"Age gating" of History has gone on longer than The Internet. My middle school US history class ca. 1975 totally ignored the reality of antebellum chattel slavery. I didn't hear about the sexual abuse side of it until maybe 2005. I don't think that's in the middle/high school curriculum today.
Well reasoned! A car accident is something that just happened. It's not manufactured gore, but a fresh part of history, so take the sheets off the dismembered bodies and let my five-year-old see everything!
Use parental controls on your child's device if you don't want them seeing things. Don't use your bad parenting as an excuse to violate privacy with age verification for everyone else.
There's a major difference in who imposes the age gate. The parent, for their own children, or the website, for all children and adults. (In some cases, both types are wrong to use.)
The California Digital Age Assurance Act forces operating systems to collect age info. Adults cannot choose to withold both their own age info and the age info of their children. Older children in abusive parental situations cannot both get their own (standard) devices and withold their age info. I oppose such an implementation because a more privacy-respecting implementation is available: the government could mandate that operating systems provide device owners with an option to reveal their age info or their children's age info.
Anyway, TFA is not about any particular act. TFA is about the attitudes that lead toward both privacy-harming government-mandated age gates and toward privacy-harming or education-harming voluntary/informally-pressured age gates.
> the article author seems not to mind the controls if they are on manufactured gore or porn.
From what I've read of her blog, my interpretation is that Heather Burns opposes all government-mandated age verification (which most government-mandated age gates would require), but does not necessarily oppose all voluntary (on the part of the website) or socially-enforced age gates.
> not to mind the controls if they are on manufactured gore or porn.
Should we ignore the differing purposes of creating contextually inappropriate info and the differing purposes of sharing it? Is there a logical or moral contradiction in treating potentially inappropriate info created or shared by people for the purpose of pleasing or shocking (without urgency) other people with violent, disgusting, or sexually explicit material differently than we treat potentially inappropriate info shared or recorded (not the same as created) by people for the purpose of informing or shocking (into urgency) other people?
What's more in this case, 9/11 is one of the few events that some US middle schools (with students as young as 10 or 11) and high schools hold an annual moment of silence for. After "hearing" it twice, almost every student will understand that 9/11 is being singled out as a particularly important historical event. At least by the end of middle school age, children should have some room to voluntarily (on the part of the children) learn about the most disturbing aspects of 9/11.
"Age gating" of History has gone on longer than The Internet. My middle school US history class ca. 1975 totally ignored the reality of antebellum chattel slavery. I didn't hear about the sexual abuse side of it until maybe 2005. I don't think that's in the middle/high school curriculum today.
Well reasoned! A car accident is something that just happened. It's not manufactured gore, but a fresh part of history, so take the sheets off the dismembered bodies and let my five-year-old see everything!
Use parental controls on your child's device if you don't want them seeing things. Don't use your bad parenting as an excuse to violate privacy with age verification for everyone else.
But those are the same thing. The age gate is the parental controls.
There's a major difference in who imposes the age gate. The parent, for their own children, or the website, for all children and adults. (In some cases, both types are wrong to use.)
The Digital Age Assurance Act is about parents age-gating their own children.
The California Digital Age Assurance Act forces operating systems to collect age info. Adults cannot choose to withold both their own age info and the age info of their children. Older children in abusive parental situations cannot both get their own (standard) devices and withold their age info. I oppose such an implementation because a more privacy-respecting implementation is available: the government could mandate that operating systems provide device owners with an option to reveal their age info or their children's age info.
Anyway, TFA is not about any particular act. TFA is about the attitudes that lead toward both privacy-harming government-mandated age gates and toward privacy-harming or education-harming voluntary/informally-pressured age gates.
Moreover, the article author seems not to mind the controls if they are on manufactured gore or porn.
> the article author seems not to mind the controls if they are on manufactured gore or porn.
From what I've read of her blog, my interpretation is that Heather Burns opposes all government-mandated age verification (which most government-mandated age gates would require), but does not necessarily oppose all voluntary (on the part of the website) or socially-enforced age gates.
> not to mind the controls if they are on manufactured gore or porn.
Should we ignore the differing purposes of creating contextually inappropriate info and the differing purposes of sharing it? Is there a logical or moral contradiction in treating potentially inappropriate info created or shared by people for the purpose of pleasing or shocking (without urgency) other people with violent, disgusting, or sexually explicit material differently than we treat potentially inappropriate info shared or recorded (not the same as created) by people for the purpose of informing or shocking (into urgency) other people?
What's more in this case, 9/11 is one of the few events that some US middle schools (with students as young as 10 or 11) and high schools hold an annual moment of silence for. After "hearing" it twice, almost every student will understand that 9/11 is being singled out as a particularly important historical event. At least by the end of middle school age, children should have some room to voluntarily (on the part of the children) learn about the most disturbing aspects of 9/11.