Sure. I think clearly this thread has been talking about the OS piece specifically. I wholly disagree with having some private company that collects IDs and makes the determination themselves. If instead your browser can just ask your device if you have parental controls enabled, then that removes the privacy concern entirely, as far as I know. Is there an extra data point for browser fingerprinting? Yeah, I guess. But I would also assume that anyone who cares to avoid this fingerprinting is going to not have parental controls enabled.

Essentially, I'm confused why the world gave up so quickly on parental controls (not really confused—the alternative provides more surveillance capability).

People keep saying this. Is it not within an operating system's purview to provide parents tools to configure what their kid can do with the system? Have parental controls been out-of-scope for all these OSes this whole time?

Whether it should be government-mandated is one question, but it seems more like this "it's the parent's job, not the OS's" has become a tagline that people just repeat rather than really thinking through it.

Is your expectation then that parents should sit over their kids' shoulder every moment that they access the internet? Are our tools not supposed to make that easier to handle?

At the very most, provide tools to help parents (e.g. on device filtering etc. or require companies to provide APIs to facilitate the same goal)

I thought that this is what you were getting at here, which is why I asked how this was an argument against values held locally on the device.

I am or am in the process of being rid of most of them except for Amazon. Unfortunately, there's no end in sight for Amazon.

Since email seems like the key to everything now, starting fresh with a new service was the most logical place to start for me. I went with Proton, largely because email and VPN in one payment. From there, replace (or transfer) old accounts one-by-one.

Oh yeah, and everyone else is mentioning this, so I'll add it too: it's also a good time to reevaluate where you spend your time, so check:

1. Can I discard this service? If no, then...
2. Can I replace this service? If no, then...
3. Should I transfer my account for this service?

Where we think* it's likely to form. We've yet to find verifiable genesis elsewhere, and so we can't well determine whether the nature of our genesis is common or rare. And how many times has life started on Earth alone?

Similarly, our definition of life may need changing upon alien discoveries.

How can you provide the capability for parents to keep their children off inappropriate websites if you don't require that sites adhere to a conduct?

(I'm simply asking why this makes it an inherently bad solution—not suggesting that there aren't better solutions.)

How is your first reason an argument against OS-level check?

I like to say I'm a musician and a game developer, but it's been so long since I've seriously participated in either that I don't think I deserve to describe myself as such right now.

I enjoy languages, which I do actively study unprofessionally.

Aside from my actual day job, I spend most of my time playing whichever single game I'm hyperfocusing on at the moment, although I would rather be doing one of the aforementioned hobbies.

Never heard of the mi'raj. That's got a 65% chance to stick as a hyper obsession on which I base game handles.

I've had a very shallow interest in hares for some time.

Now someone tell me a terrifying fact about them.

Scoubidoubideaux, tu vas où

I think maybe the barrier could be a little higher than just disconnecting from your home's network.

If we were to accept the premise that there is currently an issue with child internet safety, then clearly this still an issue despite the existence of router controls. But now the question of if this premise is valid. What do you look at to determine whether "internet safety for children" is adequate? I don't really know, and so I guess I have more reading to do.

I was gonna say something about PSAs, but no time.

Wrote a comment recently. Age verification? Unnecessary. OS-level parental controls? Possibly meriting.

https://programming.dev/comment/22589550

I am still against where all this age verification crap is coming from, and I'm against what specifically "age verification" entails; but here's the thing: We keep saying, "It should be the parent's responsibility to secure their kids"—and while that's true, you can do all the talking and educating you want, but the fact is that the internet is now nigh-fully integrated with our lives, and unless you are surveilling your kid at every moment they are on the internet (don't recommend), not every parent has the time, resources, or know-how to keep their children safe on the internet without help.

There are some states pushing for "OS-level age verification," and I'm not convinced the proponents for this idea know what this combination of words means—but the idea isn't all bad. An interface for apps to query the device for a simple "can access adult content" value would be helpful for parents to better manage what their kids can access without having to hover 24/7. There is zero need for any sort of identification at any point in the process. The fact that legislation is promoting cumbersome identification collection and not the already existing idea of parental controls is evidence enough that this is designed to surveil.

This may address the privacy concern, but the issue still remains of a centralized power deciding what is and what isn't "safe for kids."

I don't think we're gonna get around the child internet safety conversation, and for good reason; but the conversation should be around how we can do it without jeopardizing individuals' safety and privacy, including children.