Parents Decide Act (H.R. 8250)
www.govtrack.us
To require operating system providers to verify the age of any user of an operating system, and for other purposes.

So, OS-level age-gating is going federal, which will effectively kill your rights to device ownership and what’s left of free speech and expression.

Enjoy your free speech while you still have it because this is a clear attempt to erase that right.

SOPA never died, it just went into hiding until time to reemerge, and now’s that time, this is basically SOPA in a save the kids trenchcoat.

  • korazail@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    Edit 2, coming back later with more thoughts:

    The real difference is that Attestation, or lack thereof, puts any legal issue on the user who claimed to be something they were not, whereas Verification will put the onus on the OS developer, API developer, app developer and anyone else in the chain, which is just insane.

    Parent walks in on kid watching porn? That’s not the fucking OS developer’s fault, and needs to be handled inside the household and not in court, if at all. I could have a whole conversation about what I fear that my son might find online, and it’s not PornHub, it’s Joe Rogan or similar “influencers” and grifters.

    Whole tangent into “protecting the children”:

    In a sane, non-fascist surveillance-state world, this would be called parental controls, and be something opted-into instead of forced – and it used to be a thing. I’m all for an OS that has the ability to have supervising user with parental controls, and will chose to install those on my kid’s devices. My son has a phone that doesn’t have unrestricted access to the internet because he’s a pre-teen and is still developing the ability to discern reality from propaganda. He also has a Nintendo Switch with screen time and game limits so that he can play, but can’t play ALL the time and can only play things I’ve approved (As of like 2020, hes gotten older and I’ve removed most restrictions – hooray growth!).

    He hates the restrictions, but that’s tough stuff for him because he can text his friends to coordinate an online game session, call me if he gets in trouble, map his way home, calculate pi, etc, which I couldn’t do in my pre-teen years before pocket computers. I think it’s OK for there to be options for parents to manage their kid’s digital existences and, critically, I think it’s OK when my son escapes my borders through skills he learned. When he installs his first VPN on his phone, I’ll be so proud.

    It was a rite of passage when we learned how to get a terminal in an ancient MacOS, or use notepad to launch a program like a browser on a school computer. These guardrails will always fail and the only way to solve them is human to human conversation.

    Not Legislation. Call your Representatives (And Senators if this or something like it escapes the House) and tell them this shit is not acceptable.