this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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Obviously everyone here hates this, but I'm gonna offer another perspective here and prepare for the down votes I guess.
There is a very good argument for OS level age 'tracking' as a means of creating a cohesive environment for software and websites to operate without having to implement individual age verification. The biggest actual issue here is how the OS determines what the user's age is. If this is implemented similar to what California has done, the OS would simply ask for the user's age at setup, and store that value, which can then be reported to programs and websites as needed. This would allow parents to setup a device for the child and not have to separately implement parental controls on every individual conceivable program, which are often easily circumvented. This would undermine any individual website's attempts to use age verification as an excuse to collect government ID data, and the security risks inherent to that.
There's no need to put any kind of validation onto this, it should simply be self-reported.
Now admittedly I don't trust our government to implement this in any kind of reasonable way so I definitely understand and respect the outrage, but I guess I'm just trying to find some positive aspect of how this might be implemented.
Wholeheartedly disagree. OS level age verification only removes the responsibility to protect users from the software developer and shifts it to the OS makers. Meta and OpenAI want this so bad so they don’t have to protect their users and their users children. Meta created the software the has lead to hundreds, if not thousands, of child suicide and they don’t want to be held accountable. AI companies have allowed the proliferation of CSAM, copyright infringement, and straight up theft of intellectual property, and want to push that off to OS as the responsible party. Google and Apple don’t fight it because they have extraordinarily deep pockets and already have the infrastructures in place in their app stores to accommodate this tomfoolery. This is also another avenue for increased surveillance at the deepest level of your digital life that is already extremely compromised. If we want parents to have more controls, then mandate easy to use parent controls for OS’s, apps, and web apps. Legislate mandating firewalls and routers have easy to use parental controls for internet settings. Pay people living wages and work them less hours so they can learn to use those things. Don’t add spyware into the OS. “Take off your tin hat dude.” How do you think they’ll verify age at the OS level? It will have to have an api that can be used to obtain the age verified information. Who’s responsive for reviewing all that PII? Where does that go? Who retains that information and for how long? What encryption technology is mandated to protect it from breach? Nah, man, no thanks.
Sorry but no. That would drive up the cost of all firewalls and routers, for no real reason, except that the manufacturers can because the government says they have to. And most firewalls that offer content filtering need some sort of a subscription to keep the filters up-to-date.
Never mind the fact that a router's job isn't content filtering (it's routing).
Todays parents grew up exposed to the internet. If we don't know how to protect our own kids and teach them how to safely use the internet, then we are hopeless as a generation.
Btw, Cloudflare WARP is free for a small number of users and has a pretty decent web filter built in. It's far from easy to use, but it's free and effective. I use it on my 9yo's Fedora laptop, and as long as he can't sudo, he can't turn it off. And if he even tries to sudo, he will be reminded that he's not in the sudoers file, and this incident WILL be reported.
Don’t get me wrong, I was not advocating. I was pointing out directed ways to actually “protect” kids that would be a lot less likely to really be surveillance. I don’t think any of that should happen.
I mean, it very easily could be. A service like WARP, they can decrypt the traffic, if you allow them to (it is off by default). The warp client will add the certificate to the trust-store, and the traffic will get decrypted on Cloudflare's end.
For my kid, I kept deep-inspection off. If he figures out how to get past DNS and SNI inspections, he deserves to see a boob or two.