There has been a lot of swirl around various pieces of age verification legislation and how different platforms and operating system developers are responding. I believe strongly in privacy and that the responsibility for the online activities of children is that of the parents. That said, as a parent, I think we need better tools available, especially for those who are less technically inclined. Here are my ideas:
- A standard needs to be established that is open source and cross platform.
- It should run at the OS level.
- It should be controlled by someone with administrator access to the device / OS (a parent in the case of devices used by children).
- It should be completely optional for that administrator whether they want to turn it on or not.
- The only input should be birth year of the child whose account is being set up. No other personally identifiable info should be included.
- All relevant sites/apps/platforms such as social media and NSFW sites should be required to honor the age indicator.
It needs to be assumed that at some point, any kid who really wants to learn will find a way to circumvent any controls but parents do need better tools.
Aren’t parental controls already in place on most mainstream things?
I’m not sure how much more accommodating for the less technically inclined it can get than settings > parental controls > enable.
Plus it’s 2026 not the 90s. No more of this “teehee I’m a technologically illiterate cutie pie and I don’t want to make an oopsy on my computer settings.” People need to figure out how to use these already user friendly parental control settings/apps and stop putting the onus on everybody else and the govt to keep their kids away from bad stuff on the internet.