The thing is, this shouldn’t really a problem.

I am still against where all this age verification crap is coming from, and I’m against what specifically “age verification” entails; but here’s the thing: We keep saying, “It should be the parent’s responsibility to secure their kids”—and while that’s true, you can do all the talking and educating you want, but the fact is, the internet is now nigh-fully integrated with our lives, and unless you are surveilling your kid at every moment they are on the internet (don’t recommend), not every parent has the time, resources, or know-how to keep their children safe on the internet without help.

So to play naive for a moment and ignore the well-understood reality that “child safety” is an atom-thick veil for mass surveillance: Why did we give up so fast on device parental controls? The OS-level verification actually isn’t so bad of an idea if the implementation valued both safety and privacy. Upon setting up the device, it is the parent’s responsibility to create a password or biometric or whatever to activate/deactivate the safety mode. It should be pretty easy. Are there technically ways for the kid to get around this? Yes, but that’d be breaking the trust. In the same way you’d deal with your kid sneaking out of the house, you deal with that separately. The existence of websites that don’t perform the check is inevitable no matter what you do.

And if you don’t believe your kid needs a safety lock on the internet, then that’s your prerogative.

It’s apparent that parents need better tools, but privacy doesn’t need to be compromised in order to achieve a safer internet. I got lazy while writing this, and I’m sure that’s clear in some spots, but I’m just gonna post it. There’s possibly something huge that I’m overlooking, so I’ll just let someone else point it out.