6 ms·

As a parent and also a startup guy and big fan of the anonymous web, my preferred solution would be a requirement for major operating system and browser makers

As a parent and also a startup guy and big fan of the anonymous web, my preferred solution would be a requirement for major operating system and browser makers to allow me to set an age linked to my child's account that gets sent as an HTTP header on every web request. That way the provider does not have to force adults to login or reveal their identity to access unmoderated content, the provider just needs to be legally required to not serve minors certain content if they see the HTTP header.

Ferrotin 4y ago
This would create an impossible moderation burden on any website with user-posted content.
- chlodwig 4y ago
  Any site that is used by children and has user-posted content should spend enough on moderation to keep that user-posted content safe, and they should charge whatever they need to charge to be able to afford the moderation. Children don't need access to unmoderated, advertising supported forums. If I really trusted my teenager to be able to handle unmoderated user-posted content, I, the parent, could remove the age restrictions on their accounts myself.
  - ipnon 4y ago
    Every website is used by children. Law of large numbers, Murphy’s law means if any website is accessible online and children have internet access, eventually a child will visit it. I don’t think we should have books moderate their content for children. The library, parents, teachers and everyone else responsible for children should take the responsibility to restrict these children’s access to material deemed inappropriate. This is how things have worked for countless years, and worked reasonably well. I don’t think controversial shoehorn legislation is going to work any better, but it will come with some downsides.
    - r00fus 4y ago
      This seems relevant - very specific clauses that identify what is children content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32667665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32667665
    - chlodwig 4y ago
      This is how things have worked for countless years, and worked reasonably well. Things have never worked that way for any other medium. Mass internet access has only been around 15 to 30 years, depending on how you count it and arguably it has had disastrous impact on the well-being and mental health of children. Yes, parents shouldn't be leaving their kids alone with the internet, but: 1. Many parents are going to a bad job at monitoring their kid's internet and if we can create rules that will leave their children less messed up, we should do so. We all pay a price when parents raise messed up kids. 2. Even for strict parents and well meaning children, it is so, so much easier to access poisonous things on the internet than on other mediums. It is hard to keep it out 24/7, it needs to be harder to access bad things. 3. As a strict parent, it sucks being stricter than all the other parents, sucks having to battle with kids about why their peers can do something they can't. Without common norms and common rules, their is an incentive for parents to defect by being the "cool" parent. And the reality of life is that no matter what parents do, teenagers are in large part "raised" by their peers. Teenagers view their peers as a source of authority because they have to live with their peers of the rest of their lives, peers represent the new generation. So what indulgent parents allow their children to do matters for my ability to parent my own child.
      - autoexec 4y ago
        > Things have never worked that way for any other medium. they've been working that way for every other medium. Some movies are good for kids, some are full of sex and gore. Parents have the responsibility to keep their kids from watching movies with content they don't want their kids to see. It's the same with TV shows and video games and books and music and plays and puppet shows. All of those mediums exist, and some content will be good for kids and other content is not intended for them. It has always been the job of parents to make sure they aren't sitting in their kids in front of things they don't want them to see/hear. >Many parents are going to a bad job at monitoring their kid's internet... As a strict parent, it sucks being stricter than all the other parents, "Being a parent is hard and some people do it better than others" is not a valid reason to censor content for everyone regardless of their age, or for forcing everyone to hand over personal information and identify themselves to access uncensored content.
- srvmshr 4y ago
  Technologically, why should that be a big challenge? In the simplest model, the HTML would require a privacy tag/flag that would need to be matched against an incoming HTTPS request's attribute. If done right, it might actually be seamless, much unlike the GDPR pop-up which needs to be manually cleared.
- pitched 4y ago
  I would default to calling all content adult-only, to be safe legally. Then, the moderation burden is deciding which ones are child-safe, which is probably a lower hurdle. But still, to be on the safe side legally, I wouldn’t want to mark any user content child-safe. And so we’d end up with the same system we have today.
- kube-system 4y ago
  If a site cannot moderate their content to a level that is appropriate for children, it is not appropriate for children. Sites for children typically have strict moderation, or more often, do not have user-generated content.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Why would it be impossible? Twitter for years has allowed people to mark content, including their whole account, with a content warning. Current categories are: Nudity, Violence, Sensitive That puts most of the burden on the poster, and checking the occasional box is not much of a burden. And these days it also acts as a great tagging system for automated ML filters. Combine that with good tools for users to report violations, and the burden seems pretty manageable. And honestly, it might lower site burdens. If people only see what they want to see, it could reduce user friction and incoming reports.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
xtracto 4y ago
I would do it the other way around: Create a standard header with a "Parental Advisory" PG kind of label. Then let the consumer decide what to do with it. The web is "content", and it is up to the parents to decide how to police their kid's content consumption (same as with music, video, etc). Then we can start talking about Operating Systems, Browsers or Access points features allowing parents to block pages with specific PG ratings.
- chlodwig 4y ago
  Hmm, that would work too. Under this kind of system, the laws protecting children wouldn't ban serving possibly-adult content, or require age checking, but would mandate that you must label certain content with the correct and appropriate age label.
  - mjevans 4y ago
    No. Lack of label should be equated to UNRATED, just like for movies. By _default_ the Internet should be for Adults who have their own right to choose what they see or don't see. Let the OS / browser / etc WHITELIST things based on a claim something is safe for children, or rated in an academic context (E.G. Wikipedia / medical / etc).
    - chlodwig 4y ago
      Right. I'm just saying that there would have to be laws punishing providers who falsely label porn as PG-13 or something. Or punishing providers who label their open, unmoderated forums as PG when in fact it has lots of obscene content on it.
- autoexec 4y ago
  That's a good solution for data that is being sent to users, but doesn't help when it comes to data being collected by sites and services.
  - kube-system 4y ago
StanislavPetrov 4y ago
As a non-parent and a tech guy who believes in freedom, my preferred solution is parents doing their jobs properly and restricting their children's access to devices and content that is harmful and not meant for children. If the burden of responsible parenthood is too much for someone to handle, they don't have to have children. It shouldn't be incumbent on the rest of us to childproof the world because parents are unwilling or unable to monitor and control their children.
- tharne 4y ago
  > As a non-parents and a tech guy who believes in freedom, my preferred solution is parents doing their jobs properly and restricting their children's access to devices and content that is harmful and not meant for children. As a parent, I wholeheartedly agree. It's not the government's job, or anyone else's job besides mine, to determine what content my children see or do not see.
godelski 4y ago
Doesn't this just end up putting your children in a vulnerable position? You're specifically announcing that they are a child. I mean there have been tons of issues with Reddit's r/teenagers and predators specifically targeting that subreddit (and some laughable/revealing moments when other subs tried to ban underage users from their own subreddits and so blocked anyone participating in r/teenagers).
salawat 4y ago
You have just handed every website operator the capability to home in on your child's birth date. Age, combined with sampling over time, leaks birth date. If you add an X-jurisdiction-advise header (presumably so we can do lookups to figure out what laws are in force that we'd have to respect), you'd leak uour zipcode eventually. Creating a bunch of sites to do marketing shenanigans and demographic analysis via matching your traffic with other fingerprint data leaks, can lead to a reasonable approximation of gender over time. Congratulations, you've now managed to leak enough datapoints to be deanonymized. Do not do this. It is also a super terrible user experience, since now, changing the driver of the web browser requires what amounts to a login. I repeat, do not go down this road, there are bad things there.
sandworm101 4y ago
How can it be anonymous if the "major operating system and browser makers" manage an account tied to a paticular person? My OS (linux) never asks me for such, and certainly not my browsers. Safety and anonymity require that corporations and governments be kept as blind as possible.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
what is the difference between this and just install "nanny" software to block stuff?
raxxorraxor 4y ago
Microsoft would immediately require you to upload your ID. Governments want it because they consist of lawyers and corporations like MS want it for government contracts. I think a header field that classifies the content could help. The client needs to do the filtering. I will never use a OS account synced at the OS provider.

Ferrotin 4y ago

This would create an impossible moderation burden on any website with user-posted content.

chlodwig 4y ago
Any site that is used by children and has user-posted content should spend enough on moderation to keep that user-posted content safe, and they should charge whatever they need to charge to be able to afford the moderation. Children don't need access to unmoderated, advertising supported forums. If I really trusted my teenager to be able to handle unmoderated user-posted content, I, the parent, could remove the age restrictions on their accounts myself.
- ipnon 4y ago
  Every website is used by children. Law of large numbers, Murphy’s law means if any website is accessible online and children have internet access, eventually a child will visit it. I don’t think we should have books moderate their content for children. The library, parents, teachers and everyone else responsible for children should take the responsibility to restrict these children’s access to material deemed inappropriate. This is how things have worked for countless years, and worked reasonably well. I don’t think controversial shoehorn legislation is going to work any better, but it will come with some downsides.
  - r00fus 4y ago
    This seems relevant - very specific clauses that identify what is children content: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32667665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32667665
  - chlodwig 4y ago
    This is how things have worked for countless years, and worked reasonably well. Things have never worked that way for any other medium. Mass internet access has only been around 15 to 30 years, depending on how you count it and arguably it has had disastrous impact on the well-being and mental health of children. Yes, parents shouldn't be leaving their kids alone with the internet, but: 1. Many parents are going to a bad job at monitoring their kid's internet and if we can create rules that will leave their children less messed up, we should do so. We all pay a price when parents raise messed up kids. 2. Even for strict parents and well meaning children, it is so, so much easier to access poisonous things on the internet than on other mediums. It is hard to keep it out 24/7, it needs to be harder to access bad things. 3. As a strict parent, it sucks being stricter than all the other parents, sucks having to battle with kids about why their peers can do something they can't. Without common norms and common rules, their is an incentive for parents to defect by being the "cool" parent. And the reality of life is that no matter what parents do, teenagers are in large part "raised" by their peers. Teenagers view their peers as a source of authority because they have to live with their peers of the rest of their lives, peers represent the new generation. So what indulgent parents allow their children to do matters for my ability to parent my own child.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      > Things have never worked that way for any other medium. they've been working that way for every other medium. Some movies are good for kids, some are full of sex and gore. Parents have the responsibility to keep their kids from watching movies with content they don't want their kids to see. It's the same with TV shows and video games and books and music and plays and puppet shows. All of those mediums exist, and some content will be good for kids and other content is not intended for them. It has always been the job of parents to make sure they aren't sitting in their kids in front of things they don't want them to see/hear. >Many parents are going to a bad job at monitoring their kid's internet... As a strict parent, it sucks being stricter than all the other parents, "Being a parent is hard and some people do it better than others" is not a valid reason to censor content for everyone regardless of their age, or for forcing everyone to hand over personal information and identify themselves to access uncensored content.
srvmshr 4y ago
Technologically, why should that be a big challenge? In the simplest model, the HTML would require a privacy tag/flag that would need to be matched against an incoming HTTPS request's attribute. If done right, it might actually be seamless, much unlike the GDPR pop-up which needs to be manually cleared.
pitched 4y ago
I would default to calling all content adult-only, to be safe legally. Then, the moderation burden is deciding which ones are child-safe, which is probably a lower hurdle. But still, to be on the safe side legally, I wouldn’t want to mark any user content child-safe. And so we’d end up with the same system we have today.
kube-system 4y ago
If a site cannot moderate their content to a level that is appropriate for children, it is not appropriate for children. Sites for children typically have strict moderation, or more often, do not have user-generated content.
wpietri 4y ago
Why would it be impossible? Twitter for years has allowed people to mark content, including their whole account, with a content warning. Current categories are: Nudity, Violence, Sensitive That puts most of the burden on the poster, and checking the occasional box is not much of a burden. And these days it also acts as a great tagging system for automated ML filters. Combine that with good tools for users to report violations, and the burden seems pretty manageable. And honestly, it might lower site burdens. If people only see what they want to see, it could reduce user friction and incoming reports.
- hgsgm 4y ago

xtracto 4y ago

I would do it the other way around: Create a standard header with a "Parental Advisory" PG kind of label. Then let the consumer decide what to do with it. The web is "content", and it is up to the parents to decide how to police their kid's content consumption (same as with music, video, etc). Then we can start talking about Operating Systems, Browsers or Access points features allowing parents to block pages with specific PG ratings.

chlodwig 4y ago
Hmm, that would work too. Under this kind of system, the laws protecting children wouldn't ban serving possibly-adult content, or require age checking, but would mandate that you must label certain content with the correct and appropriate age label.
- mjevans 4y ago
  No. Lack of label should be equated to UNRATED, just like for movies. By _default_ the Internet should be for Adults who have their own right to choose what they see or don't see. Let the OS / browser / etc WHITELIST things based on a claim something is safe for children, or rated in an academic context (E.G. Wikipedia / medical / etc).
  - chlodwig 4y ago
    Right. I'm just saying that there would have to be laws punishing providers who falsely label porn as PG-13 or something. Or punishing providers who label their open, unmoderated forums as PG when in fact it has lots of obscene content on it.
autoexec 4y ago
That's a good solution for data that is being sent to users, but doesn't help when it comes to data being collected by sites and services.
- kube-system 4y ago

StanislavPetrov 4y ago

As a non-parent and a tech guy who believes in freedom, my preferred solution is parents doing their jobs properly and restricting their children's access to devices and content that is harmful and not meant for children. If the burden of responsible parenthood is too much for someone to handle, they don't have to have children. It shouldn't be incumbent on the rest of us to childproof the world because parents are unwilling or unable to monitor and control their children.

tharne 4y ago
> As a non-parents and a tech guy who believes in freedom, my preferred solution is parents doing their jobs properly and restricting their children's access to devices and content that is harmful and not meant for children. As a parent, I wholeheartedly agree. It's not the government's job, or anyone else's job besides mine, to determine what content my children see or do not see.

godelski 4y ago

Doesn't this just end up putting your children in a vulnerable position? You're specifically announcing that they are a child. I mean there have been tons of issues with Reddit's r/teenagers and predators specifically targeting that subreddit (and some laughable/revealing moments when other subs tried to ban underage users from their own subreddits and so blocked anyone participating in r/teenagers).

salawat 4y ago

You have just handed every website operator the capability to home in on your child's birth date. Age, combined with sampling over time, leaks birth date. If you add an X-jurisdiction-advise header (presumably so we can do lookups to figure out what laws are in force that we'd have to respect), you'd leak uour zipcode eventually. Creating a bunch of sites to do marketing shenanigans and demographic analysis via matching your traffic with other fingerprint data leaks, can lead to a reasonable approximation of gender over time. Congratulations, you've now managed to leak enough datapoints to be deanonymized. Do not do this. It is also a super terrible user experience, since now, changing the driver of the web browser requires what amounts to a login. I repeat, do not go down this road, there are bad things there.

sandworm101 4y ago

How can it be anonymous if the "major operating system and browser makers" manage an account tied to a paticular person? My OS (linux) never asks me for such, and certainly not my browsers. Safety and anonymity require that corporations and governments be kept as blind as possible.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

what is the difference between this and just install "nanny" software to block stuff?

raxxorraxor 4y ago

Microsoft would immediately require you to upload your ID. Governments want it because they consist of lawyers and corporations like MS want it for government contracts. I think a header field that classifies the content could help. The client needs to do the filtering. I will never use a OS account synced at the OS provider.