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this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2025
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The solution to all of this “think of the children” stuff is that devices owned/used by children should have to be registered as a child’s device, which would enable certain content blockers.
Forcing adults to verify their identity, rather than simply activating some broad based restrictions on devices being purchased for child use, is a waste of time. Kids will still find workarounds. Adult privacy will be compromised.
Its also an easily enforceable policy to require registration of children’s devices. You can hold the parents to compliance. You can hold the carriers to compliance. Its truly the simplest way to keep kids from accessing porn without having to mess with adult use of the internet whatsoever
Goal achieved. "Think of the children" is subterfuge.
The arguments that I’ve seen against that is that the problem is the hardware. The child can figure out/find a hack to circumvent the restrictions. A determined 11/12 year old could do it. They’re the ones who still need restriction.
So what you're telling me is you don't think an 11/13/14 yo could use an LLM to age up a selfie to gain access to subreddits they shouldn't be accessing (legally or morally). But you do think that same age group of children is going to gain root access to a device in order to flash some software to circumvent a device specific toggle limiting their device by hard coding it as a child's device.
I don't think this is a good idea...
This is even more invasive - it would mean all the traffic and activity in every device would be traceable to a registration. Whereas now they might have a pretty good lock on individual device ids, they'd then have an actual registry of devices and owners to verify it against
A simple toggle, secured with a password would do it. Child's device Y/N. If no, proceed. Your browser or whatever app you're using would only need to see that one setting, and it's not much different than your browser looking at any number of settings on your device.
Shit with TWO toggles, the other being "is this child under the age of 13?" You could even force sites like YouTube actually to comply with federal law about targeting minors with advertising.
But. These laws aren't actually about protecting children, they're about establishing a real identity for every person online.
That's kinda the case right now already, but the problem is that adult-only sites don't work with that currently.
So the right solution would be to mandate that e.g. all sites are required to return a header with an age recommendation or something similar, so that a device set to child-mode then can block all these sites. And if a site doesn't set the header, it will also get blocked on child-mode devices
Wouldn't be too hard to do, and accidental overblocking would only occur on child-mode devices, so there's not much of a loss there.
Legislation could then be focussed on mandating that these headers aren't falsely set (e.g. a porn site setting the header to child-friendly).