[cosmic_cheese]

> And on the actual matter of things, it's really sad to see California to be on the front line of this crap (this screams ageism). And, dear "adults", screw your parental authority so much. Whatever skills I've gained before the university I've done against an explicit parental prohibition. This is what I live off now. Screw you all.

It's yet another surface that totalitarian parental control has crept into, and it's a serious problem. Young people kept strictly within the iron grip of their guardians generally aren't the ones who become happy actualized all-star adults.

Obviously there should be some limits on what teenagers and children can access, it shouldn't be entirely free reign, but robbing them of space to bend the rules severely limits their potential for growth and incurs a strong risk of extinguishing their spark.

[mcmcmc]

> Obviously there should be some limits on what teenagers and children can access

Is it? The only people who should be deciding those limits are parents. If they fail to set and enforce those limits then any negative outcomes for the child are due to their own negligence, and can be adjudicated as child abuse per those laws.

[kelnos]

Exactly. OS makers should build fine-grained parental controls into their OSes, and parents, and only parents, get to decide how much (if any at all) of that to enable for their children.

(And OS makers need to get better at this; from what I understand, it's not difficult for savvy kids to bypass parental controls on iOS and Android.)

[cosmic_cheese]

I agree fully. Limits should be on the shoulders of parents, not the government or any other institution.

[fc417fc802]

If this were the late 80s I would wholeheartedly agree with you. But it isn't. Every device under the sun seems to have a web browser and wifi built into it at this point. Even most TVs are "smart" these days. If you told me that your refrigerator had a web browser and an app store I would assume you were entirely serious.

The internet is full of amazing things but it is simultaneously a largely unfiltered cesspool.

Imagine you live in the suburbs, but at some point the house to your left got demolished and replaced with a casino that doesn't ID anyone. The house to your right got demolished and replaced with a liquor store that doesn't ID anyone. And the house across the street got demolished and replaced with the headquarters of a local group of political extremists.

Sure, there also happens to be an award winning library a couple houses down. But that's largely irrelevant when it comes to the question of how you're supposed to raise children in this environment.

[cosmic_cheese]

I don’t agree. It’s still ultimately up to the parent to keep an eye on what their kids are up to, talk to them and prepare them to handle ugly things (which they will encounter at some point whether you prepare them for it or not, no matter how hard you try to keep them in a bubble), and if they feel necessary impose restrictions on a household basis.

Even if I did agree, the implementations being rolled out present far more danger to adults than requiring an ID to enter a physical establishment ever could. Internet ID systems are rife for political abuse for example, and requiring age attestation at the OS level endangers general purpose computing, adds yet more hoops for free open source OS projects to jump through, and risks making FOSS OSes illegal to use for those who need an escape hatch from their commercial counterparts the most.

[kelnos]

You be a parent and set limits on your children's behavior. You enforce it through the usual means. You don't rely on a nanny-state government to do it for you. That's abandoning your responsibility as a parent.

And let's not seriously try to say internet availability is the same as free-for-all liquor stores and casinos on as your physical neighbors. It's just not. It's still easier to restrict what a kid does online than it is to restrict their physical movements.

(And frankly, it's not that hard to restrict a kid's physical movements.)

[tliltocatl]

You shouldn't apply that kind of thinking to global things. Because what you end up doing is nuking library on earth - there might be a casino somewhere near there. I see your concerns, but, ultimately, parent's carving for a comfortable illusion of control is less important than child's rights. And yes, I'll repeat it again, it's not child's best interest to have their surroundings controlled and censored.

And for reference, when I was talking about my personal experience, I wasn't talking about 80's. More like mid- to late- 00's Russia. The internet was already quite a cesspool at the time, the local IRL even more so. Just I wasn't interested. Once a teen is interested in getting into the edgy stuff there is no amount of regulation can stop them.