this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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not necessarily. you give a phone to your children. you partly lock it down by setting it up as a child account, with its age. you make sure to install a web browser that supports limiting access to age appropriate content according to the age set in the system, maybe taking a parent allowed whitelist. the website is legally obliged to set an appropriate age limit value in a standard HTTP header.
that way, the website does not know your age. the decision is on the web browser.
the web browser checks the configuration in the system, that only the parent can change. it does not send it anywhere, only does a yes/no decision. if the site is not ok, it'll show a thing like when the connection is not secure or it was put on the safebrowsing list, except that you can't skip it, only option is to request parent permission.
and finally the age is set in the operating system, without verifying its truthiness, but once again requesting lock screen authentication.
oh and app installs need parent approval for kid accounts, like it should almost always be.
this way it's as private as it can get. the only way a website can find out information about you from this, is to log if your browser loaded the html but not any other resources, because that means you were caught in the age filter. but that's it.
there's multiple pieces in this that is not yet implemented, but they should be possible with not too much work.
this is all possible with open source code, if you make sure the kid can't install anything without parent approval. stores like fdroid could have some badge or something if a browser supports this kind of limitation.
All of this is precluded by you using a browser that is authorised and approved by the government.
fuck any and all government that wants to limit what browsers we can use! the legislation should end at requiring websites to provide their classification in the headers. after that, it's the parents job to set up the device properly.
This is kinda genius
All's well until other countries try to implement this and you will very quickly see how nearly none of them agree with each other on which age limit goes where. In my opinion, the best way to ensure that children don't go to certain places on the internet is to either not give them access to the internet at all or to only let them use whitelisted websites that you review yourself before adding.
that's the task of the website to figure out, the device does not have to be aware of the laws. but I think is still much easier to manage than id verification.
I habe an other idea. don't make the websites send agelimit http headers, because as you said that can easily vary by country. instead send http headers that tell what kind of content is available there. only the categories that could be questionable. that way the device (actually the browser) would decide if with the kid account's age that kind of content is accessible.
that way the browsers need to know the age limits, and maybe it's easier to handle it this way.
ok, and I agree, but only very few parents will do that unfortunately. especially considering that their kids could be discriminated against by their ~~limited~~ clasates who don't have their access so broadly limited.
and then, you still need such a whitelisting capability, which I think does not really exist today in firefox and such browsers. addons cant solve this because they can be removed.
That still could vary greatly by country and culture, as one man's pornography could very well be another man's art. You would either need a great deal of near-duplicate categories or just label something as explicit the moment a single country pipes up about a woman not concealing her hair or something else that doesn't bother you one bit.
I suppose that we could at least be able to convince the parents that letting their children go unsupervised on the internet is like letting them go unsupervised in the big city. Totally fine if they're old enough to know what they're doing and don't stray too far from where they're meant to be going, but unacceptable if they're not so wise yet and aren't at least somewhat regularly checked up on. Children will always want the forbidden fruit, but their parents should restrain them until they understand why it was forbidden to them in the first place, and how to safely interact with it.
I'm not too well versed in this kind of software either, but I just looked up some parental controls services and they seem to offer device-level blocking of unwanted websites/apps/downloads/etc. Web browsers don't need to do the blocking, as the parental controls probably refuse the connections to the web domains.
I didn't even mention all of this being completely bypassed if you used another website as a kind of proxy: go to proxywebsite.com -> it has a search bar -> use it to go to explicitwebsite.com -> proxywebsite.com returns the html, css, js etc of explicitwebsite.com without you ever visiting it -> profit.
that's right. but I don't think this system would be manageable for website owners if they wanted to comply with any and all countries laws. what if a country just bans any pictures about women? or something insensible like that.
since this system is only for child protection, and wont be able to barr adults from accessing sites, I think it makes sense if a website owner only wants to be compatible with countries that have sensible laws for this purpose. like banning child access to any kind of porn, gambling, and such. I think the PEGI rating system could be used for this, it's been around for ages. but if a country has banned pictures that depict women in any way, they would just outright block that country, both because it would be very hard to deal with them anyways and because this is not supposed to be a censoring tool.
that sounds good, and things like this should go in place of TV and youtube ads, but it's very hard to reach so many parents without some kind of mandatory thing. and then, where I live I often enough see parents who have a baby stroller with a built-in fucking smart phone holder!! and guess what it is being used, the brainrot is flooding from them all the time. I guess that's their approach to parenting even at home. it would be especially hard to convince these parents that this is bad.
Ah, I had been thinking that the parent would decide. But of course, how naive of me lol
Doesn't need to be by age tbh- you could have content tags and filter by content instead of age (I.e. No graphic violence). That would ignore country discrepancies and then give more flexibility