alt Hacker News> I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”,
If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag. Lock it behind the most basic parental controls that can be protected and remotely monitored. There are some loopholes with kids downloading apps that allow custom web requests without the flag being sent, so there probably needs to be an app allowlist or special App Store category to match.
Carve out some legal exemptions for Linux distributions that no kids are using and leave it to the iOS, Android, Windows, and Macs of the world. Any parent who doesn’t like the idea doesn’t have to enable it on their kids’ devices.
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> If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag.
Parental controls already exist. Lawmakers want to step in and parent peoples' kids for them by removing these freedoms from everyone.
It doesn't have to be sent anywhere, websites should send a flag when serving various types of content, so parental controls has the information it needs for filtering. Websites could still infer what's being filtered of course, but doing the decision on the client allows for much more granular/extensible categories of content, as well as allowlisting, time limits, etc. Some sites/proxies won't be marked properly, but 99% self-categorizing would help a lot, and it's not like making them do ID checks or attestation is easier than setting an HTTP header or something
just add a flag to the OS
What a fucking stupid, impossible, idea.
Like, explain to me how you think this could be done meaningfully other than some setting that can just be arbitrarily flipped without adding massive complexity.
Several of the laws TFA complains about are literally what you just asked for. Like the California and Illinois laws. They are literally that.