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I think a bigger issue in this case is the age. A 10-year old should not have access to TikTok unsupervised, especially when the ToS states the 13-year age thre

by ratorx 2y ago

I think a bigger issue in this case is the age. A 10-year old should not have access to TikTok unsupervised, especially when the ToS states the 13-year age threshold, regardless of the law’s opinion on moderation. I think especially content for children should be much more severely restricted, as it is with other media. It’s pretty well-known that age is easy to fake on the internet. I think that’s something that needs tightening as well. I’m not sure what the best way to approach it is though. There’s a parental education aspect, but I don’t see how general content on the internet can be restricted without putting everything behind an ID-verified login screen or mandating parental filters, which seems quite unrealistic.

Terr_ 2y ago
> I’m not sure what the best way to approach it is though. Pretty much every option is full of pain, but I think the least-terrible approach would be for for sites to describe content with metadata (e.g. HTTP headers) and push all responsibility for blocking/filtering onto the client device. This has several benefits: 1. Cost. The people paying the most expense for the development and maintenance of blocking infrastructure will be the same parents who want to actually use it, instead of creating an enormous implicit tax on the entire digital world. 2. Privacy. The websites of the world don't need to know anything at all about the user. No birthdays, no geographical information to figure out what legal jurisdiction they live in, and no giant national lookup database that can track every website any resident registers to. Just isolated local devices that could be as simple as a Boolean for whether the child lock is currently unabled. (In practice I'm sure there will be local user accounts.) 3. Leveraging physical security. Parents do not need to be programmers to understand and enforce "little Timmy shouldn't be using anything except the tablet we specially set up for him that's covered with stickers of his favorite cartoon." Sure, Timmy might gain access to an unlocked device, but that's a challenge parents and communities are equipped to understand and handle. 4. Rule complexity. The individual devices can be programmed with whatever the local legal rules are for ages of majority, or it can simply be parents' responsibility to change things on a notable birthday. Parents who think ankles on women should never be shown at any age would be responsible for putting on plugins that add extra restrictions, instead of forcing that logic on the rest of the world.
- ratorx 2y ago
  I think this is the most privacy-friendly and reasonable approach. However, as a devil’s advocate, this is still pretty fingerprintable. “Most users load n pages with ankles, the likelihood of a user only loading a single page with ankles is someone under the age of X from country Y with Z% likelihood”

by ratorx 2y ago

Terr_ 2y ago

> I’m not sure what the best way to approach it is though. Pretty much every option is full of pain, but I think the least-terrible approach would be for for sites to describe content with metadata (e.g. HTTP headers) and push all responsibility for blocking/filtering onto the client device. This has several benefits: 1. Cost. The people paying the most expense for the development and maintenance of blocking infrastructure will be the same parents who want to actually use it, instead of creating an enormous implicit tax on the entire digital world. 2. Privacy. The websites of the world don't need to know anything at all about the user. No birthdays, no geographical information to figure out what legal jurisdiction they live in, and no giant national lookup database that can track every website any resident registers to. Just isolated local devices that could be as simple as a Boolean for whether the child lock is currently unabled. (In practice I'm sure there will be local user accounts.) 3. Leveraging physical security. Parents do not need to be programmers to understand and enforce "little Timmy shouldn't be using anything except the tablet we specially set up for him that's covered with stickers of his favorite cartoon." Sure, Timmy might gain access to an unlocked device, but that's a challenge parents and communities are equipped to understand and handle. 4. Rule complexity. The individual devices can be programmed with whatever the local legal rules are for ages of majority, or it can simply be parents' responsibility to change things on a notable birthday. Parents who think ankles on women should never be shown at any age would be responsible for putting on plugins that add extra restrictions, instead of forcing that logic on the rest of the world.

ratorx 2y ago
I think this is the most privacy-friendly and reasonable approach. However, as a devil’s advocate, this is still pretty fingerprintable. “Most users load n pages with ankles, the likelihood of a user only loading a single page with ankles is someone under the age of X from country Y with Z% likelihood”