This law doesn't do anything that prevents non-anonymous access. Here's how you would access things anonymously if you bought a new computer that implemented this.
1. When you set up your account and it asks for your birthdate, make up any date you want that is at least far enough in the past to indicate an age older that what any site you might use that checks age requires.
2. Access things the way you've always done. All that has changed is that things that care about age checks find out you claim to be old enough.
The only people it actually materially affects on your new computer are people who cannot set up their own accounts, such as children if you have set up permissions so they have to get you to make their accounts.
Then if you want you can enter a birthdate that gives an age that says non-adult, so sites that check age will block them.
From a privacy and anonymity perspective this is essentially equivalent to sites that ask "Are you 18+?" and let you in if you click "yes" and block you if you click "no". It is just doing the asking locally and caching the result.
I agree. I feel the flow of having browsers send some flag to sites is the most privacy-preserving approach to this whole topic. The system owner creates a “child” account that has the flag set by the OS and prevents the execution of unsanctioned software.
This puts the responsibility back on parents to do the bare minimum required in moderating their child’s activities.
What would be even more privacy preserving would be to mandate sites to send age appropriateness headers (mainstream porn sites already do this voluntarily).
Possibly it could be further mandated that the OS collect relevant rating information for each account and provide APIs with which browsers and other software could implement filtering.
And possibly it could be further mandated that web browser adopt support for this filtering standard.
And if you want a really crazy idea you could pass a law mandating that parents configure parental controls on devices of children under (say) 12 and attach civil penalties for repeated failure to do so.
There's never any need for information about the user to be sent off to third parties, nor should we adopt schemes that will inevitably provide ammo for those advocating attested digital platforms.
So does Google send a header for each search result when you look up "Ron Jeremy" so that some results get hidden, or does the browser just block the whole page?
Sending all the "bad" data to the client and hoping the client does the right thing outs a lot of complexity on the client. A lot easier to know things are working if the bad data doesn't ever get sent to the client - it can't display what it didn't get.
I think you would find widespread support from the various websites out there for this. Most porn websites today voluntarily implement some type of mechanism that advertises them as not for children.
If browsers are going to send flags, they should only send a flag if its a minor. Otherwise is another point of tracking data that can be used for fingerprinting.