[furyofantares]

Legislating it in the OS takes power away from parental controls.

What you actually described, however, is websites and apps reporting information about their content to the OS. That would indeed give more power to parental controls. But what's being legislated is reporting age range to platforms.

[tomth]

Doesn't make much of a difference, the former is just slightly more privacy friendly than the latter. Which is preferable of course, but no big difference compared to reporting an age bracket to platforms.

I also don't see how it takes anything away, you could still set stricter policies with those tools, or more mild ones if you set the age to 18.

[furyofantares]

Sure, if it's not verified then parental controls could skip the feature entirely and still do whatever blocking they want as normal. This is a terrible argument that it doesn't take anything away from parental controls. It's literally pushing the decision away from parental controls onto the platforms and legislators, with an opinion that it should be based on specific buckets and content that have been legislated, and now parents and developers have to think about both the local blocking and remote blocking matrix.

Maybe I actually like the defaults for some age range blocking and want to make an exception. So, what, parental controls that would like to support this now must implement lying to each app or website individually?

[skydhash]

If OS report age to platforms, the platform can target specific brackets like age[9-13] during christmas without the parent being the wiser. If the platform were required to provide age rating for their content, you (as the parent) may have a higher visibility on what they're pushing to a specific age group.

We have age rating for movies and games and the labels are very easy for parents to discern what to buy for their kids. It would be easier to set preferences on an accounts like steam to filter out games with nudity and brutality, than to let steam know that the user is a 14 year old child.

[furyofantares]

My guess is this is why Meta spent billions lobbying for age verification legislation. They don't want parents making decisions about which content to block or allow for their kids. The form they want this to take is that they get some buckets to optimize engagement within.