Better yet, require online services to send a 'not for kids' flag along with any restricted content then let families configure their devices however they want.
Even better, make the flags granular: <recommended age>, <content flag>, <source>, <type>
13+, profane language, user, text
17+, violence, self, video
18+, unmoderated content, user, text
13+, drug themes, self, audio
and so on...
And here we are again...
ASACP/RTA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Sites_Advocatin...
PICS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_for_Internet_Content_...
POWDER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_for_Web_Description_R...
Tools avaliable for decades.
But as said multiple times, the childs are the distraction, the targets are privacy and freedom.
No - Kid friendly should be something site's Attest to and claim they ARE. That becomes an FTC enforceable market claim (or insert other thing here).
Foreign sites, places that aren't trying to publish things for children? The default state should be unrated content for consumers (adults) prepared to see the content they asked for.
Okay...
0+, kid friendly, self, interactive content
Just say the whole internet is not for kids without adult supervision and leave it at that.
It doesn't even matter if you can get something that technically works. Half the "age appropriate" content targeted at children is horrifying brainrot. Hardcore pornography would be less damaging to them.
Just supervise your damn children people.
This gets complicated when you need to start giving your kids some degree of independence. I would also argue this could be implemented in a more accessibility-oriented approach.
Also, not all 13-year-olds are of equal level of maturity/content appropriate material. I find it very annoying that I can’t just set limits like: no drug-referencing but idgaf about my kid hearing swear words.
On other machines: I do not want certain content to ever be displayed on my work machine. I’d like to have the ability to set that. Someone who has specific background may not want to see things like: children in danger. This could even be applied to their Netflix algorithm. The website: does the dog die, does a good job of categorizing these kinds of content.
yep, 18+, show id at the time of purchasing access soooo easy and zero technical issues.
Other advantages include:
- It's much easier for web sites to implement, potentially even on a page-by-page basis (e.g. using <meta> tags).
- It doesn't disclose whether the user is underage to service providers.
- As mentioned, it allows user agents to filter content "on their own terms" without the server's involvement, e.g. by voluntarily displaying a content warning and allowing the user to click through it.
This exact method was implemented back around the turn of the century by RSAC/ICRA. I think only MSIE ever looked at those tags. But it seems like they met the stated goal of today's age-verification proposals.
That's why I have a hard time crediting the theory that today's proposals are just harmlessly clueless and well intentioned (as dynm suggests). There are many possible ways to make a child-safe internet and it's been a concern for a long time. But, just in the last year there are simultaneous pushes in many regions to enact one specific technique which just happens to pipe a ton of money to a few shady companies, eliminate general purpose computing, be tailor made for social control and political oppression, and on top of that, it isn't even any better at keeping porn away from kids! I think Hanlon's razor has to give way to Occam's here; malice is the simpler explanation.
Internet Explorer had content ratings back in the day
The "problem" back then was that nothing required sites to provide a rating and most of them didn't. Then you didn't have much of a content rating system, instead you effectively had a choice for what to do with "unrated" sites where if you allow them you allow essentially the whole internet and if you block them you might as well save yourself some money by calling up your ISP to cancel.
This could pretty easily be solved by just giving sites some incentive to actually provide a rating.