alt Hacker NewsI mean, we already have corporations levying a society-wide information tracking system that they just sell the government information from, so there's that.
With this said, if the government doesn't ban cellphones/tablets at school all of your blocking kids at home from electronics is fucking useless.
My daughter pulled this crap as a teenager where we banned her from social media... so she got an old tablet from a friend and setup all new accounts. It was only months later that we caught her at it.
Kids are way more resourceful than you think.
Of course they pull that kind of crap. Teens are often plenty smart, just generally naive to consequences.
They'll do this kind of stuff even if we require spybotting the entire internet. Kids already lean on sketchy older siblings or friends or stolen/fake credentials to acquire booze illegally. Getting them to sign up for and verify online accounts would be next. Or paying/doing favors for random sketchy adults. Or buying them online, as the original article mentioned.
Anything more than the equivalent of "mark this device account as being PG/PG-13/Adult" isn't buying more security for kids, just more intrusion into the lives of everyone else, while pushing access into a black market that will create new dangers for the kids entering into it.
A device flag enabling an http header indicating a device account is "PG-13" could still allow a kid to sign up to non-adult sites online, but then have appropriate restrictions on usage etc applied to the accounts. Kids can access their friends, maybe the media cuts off during school hours, but they don't feel the need to escape the system, and are more likely to stay within it.
Requiring invasive overbearing authoritarian systems be put in place with the excuse of saving the children won't accomplish the stated goal, just the unstated one.