Australians to face age checks from search engines

I'm split on it. 100% agree that kids being off social media is better for society. But I can't see how it could be enforced without privacy implications for adults.

Don’t buy them devices and lock down your computer and networks.

I guess if a teenager is enterprising enough to get a job and save up and buy their own devices and pay for their own internet then more power to them.

Obviously an impossible task. Kids need computers for school, and every school provides laptops. Kids don't need access to social media.

Perhaps enforcement at the user end isn't what's needed. A perfect solution is likewise probably unnecessary.

As but one possible example. Common infrastructure to handle whitelisting would probably go a long way here. Just being able to tag a phone, for example, as being possessed by a minor would enable all sorts of voluntary filtering with only minimal cooperation required.

Many sites already have "are you 18 or older" type banners on entry. Imagine if those same sites attached a plaintext flag to all of their traffic so the ISP, home firewall, school firewall, or anyone else would then know to filter that stream for certain (tagged) accounts.

I doubt that's the best way to go about it but there's so much focus on other solutions that are more cumbersome and invasive so I thought it would be interesting to write out the hypothetical.

Yeah that seems pretty reasonable. Apple and Google could extend their parental controls to send a header or something flagging an under age user, for sites to then either block, or remove social elements from the page.

Seems like right now the Aus Government isn't sure how they want it to work and is currently trialing some things. But it does seem like they at least don't want social media sites collecting ID.

No? This was how it was for me. And the only downside was, that all the other kids are glued to their smartphones.

Why is this even controverse. Is there any rational reason why kids should have smartphones? The only reason I see is to let the big companies earn money and because adults don't want to admit, that they are addicted themselves.

Are you 18 or older?

You don’t get that notification show up when you buy alcohol or cigarettes at a shop, would have been easier being a minor buying beer. The porn companies know what they are doing or they would create a adults robots.txt and published a RFC. Hope they won’t ask for age verification for the shroomery

Yeah, I think the thing usually missing from the child smartphone discussions is that many parents are addicted, sometimes even more than their children. Wouldn't expect a phone-addicted parent to moderate their kids, or if they tried, the kids would notice the hypocrisy.

Don't know how long ago you went to school, but at least in Australia, every student is provided a personal laptop for school work which is capable of connecting to social media. Maybe you could block it on your home wifi, but that't a step beyond what most people are capable of. And you'd be an extremely unpopular parent if you were the only one blocking social media while every other kid continues to arrange event invites on Facebook

Blocking it at the service level would be significantly more effective and mean all kids would have to socialise and send using IM platforms instead.

So educate parents or rethink what they need laptops for?

I didn’t say it was going to be easy. But all the middle aged guys who created all these tech startups that are rotting your children’s brains didn’t grow up with this level of technology.

So it’s clearly possible. Does the government or parents have the will to make the change? Maybe not.