Parental supervision required [LWN.net]

Parental supervision required

Posted Mar 11, 2026 21:48 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
Parent article: California's Digital Age Assurance Act and Linux distributions

we can breathe easy knowing that no 13-year-old would ever fib about their age in order to access "forbidden" content.

The age is set at the time of account setup, and the idea seems to be that parents will set up accounts for their kids rather than letting the kids do it themselves. If the parents set the ages of their kids accurately, all well and good. If they set the ages of their kids inaccurately or if they allow their kids to set their own ages unsupervised, the parents aren't in a strong position to complain about their kids accessing forbidden content. It isn't a perfect solution, but it does theoretically give parents a way of age restricting their kids' access while minimizing the information leakage.

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Parental supervision required

Posted Mar 11, 2026 21:50 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

I would have no issue is this were an optional feature of an OS. Then parents who want it could buy devices that support it (or enable it under settings), set up their kids' accounts, and all would be well. I wouldn't even mind if the law said something like "vendors that do not provide parental controls must prominently advertise that fact" or something.

Mandating age-bracket signals for every OS and every app? Uh... no. Just no.

Parental supervision required

Posted Mar 12, 2026 2:47 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

> I would have no issue is this were an optional feature of an OS.

Of course this will always be "optional" somewhat because it will be at the very possible easy to defeat.

Android parental control is pretty hard to defeat today, but nothing stops a kid from buying a cheap used phone and setting it up from scratch while lying about their age. Yet parental control is still very useful because not every kid wants to go that far. As a parent you cannot be constantly watching over your kids' shoulder; that's what parental control is for.

Parental supervision required

Posted Mar 12, 2026 14:16 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Of course this will always be "optional" somewhat because it will be at the very possible easy to defeat.

The law does not make it optional and it imposes substantial fines on developers who don't include it. I know it will be effectively optional for end-users, but as a developer, I don't relish being on the hook for the fines if I don't include this in my software.

Parental supervision required

Posted Mar 12, 2026 17:56 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

It doesn't minimise DoB leakage at all.

Any application (inc. web site applications, there will no doubt be some HTML API in time for this) that can get the age category 'signal' can just store 1 instance of the tuple of (category indicated, date last requested) for each user and then just note when a fresh 'signal' differs from the stored - the DoB is within the range [date last requested, current date]. So a popular 'application' for a given user who is under-18 has 1 or more chances to acquire the user's DoB down to a fine granularity (to the day potentially). And popular 'applications' with large user-bases will be able to build up databases of DoBs that are correct down to the day for large numbers of people.