>Then, if the content is for adults and you're not one, your parents can configure your device not to display it.

That would require people to be a responsible adult and actively parent their kids.

It's ironic, because people in this country identify with how hard they grind at work, but refuse to put a fraction of that effort into being an involved parent.

It's easier to just let the government ruin everyone else's good time online.

In return, the parents:

1. Get the illusion that their kids are safer (they aren't)

2. Get a clear conscience, and feel better mentally equipped to run on their corporate hamster wheel

It may often times be trickier than that - content often mixed of course. My 10 y/o hit me with a request yesterday to play Among Us where the age verification system wanted my full name, address, email, AND the last 4 digits of my SSN. I refused.

Heh that's already what parental controls do (granted, the website don't report the content, and it's based on blacklists), but they are trivial to bypass. Even the article mention it:

> The child can install a virtual machine, create an account on the virtual machine and set the age to 18 or over

It's precisely how I worked around the parental control my parents put on my computer when I was ~12. Get Virtualbox, get a Kubuntu ISO, and voilà! The funniest is, I did not want to access adult content, but the software had thepiratebay on its blacklist, which I did want.

In the end, I proudly showed them (look ma!), and they promptly removed the control from the computer, as you can't fight a motivated kid.

> Instead, the service should be telling your device the nature of the content. Then, if the content is for adults and you're not one, your parents can configure your device not to display it.

That makes sense for purely offline media playback, but how could that work for a game or application or website? Ship several versions of the app for the different brackets and let the OS choose which to run? Then specifically design your telemetry to avoid logging which version is running?

You'd also not be reporting your age, you'd be sending a "please treat me like an adult" or "please treat me like a child" flag. That's hardly PII. More like a dark/light mode preference, or your language settings (which your browser does send).

Windows already allows this. Content can be set based on age in Microsoft Family. Set an age on a user's account and MS curates the store experience, regardless of which computer the user is logged into.

Who decides the 'nature' of the content? Who decides what constitutes age appropriate?

These questions of liberty are as old as the hills. And the keepers of the internet and virtually every single government past and present have repeatedly and endlessly shown themselves to be lying, conniving, self interested parties. When will 'we' ever learn?

*who decides who 'we' are.

I haven't even thought of this, I'm kinda surprised! This should be how it's done!

It's necessary if the page contains mixed content. Under your proposal, Google Search would need a separate search page that shows adult content, and that would be even worse for privacy - logs would show whether you accessed the adult search page - and adult sites (not only porn) would try quite hard to not be relegated to that second, less discoverable, search page.

Exactly. Except this way you can't build a complete biometric database if all citizen! Since it's so obvious how to do it correctly without creating such a database one could make the assumption the creation of such a database is the actual goal.