At best, you go back and forth between no privacy, a heavily condition privacy. At best.
Let’s take privacy back, but that’s a big process.
If you haven’t internalized surveillance, start working on it!
Forcing providers to divine the age of the user, or requiring an adult's identity to verify that they are not a child, is backwards, for all the reasons pointed out. But that's not the only way to "protect the children". Relying on a very minimal level of parental supervision of device use should be fine; we already expect far more than that in non-technology areas.
1) Given that it just says you're a "child", how does that work across jurisdictions where the adult age may not be 18?
2) It seems like it could be abused by fingerprinters, ad services, and even hostile websites that want to show inappropriate content to children.
It's a client-side flag saying "treat this request as coming from a child (whatever that means to you)". I don't follow what the jurisdiction concern is.
[EDIT] Oooooh you mean if a child is legally 18 where the server is, but 16 where the client is. But the header could be un-set for a 5-year-old, too, so I don't think that much matters. The idea would be to empower parents to set a policy that flags requests from their kids as coming from a child. If they fail to do that, I suppose that'd be on them.
It doesn't seem sufficient, and would probably lead to age verification laws anyway.
Alternatively, just use an older browser that doesn't serve the header.
If anything, you'd want the reverse. A header that serves as a disclaimer saying "I'm an adult, you can serve me anything" and then the host would only serve if the browser sends that header. And you'd have to turn it on through the settings/parental controls.
Now, this doesn't handle the proxy situation. You could still have a proxy site that served the request with the header for you, but there's not much you can do about that regardless.
Even the idea of prosecuting parents for allowing their child to access 'information,' no matter what that information is, just sounds like asking for 1984-style insanity.
A good rule of thumb when creating laws: imagine someone with opposite political views from yours applying said law at their discretion (because it will happen at some point!).
Another good question to ask yourself: is this really a severe enough problem that government needs to apply authoritarian control via its monopoly on violence to try to solve? Or is it just something I'm abstractly worried about because some pseudo-intellectuals are doing media tours to try to sell books by inciting moral panic?
As with every generation who is constantly worried about what "kids these days" are up to, it's highly highly likely the kids will be fine.
The worrying is a good instinct, but when it becomes an irrational media hysteria (the phase we're in for the millennial generation who've had kids and are becoming their parents), it creates perverse incentives and leads to dumb outcomes.
The truth is the young are more adaptable than the old. It's the adults we need to worry about.
mikece•2h ago
no_wizard•1h ago
guilamu•53m ago
owisd•27m ago