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Giving kids a computing device isn’t much like giving them a car so that analogy fails for me. Instead, think of it like a portal to a child’s view of the Inter

Giving kids a computing device isn’t much like giving them a car so that analogy fails for me. Instead, think of it like a portal to a child’s view of the Internet. Child-locked devices get one view of the Internet and unlocked devices get a different view. The view you get depends on whether the lock is on or not. It’s true that devices aren’t people, but I think that’s a strength of taking a device-based approach. Parents (or anyone who is curious) should easily be able to see for themselves what the child-locked Internet looks like. Search engines should be able to crawl the Internet in child-locked mode to see what’s there. This would make it easier to do things like enforcing laws against advertising to children. Maybe some features like cookies cookies could be disabled? It’s okay for people to share devices. Parents (or anyone else who is curious) can use a child-locked device to see what the Internet looks like for kids. Kids can use a parents’ device with supervision to see the adult view.

mikeysight 2mo ago
I think we just hold a different mental model of the problem, and that's fine. I view the internet as a digital world of destinations, and devices as the vehicles we use to visit those destinations. In the physical world, children share the same environment that we do. A school, casino and a liquor store can all be found on the same street, and we would never suppose that the latter two establishments have no responsibility to verify their customers are of age simply because they were able to drive themselves there. This model works shockingly well in the physical world, and I believe it's the most intuitive for the digital world as well. I do actually think there's still a role for device-based parental controls in certain contexts for many of the reasons you mentioned (the portal is a cool analogy for this), and I like both your ad and cookie blocking ideas. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.

mikeysight 2mo ago

I think we just hold a different mental model of the problem, and that's fine. I view the internet as a digital world of destinations, and devices as the vehicles we use to visit those destinations. In the physical world, children share the same environment that we do. A school, casino and a liquor store can all be found on the same street, and we would never suppose that the latter two establishments have no responsibility to verify their customers are of age simply because they were able to drive themselves there. This model works shockingly well in the physical world, and I believe it's the most intuitive for the digital world as well. I do actually think there's still a role for device-based parental controls in certain contexts for many of the reasons you mentioned (the portal is a cool analogy for this), and I like both your ad and cookie blocking ideas. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.