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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

> Stop making your kids my problem!

This is an interesting point: there is a trade-off between kids being denied access to inappropriate websites and adults not being forced to verify their age. We can't have both, so we must weigh which is more important. One could argue that protecting kids is clearly more important; on the other hand, there are way more adults in the world than kids, so more people are impacted with restrictions for adults.

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I saw porn when I was under 18, and I'd wager the majority of people also have going back to the 70s or 80s. We all ended up mostly normal

<<Looks around>>> You call this normal?!?

Millenials are the first generation that had massive, unrestricted access to porn online. I'd wager a good chunk were negatively affected. Overconsumption was not much of a risk, until it was. To say nothing about extreme content.

It's also important to understand that this is not a binary situation. You will never keep 100% of the kids from 100% of the inappropriate material. So it should be a debate about levels, and trade-offs.

IMO, the approach of having the large / popular commercial OS platforms ask you the birthday of the primary user on install (and secure that so it can't be changed), and then reveal the age (bucketed to a range) to apps. If you don't have kids, or care what they see, just put Jan 1 1900 (or have an explicit opt-out, which puts you in the last bucket). After that it's up to parents to parent.

Privacy is way more important than protecting kids from consuming content online. Kids already have more protection than it's worth, probably, this is moving in the wrong direction.

> there are way more adults in the world than kids

How can that be? The world population has been growing for decades.

Yeah but kids that are online are perhaps ~5 to 17, while adults go from 18 to 80, 90 or more. Moreover, social media is usually also allowed for older teenagers, so it's not necessarily all people up to 18 that need filtering out.

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