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 part corporations.
At a regional and country level I would suggest a 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 defult, or made easily available for upload by parents or users.
Parents that can be offloaded a little of the “curration effort”. This can be simply setting of applying the proper age appropriate whitelist and block everything else that is not on the approved list.
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.