Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for privacy. But between setting up the birthdate when creating my children’s local account on their computers, and having to send a copy of their ID to every platform under the sun, I’d easily chose the former.
I’d even agree to a simple protocol (HTTP X-Over-18 / X-Over-21 headers?) to that.
One thing I said before is the question of what is the research on this, and how do we know child internet safety is actually a problem? I don’t know the statistics on this, and I haven’t done much studying on it yet. So I will admit that I have been operating under the premise that this is an issue to begin with. Someone mentioned routers with parental blocks. Aside from being able to easily disconnect from the network (inevitability for kids because it’s easy and they have plausible deniability, in my opinion), if child internet safety is currently an issue, then clearly there is something about it that isn’t working.
Don’t get me wrong, it would still require another component whether that be a requirement for websites to query the OS via the browser, or a database of “bad” websites.
Now, if you want there to be an app that handles this, that’s your opinion and I respect that. Personally, I would rather it be built into the OS. Least of all because already-on-your-device is easier than something parents need to research and download on their kids’ devices. More significantly, if this kind of capability becomes an expectation for your general usage OSes to have, then that’s less incentive for some company to come in and try to capitalize off of it and charge $12.99 per month, and then still have incentive to collect and sell data on which sites are being visited. I mean, you can be reasonably sure that Microsoft is gonna do that too, but that would be another reason to switch to a Linux distro that doesn’t do that.
I meant there would be no way to stop any OS from just waving users through and automatically converting their account into an ‘adult account’, or just asking users “Are you 18 yes/no”. How many variations of Linux are there now?
I’d be in favour of the government commissioning and funding this and making it free-to-access for parents.
Right, but in this case, the parental controls just wouldn’t be doing their job. I mean, you’re right—there’s nothing you can do about that. But if I’m turning on a setting to enable a parental control and it doesn’t enable the parental control, then I’m 1) complaining about Microslop in the case of Windows, or 2) switching my kids to a different distro in the case of Linux. Again, I’m against the idea of government-mandated on the OS side. I’m undecided on the website side of things.
I’m gonna transcribe a section of a comment I made in another post:
That’s interesting. I’m in America and, unless it’s FOSS, I definitely 100% do not trust a government-commissioned application that needs to see and manage all of my home’s network traffic in order to work. Especially not right now.
Well if it’s not mandated (on the OS side that you refer to) then sure.
I mean it would be opt-in. Me and you wouldn’t ever get it and websites and developers wouldn’t be burdened by it. That’s the point.
No problem with your excerpt there either.