I have a kid. All I want is the ability to put a "there's a baby driving" bumper sticker on their devices. And to have pornhub et al steer around them.

I'd suggest that this is actually a pretty common desire from parents. We don't want to collect your IDs. We don't want to install spyware in your webcams. We do want a way to signal there's a kid driving a device.

This article is long on hyperbole and short on facts. I gave up about six paragraphs in, being far more informed about what the author feared about this legislation than its actual content.

Sure, if it would mandate ID harvesting, I'm against it. If it requires biometric verification, no. But if we can just have a way to put bright orange vests on devices that require special treatment... That doesn't feel invasive to me.

I'd prefer to cut all the "think of the children!" charlatans off at the pass. Your kid got traumatized by some crazy hyper porn? Why the heck didn't you flag their device?

In short: you seem to want the Internet to parent your child. I have kids and do not want any of this for them, because all of it is a slippery slope to falling deeper into the surveillance state.

As a parent: do your job and take responsibility for your kids. While it's not trivial this also isn't overly complicated anymore.

The problem is with government mandates.

Apple and Google already ship OSes with comprehensive APIs and parental controls. There's not even any porn on the iOS App Store by policy.

Creating liability for random OS and app developers is absurd, and foreign porn websites aren't going to comply with this anyway.

I can understand the "baby mode" desire, but as the other reply pointed out, this does not need to be legislated. The big OS companies can easily offer this feature for those that want it.

I'm curious though about all this porn that apparently hides behind a rock on the device and leaps out to corrupt tiny minds when they least suspect it.

Shock websites aside, pornography generally doesn't ambush you. Unless you're a republican giving a presentation and have no idea how that porn got in there.

And, AB1043 specifically exempts websites, so it doesn't protect anyone from the goatse's of the world anyway.

These bills will not do what they purport to do, but they will do a whole lot of bad stuff.

> "there's a baby driving"

Why does your baby need internet?

> We do want a way to signal there's a kid driving a device.

Which is extremely irresponsible. It creates a false sense of security and abandons your child to the whims of strangers. This seems akin to putting a "please don't hurt me" sticker on your child and then letting them roam around downtown unsupervised.

> But if we can just have a way to put bright orange vests on devices that require special treatment

There is software you can already use which will lock the device down and only allow it to go to pre-approved sites. I'm unwilling to give up any of my civil rights for your level of convenience above this.

You put your child in the driver’s seat and expect others to make sure it doesn’t make a wrong turn? Did you really have to give it the keys to this hypothetical car instead of, say, LEGO?

You wouldn’t drop a toddler in the cbd and expect them to be fine, why would you expect a device to be any different?

You need to be a parent and stop expecting the people around you to do it for you.

Edit: and there are already device level parental controls.

I have a kid. Actually two kids. They have their usage controlled by google family. I review weekly their internet usage, screen time is limited to 2 hours/day. They dont have social media. School research and etc, they do at home, in the "main computer" in our dinning room. Youtube too. In the end is our responsibility to educate and protect our kids. I truly dont see a need for such extra controls if the parents aren't interested in enforcing it.