There are several different approaches to trying to keep children from things that are probably bad for them on the internet that have been proposed or passed as laws.

1. Requiring sites in various categories (porn, social media) to make sure they aren't serving children, without specifying how they are to do that.

2. Similar to #1, but specifying specific means the sites must use. They are often pretty bad from a potential privacy perspective because they often specify uploading copies of passports or driver's licenses or other things that could be very harmful to you if they leaked. These laws do at least often require the sites to delete those documents. With #1 sites often ask for the same documents but aren't required to delete them.

3. Like #2 but includes among the allowed means of verification some that don't give the site copies of your sensitive documents.

4. Ones that require operating systems on devices whose primary user is a child to let the parents set the age of the child when the child's account is being set up, and to provide an API that apps can query to find out if the current user is a child.

Whenever any of those are discussed here, or whenever any of the other approaches being developed such as those that allow binding a digital copy of your government ID to a hardware security module you have (such as on a smartphone) and to use that to demonstrate age range without disclosing anything else (Google and Apple have these, and the EU is planning on such a system) is discussed here, 95% of the commenters comment as if it was a #2 type of system.

So might as well discuss this one now. The discussion won't be any different once the text comes out.

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nemomarx 3 days ago | parent [-]

4 is a more interesting pitch, but without knowing if the law requires the OS check the age somehow it's hard to say. I also think ideally it shouldn't be an actual age for privacy reasons? Ideally it should be a kind of adult / not adult flag that's on or off, presumably tied to other parental controls.

So if the legislation leans that way it would be interesting to discuss that part in particular.

	▲	tzs 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		The main type 4 law right now is the one California passed and some others copied. It requires that the parent be able to enter an age or birthdate. The API that the OS must provide to apps is required to let apps ask for age ranges, with these ranges required: [0, 13), [13, 16), [16, 18), [18, ∞). The California bill is mostly fine, and just needs some tweaks. It is way narrower than 99% of the people who comment on it think it is. From what little that has actually been disclosed about the federal bill it sounds like it too is taking a parental control approach, but it also sounds like it might be requiring the OS to actually verify the age. The big question is what does that mean? If it just means the OS has to ask the parents for the age it may be similar to the California law and might just take some tweaking. If it means the OS has to be provided actual proof then it is quite different and much more problematic.