No.

Basically, as soon as a web service knows your age, they can tailor their content specifically for you. That's great when the service is Netflix and doesn't want to suggest R-rated movies to pre-teens.

That's not quite so great when the "service" is KidGroomer dot com.

Turns out that having machines automatically report the ages of their users is not such a good idea. Turns out that enabling groomers to identify children from adults is a fair bit worse than kids finding naked people on the internet.

Ok. So your variable is set in hardware.

How are you going to prevent the OS or a program from ignoring it?

How are you going to prevent ROM flashing or storage replacement to modify the OS or other software?

I'd be surprised if debian.org or Microsoft.com would be considered child-unfriendly.

The websites?

The problem here is that the OS and all applications on them would need to change their behaviour based on the mode.

I'm not sure what you mean. Nobody's talking about contracts?

yep, everybody knows that already

How would you implement this?

Hardware and firmware combination. Fusible link in the CPU would be the one-way change. Firmware would have to support the service menu option to burn the link forever setting the device to only access the child-friendly internet. The only change in the firmware be the menu to activate the fusible link burning, and later reading the registers where a binary state of "child friendly=0 or 1" exist.

It would require devices so locked down you could never replace or even update the OS on them.

What is child un-friendly about an OS? I can't see any reason why an OS would be labeled not-safe-for-children. I'd be surprised if debian.org or Microsoft.com would be considered child-unfriendly.

You said teens. I didn’t know you meant 18. Even if it wasn’t your topic…surely kids having access to hardcore porn, fetish scenarios, etcetc before they have access to sex ed isn’t optimal.

Yeah…things are better, sex ed wise, then they were in the 80s. Miles better. That’s a great thing - but as I said above, sex-ed can’t keep up with what children are being exposed to. We’re not talking about Playboys and R-Rated movies here. 

You didn’t really get my point, no. My point was that some children are being bombarded with sexual information from all angles, and it’s having unintended consequences. We essentially opened a new all-encompassing type of media and barely tried to regulate it.

No, it's not desirable, but it's coming nonetheless. I was just curious if it's even possible to do it in a way that doesn't harm everyone.

How about we just don't.

This isn’t true.

The internet has been around since the late 90s at the earliest…that’s when some kids started freely accessing adult content.

When I was a kid…(and I grew up unsupervised and poor with one working parent - I was free range)…porn mags were like the holy grail. I literally didn’t see one until I was about 14 and I found one in somebodies forest fort. So think about that…not only could I not find a porn mag…but the person that had one had to go hiking to “use” it.

I mean…we also had homophobic molester gym teachers teaching us health class…

There’s got to be a workable happy medium between no access and no information - and everything always all the time to the max.

I'm sorry. I hope you're ok.

But don't go telling people their pain isn't valid. You literally can't know.

And it's not your fucking place to ask. What you tried to do to me by doing so, I would never do to anyone. And I'm pretty sure you understand why.

Hardcore Christians are just pedophiles and trauma victims.

Alcohol is also harmful to adults.

So is the internet.

To engage with either without risk, mental fortitute and maturity is required.

You should inform the underpaid workers going insane moderating facebook that the pictures can't harm them. I'm sure their need for therapy will instantly vanish.

Oh, mine is a terrible idea, but maybe one of the least bad. I like your idea of making it reusable somehow.

Sure.

Reply to this.

Not the comment where I actually make my case.

None of your business.

I don't need you approval that my past is "real enough" to be allowed to argue my point.

And did you seriously just try to use dismissing my trauma as a point, instead of a logical retort?

It is teaching your kids that you do not trust them, and it is indulging your own paranoia.

Only if you never lift the restrictions, and coddle instead of raise them.

A parent buying their kid their first beer is a show of trust, and confidence in having prepared them. That they weren't allowed before isn't some paranoia about turning them into an alcoholist. It's about preparation and maturity.

It is a display that shows that the parent feels their child is ready and responsible enough for the ability to decide themselves to be granted to them.

A parent enforcing a rule before that is not some violation.

Only, for the internet, the tools and know-how to do so are rare or non-existent.

My parents did this with tons of things as me and my siblings grew up. Each time trusting us with a new piece of responsibility, when they felt we were ready.

What kind of parent doesn't decide their childrens bedtime until they can sanely maintain their sleep schedule themselves?

It was a big day when I was granted the ability to go to visit friends without asking permission first.

Parental control and guidance is essential for the stage-by-stage raising of a child into adulthood. Both online and offline, only tools and practices around the former practically don't exist.

Each parent is also on a deadline. When someone turns 18, all rules come off whether you're ready or not.

As a parent, you should aim for your kid to be making as many decisions themselves as possible by then.

Absolute privacy? Not at all, the fact that I'm over 18 is personal information, you've all invaded my privacy a little bit by reading that. Absolute accuracy? Not at all, I have no idea how anyone would ever prove for sure someone's age. Any potential solution is going to about compromise. The real question is: How well can we verify someone's age well enough while preserving as much privacy as possible?

The best solution I've heard of, that hits a pretty good compromise, is giving the local device some indicator of the user's age, and allow applications or websites to perform a limited resolution query of that value, along the lines of which of several age brackets does the user fall into. The birthday can optionally be provided when the device is configured; a parent can set up a device for their kid, setting whatever value they want for the kid's age. A good implementation would make it quite difficult to extract or change that birthday value without admin rights, which the parents would keep.

If this sounds a lot like the laws in the news from California and Colorado, that's because it is. I think that they're stupid laws, but they describe reasonably good features for software. That law making effort should have been put towards banning the incredibly invasive and somehow also incredibly inaccurate use of AI image processing for age estimation.