Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for privacy. But between setting up the birthdate when creating my children’s local account on their computers, and having to send a copy of their ID to every platform under the sun, I’d easily chose the former.
I’d even agree to a simple protocol (HTTP X-Over-18 / X-Over-21 headers?) to that.
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.)
Parents, schools, employers, and governments, already use content controls to restrict users from accessing undesirable sites and services on the internet.
Searching the terms “content blocking” or “parental controls” will get you lists of apps and services doing just that.
Parents already have the capability. This law doesn’t provide any additional capability for parents to parent their kids. This law seeks, instead, to remove the power and responsibility of parenting from the parents, and assign it to pornographers. They want the operators of adult websites around the world to be the ones determining whether or not to provide content to their kids.
What this law actually does is provide a means for a website to determine whether an adult or a child is trying to access their content, and to use that information to decide what content to provide. The thinking is that a respectable services like Netflix will be able to decide to provide only age-appropriate content, blocking kids from adult content.
However, that also means that services like “KidGroomer dot com” will be able to provide different content to adults than it does to children. To an adult, they can portray themselves as a site that provides information on how to protect kids from grooming. But when a kid visits, this law lets the site know it is a kid. The site can now show them kid-targeted content, like how to get in contact with the nearest candy-giving stranger.
Perhaps we don’t actually want a website to be able to determine whether there is a kid on the other side of the screen.