[intothemild]

I've said this to every single person who pushed for this.

"Imagine you're a teenager, and your parents and government tell you to not do something... What will happen?"

The answer is of course that they keep doing it anyhow. But hide it.

As an Aussie, and a parent. What I wanted was that the government mandate that in order for your website or app to launch in Australia, that if you want to allow kids between certain ages on the website/app. Then you need to have robust parental controls. Create family accounts where you can link parents and children, share whatever tracking/tracing you have with said parents and make it as good as you can. Mandate specific minimum controls based on what kind of type of app/website it is.

Put the control in the hands of the parents, and not this stupid one size fits all approach.

[astrobe_]

Here some types of small motorize vehicles can be used by persons under 16. Of course, they have built-in speed limiters.

What if we had this kind of distinction for mobile devices with Internet access? Adult's smartphone vs kid's smartphone?

It could be some sort of combo of a specific "for kids" SIM card (with, say, DNS blocking at ISP level and/or date of birth of the user) and a "kids hardened" OS that prevent bypasses and the parental monitoring tools you mention. The OS (in a wide sense, that could extend to the browser and other mission-critical programs) could be certified by some national agency; commercial products have to pay for the test, FLOSS projects could tested for free on request.

[jtokoph]

Won’t kids just make a new secret account that doesn’t belong to the family? Like you said, they will do it anyway

[intothemild]

Still better than what we have now.

[blitzar]

We just need to go back to telling kids they cant go outside and cant have sex.

[grebc]

They're providing for lowest common denominator.

You already said you've got your own solution.

[ranger_danger]

Nice idea but how are you going to prevent the kids from creating their own parent accounts while preserving people's privacy and without being too invasive?

[intothemild]

You introduce it at a really young age, which is what we did for our daughter. She doesn't get access to anything that doesn't have good parental controls.

So far it's working fine, I expect that to change in the future. But it's also both the carrot and the stick at the moment.

As for creating parent accounts themselves. Imagine you've got a kid, you've created an account for you and the kid.. you have stats, data, usage etc. And suddenly the kids on their device all day, but you see nothing. That's how you know.

Will the kid find a way around it. Probably.. I expect them too. But it's still a hell of a lot better than what we have. Because it puts more control and visibility in the hands of the parents than it does the state and people like Peter Thiel.

Will there be idiot parents who just don't care. For sure. But thats already happening. You can't stop that.