alt Hacker News> 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).
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The shifts between flags will correlate with date of birth though, or do you think someone turning 16 or 18 will wait a year or two to switch to more adult content for privacy? Also I'd guess the tech industry would push for more specific age buckets.
Games already have PG ratings and similar in different countries, I don't see the issue there. Web content could set a age appropriateness header and let browsers deal with it, either for specific content or for the whole website if it relies on e.g. addictive mechanics.
Applications is a wide field, but I'd be interested in specific examples where you think it wouldn't work.
Games already have ratings. Every app submitted to the App Store or Google Play is rated.
90% of an R rated movie might be ok for a 12 year old but those one or violent or sex scenes makes it R. Should we be rating every scene in movies?
Give parents general guidance and let them define the controls.
> 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?
Suppose you had an ID requirement instead. Are you going to make two different versions of your game or website, one for people who show ID and another for people who don't? If so, do the same thing. If not, then you have one version and it's either for adults only or it isn't.
> 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.
Except that you essentially are reporting your age, because when you turn 18 the flag changes, which is a pretty strong signal that you just turned 18 and once they deduce your age they can calculate it going forward indefinitely.
This is even worse if it's an automated system because then the flag changes exactly when you turn 18, down to the day, which by itself is ~14 bits of entropy towards uniquely identifying you and in a city of a 100,000 people they only need ~17 bits in total.