I’m asking for public policy ideas here. A lot of countries are enacting age verification now. But of course this is a privacy nightmare and is ripe for abuse. At the same time though, I also understand why people are concerned with how kids are using social media. These products are designed to be addictive and are known to cause body image issues and so forth. So what’s the middle ground? How can we protect kids from the harms of social media in a way that respects everyone’s privacy?
Home routers have something called parental controls which can help parents block certain websites and platforms at the home network level.
This together with parenting and education of ones children can help, all without sacrificing and giving away our privacy to third party corporations.
At a regional and country level I would suggest a government funded public service similar to a library to index the internet. Similar to how books are classified by age and genres.
These lists can be provided within each home router by defult for easy selection, or made easily available for upload by parents or users into existing routers.
These government funded publicly curated list can help parents offloaded a little of the “curration effort”. This can then simply be a setting or toggle in the router setup, applying the proper age appropriate whitelist and blocking everything else that is not on the “approved list”. The setup can even help parents classify specific devices on the home network as “child owned” so the list only works for those devices.
This would be the most “privacy respectful” option IMO over things like “age verification” or any other alternatives being suggested by corporate tech firms at the moment.
The tech for this is already here, where we are lacking is:
As for power users and tech literate individuals, public lists curated by individuals online already exist. For example Pihole and Adguard lists, these help people block and whitelist websites at the home network level.
This is a unique idea. I think if we were to have a publically funded curation effort it would need to maintain some structural independence from whatever government was in power, to prevent any potential for abuse. It would be like government funded news agencies, like the BBC or the CBC. These organizations are funded by their respective governments funds but the government can’t tell them what to publish unless It’s violating some law or something (e.g. by doxxing someone). Similarly: the government could fund these block lists but have no say in what websites eventually land on it.
Ideally the process would be as transparent as possible too, but that might have some drawbacks. By explaining in depth why they blocked a website they might be inadvertently drawing attention to that website, which is not always a good thing.