You should be able to choose what's age-appropriate for your kids. Giving them access to e.g. "PG-13" media when they're 9 isn't the problem. Giving mature kids unrestricted access isn't a problem. The problem is culture:

- Many parents don't think about restricting their kids' online exposure at all. And I think a larger issue than NSFW is the amount of time kids are spending: 5 hours according to this survey from 2 years ago https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/04/teen-social-use-mental-h.... Educating parents may be all that is needed to fix this, since most parents care about their kids and restrict them in other ways like junk food

- Parents that want to restrict their kids struggle with ineffective parental controls: https://beasthacker.com/til/parental-controls-arent-for-pare.... Optional parental controls would fix this

> Fuck man, I can even legally give my kids alcohol - I don't see why it's appropriate to enforce what content I allow them to see.

In the USA it depends on the state. Federal guidelines for alcohol law does suggest exemptions for children drinking under the supervision of their parents, but that's not uniformly adopted. 19 states have no such exceptions, and in many of the remaining 31, restaurants may be banned from allowing alcohol consumption by minors even when their parents are there.

The law is there to protect children in the case they have absent/neglectful parents. Unfortunately not every child has a parent as aware as you.

People angrily replying to the top comment on this article are going to be pissed when they find out about this guy.

this seems to be an issue of being able to be a parent, period.

yup we should all be able, to talk to our kids instead of screaming at them.

The older sibling should be old enough to know better. Or if they're still a kid, they can have their privileges temporarily revoked.

This problem probably can't be solved entirely technologically, but technology can definitely be a part of solving it. I'm sure it's possible to make parental controls that most kids can't bypass, because companies can make DRM that most adults can't bypass.

> If ID checks are fully anonymous (as many here propose when the topic comes up) then every kid will just have their friends’ older sibling ID verify their account one afternoon.

Exactly the same way that kids used in former days to get cigarettes or alcohol: simply ask a friend or a sibling.

By the way: the owners of the "well-known" beverage shops made their own rules, which were in some sense more strict, but in other ways less strict than the laws:

For example some small shop in Germany sold beverages with little alcohol to basically everybody who did not look suspicious, but was insanely strict on selling cigarettes: even if the buyer was sufficiently old (which was in doubt strictly checked), the owner made serious attempts to refuse selling cigarettes if he had the slightest suspicion that the cigarettes were actually bought for some younger person. In other words: if you attempted to buy cigarettes, you were treated like a suspect if the owner knew that you had younger friends (and the owner knew this very well).

More simply: If ID checks are fully anonymous (as many here propose when the topic comes up) then every kid will just have their friends’ older sibling ID verify their account one afternoon. Or they’ll steal their parents’ ID when they’re not looking.

Digital ID with binary assertion in the device is an API call that Apple's app store curation can ensure is called on app launch or switch. Just checking on launch or focus resolves that problem. It's no longer the account being verified per se, it's the account and the use.

Probably will limit to one device per person, to save the children, so we won’t share with others.

(So you need to keep all your stuff into one device to be fully tracked easily. And have no control over your device, share your location… )

Circumventing controls as a kid is what taught me enough about computers to get the job that made college affordable (in those days you could just boot windows to a livecd Linux distro and have your way with the filesystem, first you feel like a hacker, later the adults are paying you to recover data).

If we must have controls, I hope the process of circumventing them continues to teach skills that are useful for other things.

> what would stop anyone from merely hosting porn in Romania or some country that didn't care about US age-verification laws

A government could implement the equivalent of China's great firewall. Even if it doesn't stop everyone, it would stop most people. The main problem I suspect is that it would be widely unpopular in the US or Europe, because (especially younger) people have become addicted to porn and brainrot, and these governments are still democracies.

Wrong incentive. If you don’t give a shit about exposing children to snuff or porn, but do give a shit about page views and ad revenue, you obviously don’t rate your content or rate it as G to increase that revenue.

I imagine there would be a set of filters, including some on by default that most adults keep for themselves. For example, most people don't want to see gore. More would be OK with sexual content, even more would be OK with swear words, ...

> Most guardians would willingly do similar with locked devices.

Considering the echo chamber in which I was at school, my friends would have simply used some Raspberry Pi (or a similar device) to circumvent any restriction the parents imposed on the "normal" devices.

Oh yes: in my generation pupils

- were very knowledgeable in technology (much more than their parents and teachers) - at least the nerds who were actually interested in computers (if they hadn't been knowledgeable, they wouldn't have been capable of running DOS games),

- had a lot of time (no internet means lots of time and being very bored),

- were willing to invest this time into finding ways to circumvent technological restrictions imposed upon them (e.g. in the school network).

The kids in your social circle are used to not having access to alcohol, but they're not used to not having access to social media.

Hypothetically, if every kid in your social circle had their device "locked", the adults would probably have a very hard time the kids away from their devices, or just relent, because the kids would be very unhappy. Although maybe with today's knowledge, most people will naturally restrict new kids who've never had unrestricted access, causing a slow culture shift.

I never specified age.

The whitelist would be decided by the market: the parents have the unlocked device, there are multiple solutions to lock it and they choose one. Which means that in theory, the dominant whitelist would be one that most parents agree is effective and reasonable; but seeing today's dominant products and vendor lock-in...

Digital media use is easier to conceal than weapons. My parents did not protect me from it growing up because they were not responsible, and I was harmed as a result. To this day they still do not realize I was harmed, because I did not tell them and we are not on speaking terms. Trying to be honest would have resulted in further rejection from them. This was on a personality level and I had no way to deal with this as a developing human.

I could not control how my parents were going to raise me, I was only able to play with the hand I was dealt. I hate the idea that parents are sacrosanct and do not share blame in these situations. At the same time, if this is just the family situation you're given and you're handed a device unaware of the implications, who is going to protect you from yourself and others online if your parents won't? Should anyone?

The "Bank identity" system in Czech Republic (and likely other countries) can be used to log into to various government services. The idea is that you already authenticated to the bank when getting the account, so they can be sure it is really sou when you log in - so why not make it possible for you to log in to other services as well if you want to ?

So we trust a bank more than the government that they won’t extend this to earn more money by disclosing more information? Bad idea. You need a neutral broker.

This could help, but without the culture shift, way too many parents will intentionally and unintentionally break that law.

That would be the status quo if we had better parental controls.

Trying to enforce parental controls via regulation may only be as effective as Europe enforcing the DMA against Apple. But maybe not, because there's a huge market; if Apple XOR Android does it, they'll gain market share. Or governments can try incentive instead of regulation (or both) and fund a phone with better parental controls. Europe wants to launch their own phone; such a feature would make it stand out even among Americans.

Parents can do this today if they wanted to

The problem of "kids accessing the Internet" is a purposeful distraction from the intent of these laws, which is population-level surveillance and Verified Ad Impressions.

It would not be solved without a culture shift. But with a culture shift, giving a kid an unlocked device would be as rare as giving them drugs.

I'm sure it will occasionally happen. But kids are terrible at keeping secrets, so they will only have the unlocked device for temporary periods, and I believe infrequent use of the modern internet is much, much less damaging than the constant use we see problems from today. A rough analogy, comparing social media to alcohol: it's as if today kids are suffering from chronic alcoholism, and in the future, kids occasionally get ahold of a six pack.

Well, age verification is the "we have to do something about this nebulous problem even if the best thing we can think of actually makes everything worse for everyone but it makes us feel better" fallacy, which is equally ridiculous.

I'm saying that, in today's culture, age-gating the internet is likely to be much less effective than age-gating alcohol or tobacco. Most kids spend an appalling amount of time on social media (think, 5 hours/day*); most kids didn't spend this much time or invest this much of their lives into drugs.

* according to this survey from over 2 years ago: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/04/teen-social-use-mental-h...

For the smoking analogy to fit, you'd have to have parents giving their children packs of cigarettes to play with and then being mad at Marlboro they figured out how to smoke them.