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by caspianm
105 days ago
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Doesn't this law just let parents set up age-labelled accounts for their children with the idea that apps not suitable for children won't be allowed under those accounts? Seems no worse than what mobile OSes already do and not that bad a feature for a modern general use OS (except if you monitor someone's age bracket and noticed the exact day they change, you can work out their precise date of birth.) It does seem unsuitable to force it to be added to embedded OSes, freedos, CP/M and historical/retro OSes in general. |
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I think I saw MidnightBSD said it seemed like they were thinking of iOS when they made this law, and I agree.
If you did make a child account on a desktop system, and it had some age category signal that programs and scripts can access ... do you have to prevent the child from making their own programs and scripts, since they could be modified versions of the apps that are supposed to have access to the age signal? So are they not allowed to do programming and app development, or even scripting from a child account? Not so much of a problem on iOS where these are already heavily restricted.
On the other hand, if my Android phone had allowed me to set up an account labelled "adult" and another "child", and disable side-loading on the child account except for specific apps I approve, and then the discord app would stop bugging me for photo-based age identification on the adult account, and would prevent access to adult discord channels on the child account but not the adult account, that sounds fine. Still not sure what to do about programming apps on the child account, maybe parents could decide which ones to allow, but there could be similar problems to deciding this question for a desktop system. Also, it would be good to have a quick-switch - if I want to let my hypothetical child play approved games on the phone, there shouldn't be a cumbersome log out/log in process, just a quick change change that changes the age signal, and tells discord etc not to allow access to adult channels until the signal changes again.