Parental controls designed for children’s games can be confusing. They also don’t take into account how families may — or may not — communicate.

The “protection of children” has been the cited reason for a lot of controversial laws and measures recently. A common response is that parents should use parental controls to manage that on their own instead of relying on the government to do it to everyone. I found this article interesting since it touched on how the existing tools aren’t that good, and addressing that problem might be a better thing to focus on

Authors:

  • Sara M. Grimes | Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy and Professor, McGill University

  • Riley McNair | PhD Student in Information Studies, University of Toronto

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
    224·
    10 days ago

    A perfect example I get shot down on here a lot is to make browser-level protections. It seems so obvious to me that the browser, an app that is local to the PC, could verify your age (via ID, credit card, something) for no one specific website. That then would authorize you to access mature areas of the internet, and there could be a checkable library within the browser that websites could use to validate this.

    Us being linux nerds here know that there would be ways to circumvent this, but it would be a hell of a great jumping off point vs the current which is “give your ID to each website they totally won’t hand it over to the gov”. The fact that none of those options were seriously considered and they went right for censorship shows exactly what their true motivations are.