alt Hacker NewsI think getting the age thing correct is key to get parental classification to work properly(I think now platforms just ask for a birth date which is lame) e.g
> Surveys by Britain’s tech regulator, Ofcom, find that among children aged 10-12, over half use Snapchat, more than 60% TikTok and more than 70% WhatsApp. All three apps have a notional minimum age of 13: https://archive.ph/y3pQO
Once you get the classification correct — and AI cannot it do this — only via community ombudsman/age verifiers, in a privacy first way*, the app stores can easily tell the app devs what accounts are sensitive and filtering should be much more effective.
*Basically once your age is verified by a real human for your device(using device local encryption to verify biometrics) you are set. No kid should be able to bypass and install apps it on devices that their parents hand to them. There will always be black market devices with these apps, but there are ways of beating those to be very minimal by existing tech.
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This all depends on fantasy tech and/or totalitarian control of tech.
Who verifies that the person verifying the child's age is actually authorised to do that? Who verifies that verification? And so on up. This needs a chain of trust that can only end up at government. And that chain of trust will then be open to being abused by shitty politicians.
What mechanism in (e.g) Linux is responsible for implementing this age verification so that it cannot be tampered with (or trivially overruled by a sudo call)? Which organisation is legally liable if that mechanism doesn't do its job? How can we stop someone from overwriting that mechanism with their own, in an open OS that is deliberately designed to allow anyone with root to change anything on it?
What you propose here is the death of open computing. And I personally believe that we would be much better off as a species if we kept open computing and just taught our kids how to handle social media better.
> only via community ombudsman/age verifiers
Why do you need any third parties whatsoever? Just have the parents do it. They configure a setting in the kid's device which the device uses to determine what content to display. All you need from the app/service is a rating for the content. No third parties should never have to know anything about the user, because the user's device knows that, and the device knows it because the parents do.