Reality check: Children have many and useful opportunities to use devices in all kinds of situations away from parents.
Useful situations. On devices parents don't control.
Expecting parents to follow their children around 24/7, in case they access some adult site from a public or friend's device they don't control is beyond ridiculous.
Privacy protecting, anonymous validation of 18+ status solves the problem, in a way that doesn't require unrealistic "parenting" behavior, protects everyone's privacy, and is even helpful to responsible adult sites.
Condescendingly telling parents to "parent" in a way that is virtually impossible, instead of helping, is just rolling out the red carpet for alternate non-anonymous age verification legislation.
Zero knowledge tech, like end-to-end encryption, protects privacy.
Children will always be able to use devices or accounts borrowed or bought from adults, regardless of how the initial verification is carried out. Not to mention that the verification key / token / device might also be borrowed or when copied or transferred, depending on how it's implemented.
I think a device level setting is actually quite pragmatic.
I am having trouble understanding how anyone is unaware that children have pervasive and useful access to devices outside of their parent's sphere on a daily basis.
Or why anyone would discourage use of cryptographically hard privacy protecting solutions.
This is the perfect opportunity to take zero knowledge proofs mainstream, like end-to-end encryption, as a solution for myriads of current privacy leaking services and infrastructure.
The alternative to cryptographically protected privacy, is sites increasingly collecting people's identifiable information and associating their identities with access/behavior logs. Information that can never be assumed to stay private.
Let’s start with friend’s devices. Children have lots of devices and lots of friends.
Friend’s phones, home computers and devices of other family members.
Unattended PCs and laptops at school. According to a music teacher who has literally had to clean her work computer after it was used for erotic viewing by students when the music room in a temp building wasn’t otherwise in use.
Web browsers on game consoles, e-readers, VR headsets, smart TVs, tablets, …
Now throw in constant device turnover, software updates, including settings panel changes, and settings values that get reverted, across the board.
I am not sure why you wanted my opinion. That’s less of an opinion and more of a list of what counts as ordinary for the last decade or so.
So if we secure personal devices of children, with simple, standardized "child-owned" marker, we're basically back to 80s/90s, where children could occasionally get access to adult material via friends or irresponsible adults.
In my opinion that's more than enough, especially when you compare it to requiring everyone to identify themselves. It may be ZPK on the tin, but likely it will be close-source, corporation owned implementation, which will have holes. Then in a few years we will learn that Meta exploited them for years to sell your soul for ad money.
Btw - students occasionally steal teacher's cars. Should we block engine start with ID check too?
> In my opinion that's more than enough, especially when you compare it to requiring everyone to identify themselves.
The solution I proposed was the opposite of people identifying themselves.
Zero knowledge proofs. Enabling trusted verification without revealing identity is exactly what cryptographers designed them for.
We should be using them everywhere. Like end-to-end encryption they provide massive privacy, security, and trust (I.e. ability to verify intended disclosure) improvements.
Or we can complain about parents, the ones who care enough to ask for better help, while legislatures keep passing identity revealing anti-privacy rules. That seems to be the direction many are taking here. Complain, condescendingly, don’t solve anything. Repeat.
Useful situations. On devices parents don't control.
Expecting parents to follow their children around 24/7, in case they access some adult site from a public or friend's device they don't control is beyond ridiculous.
Privacy protecting, anonymous validation of 18+ status solves the problem, in a way that doesn't require unrealistic "parenting" behavior, protects everyone's privacy, and is even helpful to responsible adult sites.
Condescendingly telling parents to "parent" in a way that is virtually impossible, instead of helping, is just rolling out the red carpet for alternate non-anonymous age verification legislation.
Zero knowledge tech, like end-to-end encryption, protects privacy.