Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for privacy. But between setting up the birthdate when creating my children’s local account on their computers, and having to send a copy of their ID to every platform under the sun, I’d easily chose the former.
I’d even agree to a simple protocol (HTTP X-Over-18 / X-Over-21 headers?) to that.
These age band laws basically work in the opposite way to the usual parental controls. Rather than having to install and maintain the control software and having the filtering at the client end of the connection, parents need only set a flag and filtering will occur at the source end of the connection.
Will these laws provide perfect protection that eliminates the need for parental oversight of childrens’ internet access? No. Will they help stop kids accidentally stumbling into unsuitable content, reducing harm overall? Yes. As a parent, one of the things I worry about is my kids browsing sites such as youtube. Even if they’re using it for research for school projects, I can never be certain it wont prompt them to watch an unsuitable video. With a simple “this user is a child, don’t show them anything unsuitable” flag, I wouldn’t have to spend so much energy monitoring everything and could spend more energy talking to them about what they’re actually watching.
One of the key parts of the Californian law is that if the client machine sends the flag, the service must treat it as authoratative, and should not use other means of checking. That is good news, as it means there is no incentive for sites to integrate more intrusive measures such as third parties scanning givernment issued ID.