoing or historical credible threats of regulation if these industries didn't police themselves well-enough, which prompted the creation and enforcement of things like the MPAA's rating system (plus some now-defunct frameworks like the Comic Books Code or the Hays Code, both of which were much stricter than anything we'd likely accept these days—but for the "what's historically been within the Overton window of the freedom-loving United States?" perspective, those aren't that old and did co-exist with and apply to modern mass media, so still have some relevance).
The closest analog we have that I can think of is cable TV, since it's in the home and offers a whole lot of content, and even that tends to self-censor to a substantial degree and doesn't offer many of the worst things the Internet does at all—even on premium channels, which are another thing an adult has to actively work to bring into their house, totally separable from the rest of what cable offers.
Libraries are less-restricted and librarians seem to enjoy providing things a bit subversive (which is great) but I bet even lots of librarians would ask to talk to a parent before lending out certain books, let alone R-rated films, to young kids.
Support from outside entities—including, and largely, due to government action or threat of same—for parents to control what their kids see and hear is, as far as I can tell, the norm since fairly early in the days of modern mass media.
It's the Internet's model that's an aberration, requiring parents to take active steps to keep prevent kids from seeing hardcore porn or extreme violence or whatever on the same device they have to use to do homework, rather than having to take active steps to enable seeing those things, as they'd have to in most other contexts. Isn't it? Which doesn't necessarily mean these kinds of measures are a good idea, but I don't think "parents have always had to actively work to keep their kids from being exposed to awful stuff without substantial help from government and the private sector" really holds up, unless I'm missing something.
The Internet's unprecedented in its reach and being something that's basically required in a modern household, and required to allow kids some access to (again, it's not really optional for school anymore), but even other far less necessary media have had effective, if not perfectly iron-clad and universal, age restrictions imposed by businesses and the government. Right?
that isn't a law, movie ratings are a voluntary system designed to help parents make smarter choices about what they will allow their kids to see. It is not intended to police the actions of adults so that parents don't have to do their job. That's the extent of "Support from outside entities" that exists in all other mediums (with the exception of FCC regulations on broadcast TV and radio which were themselves commonly seen as a mistake which is why we didn't see them applied to cable TV, satellite TV/radio, or the internet)
> t's the Internet's model that's an aberration, requiring parents to take active steps to keep prevent kids from seeing hardcore porn or extreme violence or whatever on the same device they have to use to do homework, rather than having to take active steps to enable seeing those things, as they'd have to in most other contexts. Isn't it?
Nope. The same TV that shows sesame street shows porn, HBO shows both kid's movies and Game of Thrones, the same theater that shows G rated movies shows R rated movies, the same car radio that plays disney songs plays howard stern. It has always been the job of parents to monitor how children consume media. Always.
> I don't think "parents have always had to actively work to keep their kids from being exposed to awful stuff without substantial help from government and the private sector" really holds up, unless I'm missing something.
Having "help from government and the private sector" isn't the problem. There are lots of things the government and the private sector can do to help parents which would be perfectly acceptable. The rating system on movies is a good example. Requiring adults to scan their faces every time they want to access a website isn't one of them. Requiring adults to scan their IDs to every website they visit isn't either.
As I covered, most (all?) "voluntary" mass media industry regulation schemes have been much more of an outcome of "sort your shit out to our satisfaction or we'll regulate you into the Earth's core" grumbling from government, than actually voluntary.
Part of the trouble here is there's just nothing comparable to the Internet. The default before was "parents will have to work to enable their kids to access questionable material", not "parents will have to work (really, really hard) to keep their kids from accessing questionable material, including possibly by accident, and maybe stuff pushed on them by some god-awful 'algorithm' trying to radicalize them or push them into some other harmful rabbit-hole because it helps with 'engagement' or some other dumb-assed metric".
Again, the closest thing I can think of is cable, and that had a much more limited set of content and kept the adult stuff mostly opt-in (so, again, active effort required to enable it), plus cable TV was never 1% as valuable for getting by in modern society as Internet access is—the easy answer of "just don't pay for cable" doesn't apply to the Internet, and hasn't for more than a decade.
However, even with media that are far easier to keep out of the home, government pushes for regulation, and effective imposition of such regulation—de jure or, in fear of what de jure might look like, de facto—has been the norm. Much of this absolutely applied to what adults could access (see, again, the Hays or CCA regulatory regimes). As for "scanning their face every time they access a website"—in earlier situations in which a kid might access some piece of media a parent hadn't deliberately invited into their home, and in which some business was involved, everyone did get a face-scan, by the flesh-and-blood clerk, and since 1990 or so those situations almost certainly also involve being recorded on multiple CCTV cameras (and these days, having all that uploaded to god-knows-where and maybe even having face recognition applied to it—ugh, the Internet was such a bad idea)
Again, part of the trouble with these analogies is there's nothing comparable to the Internet. How do you have a clerk judge whether a person's face looks old enough, at "web scale" and before your web server sends a 200 response? You can't, really, but that doesn't mean something of that sort isn't typical practically everywhere but the Internet. The closest thing you can realistically do is automate that process, instead, to bring it back into something resembling the past norms.
This is, I repeat, not necessarily a defense of this kind of legislation as a good idea–I just don't think it actually is a deviation from what was the overwhelming norm for how society operated in most of the 20th century. The Internet free-for-all model is what's the odd-man-out.
I'll agree that the internet comes with it's own set of challenges, however computers enable unique sets of solutions. There is parental control software you can install, logging you can put in place, you can even screen-record and keylog everything that takes place on a device. Access can be restricted with passwords and devices can be set up to automatically disconnect the internet at certain times.
It takes some work to set those kinds of things up, but parenting has always required work. The internet has a ton of free resources to assist parents in that work. Nothing is perfect, but thankfully no kid ever died from seeing a boob either so mostly things tend to work out. My generation was online long before any parental control software or porn filers existed and we survived after all. Parents today have more tools at their disposal than ever.
Before, the usual way to keep your kids from seeing (very much, anyway—no system is fool-proof) porn or brutal violence or from encountering any excessively-weird or dangerous subcultures was basically do nothing—if you didn't try to bring that stuff into contact with your kids, odds were they'd encounter very little of it, and likely none unless they were themselves trying to find it. The Internet's flipped that around, so the default is all kinds of horrible stuff being not just available, but possibly pushed at people in your household, including kids, unless you actively work to avoid it.
The norm in earlier cases when others have some say in whether your kids can access such material, is that they're either prohibited by law from providing it, or else are following some prodded-into-existence-by-government industry guidelines that largely prevent access to it by kids. Parents didn't need to spend much time or attention policing that kind of thing, previously.
Not entirely all the ones that have already existed. Parents used to have to worry about what their kids would rent on their own from video rental stores, or who they were communicating with on teen party lines (look it up if that was long before your time) or the local BBS scene, or going back even farther if they were viewing lewd content in penny arcades or by sneaking into drive-in theaters or sideshows.
> Before, the usual way to keep your kids from seeing...porn or brutal violence or from encountering any excessively-weird or dangerous subcultures was basically do nothing
I'm afraid that's never been true. Arguably, it was much harder in past decades to monitor what your kids were doing because children were far more autonomous than they are today where many are tracked by GPS 24/7. If I were a teenager I think it'd be much easier to hide compromising polaroids and skin mags than to try to hide sexting and visits to pornhub from tech savvy parents. Really though the challenge is simply constantly evolving as old media dies off and new forms pop-up.
> The norm in earlier cases when others have some say in whether your kids can access such material, is that they're either prohibited by law from providing it, or else are following some prodded-into-existence-by-government industry guidelines that largely prevent access to it by kids.
I can say from experience that libraries don't care what you're reading and only occasionally care when you try checking the materials out. As a kid I was never told I couldn't purchase any book I brought to the counter in bookstores and many of them were not remotely appropriate for my age by most people's standards.
When video rentals were a thing the clerks would also routinely rent R rated materials to us as small children (although not 100% of the time). Record stores had zero issues selling music with 'scandalous' lyrics to kids even after parental warning stickers became a thing. Actually getting into an R rated movie as a kid was hit and miss if you bought the ticket, but most people I knew would buy tickets for a kid show and just enter the R rated show once inside (now that theaters have assigned seating that might not work as well today). I do think video game stores have been more strict comparatively because of all the attention on them from parents and media, but they've also been the most tame in terms of sexual content for the same reason.
Generally kids have never had much of an issue finding ways to get into trouble and there's nothing more appealing than the forbidden. I think every generation's parents had to stay on their toes and put in genuine effort to restrict what their kids were seeing and doing and usually with only very limited success.
Then we should make a law that holds parents responsible for poor decision making. It's not incumbent on anyone else to make the world a "less messed up" place for them, I had zero say in whether you got to have children or not.. you just decided to do it one day.
Further, most of us don't believe that this law as written or any law in general stands a chance at actually addressing your claim. This law does a really good job of protecting entrenched entrants and denying new startups access to the internet by creating unnecessary technical barriers that cost a lot to erect but don't actually protect children.
It's the worst of all outcomes, if you actually care about "messed up" children.
> it is so, so much easier to access poisonous things on the internet than on other mediums
Is "two children talking to each other" a medium or not? If so, I don't think the internet holds a candle to this.
> it sucks being stricter than all the other parents, sucks having to battle with kids about why their peers can do something they can't.
So.. because some parents find it hard to be strict, we have to force all parents to be strict. And if they aren't? Should we take their children away? I mean, if they're too tempted to be "cool" then we shouldn't even allow that to occur under any circumstance, should we?
If done right, it might actually be seamless, much unlike the GDPR pop-up which needs to be manually cleared.
Sites for children typically have strict moderation, or more often, do not have user-generated content.
That puts most of the burden on the poster, and checking the occasional box is not much of a burden. And these days it also acts as a great tagging system for automated ML filters. Combine that with good tools for users to report violations, and the burden seems pretty manageable.
And honestly, it might lower site burdens. If people only see what they want to see, it could reduce user friction and incoming reports.
I think a header field that classifies the content could help. The client needs to do the filtering.
I will never use a OS account synced at the OS provider.