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Australians to face age checks from search engines

(ia.acs.org.au)
139 points stubish | 1 comments | 01 Jul 25 23:59 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source
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hilbert42 ◴[02 Jul 25 01:16 UTC] No.44439416[source]▶
A resident of said country here. Another questionable measure by Government to protect our mollycoddled, insufficiently-resilient society.

That said, a better approach would be to limit kids under certain age from owning smartphones with full internet access. Instead, they could have a phone without internet access—dumb phones—or ones with curated/limited access.

Personally, I'm not too worried about what risqué stuff they'll see online especially so teenagers (they'll find that one way or other) but it's more about the distraction smartphones cause.

Thinking back to my teenage years I'm almost certain I would have been tempted to waste too much time online when it would have been better for me to be doing homework or playing sport.

It goes without saying that smartphones are designed to be addictive and we need to protect kids more from this addiction than from from bad online content. That's not to say they should have unfettered access to extreme content, they should not.

It seems to me that having access to only filtered IP addresses would be a better solution.

This ill-considerd gut reaction involving the whole community isn't a sensible decision if for no other reason than it allows sites like Google to sap up even more of a user's personal information.

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Tade0 ◴[02 Jul 25 06:14 UTC] No.44440703[source]▶
My take is just like we have allowance to introduce children to the concept of money, parents could use data allowance to introduce children to the concept of the internet.

The worst content out there is typically data-heavy, the best - not necessarily, as it can well be text in most cases.

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1. red_admiral ◴[02 Jul 25 11:19 UTC] No.44442342[source]▶
Money is, depending on the country, slowly evolving from physical coins/notes to plastic cards to pretend plastic cards on smartphones, to the same but you need an app to manage the account, to let's stop pretending and just use an app in the first place.

The last one is difficult because you need a common standard, either someone becomes a monopoly (or two or three quasi-monopolies such as google/apple) or better still this is one of few cases where government regulation could do more good than harm.

I think China is already close to the last phase at least in cities, going down the government regulated route?

This is highly country dependent of course - in some places shops must accept coins by law, even if it's so unusual that you have to roll a critical success to get the right amount of change back.

I would like a world where we can give children physical pocket money rather than some abstraction, and they don't need a smartphone of their own to check their balance. But we'll probably have to fight for that at some point.