Well then parents should apply legislative pressure, which should arrive at Google as "fix this or we legislate", and bingo, Google need to do something. That is parents doing parenting. Parenting happens through societal structures.

When parenting your own kids isn't enough, but you feel you need to parent everyone else's as well.

When you want to team up with other parents to make all of your lives easier.

"all your lives"? Or just the lives of a few, at the cost of the many?

Not all parents agree that this is the right thing to do.

Do you know _any_ parents that want their kids to consume ads?

I have two kids. I don't actually mind when they see advertising because it has given me a great opportunity to explain the tricks being used to sell product. I think they are generally wary of advertising now because of this.

The sane strategy is to simply avoid using an iPad as a babysitter rather than try to make everyone else’s life worse legislatively.

Right, and it's not the tobacco industry's fault that people die of lung cancer, people should just know better than to smoke in the first place.

And if you didn't know, children will eventually start using computers by themselves, probably before they are 12 (probably in first grade or kindergarten, I wouldn't be surprised). A huge portion of internet users are children. That's a fact. The reality is that a huge portion of children are online, and advertisers are specifically targeting children on youtube.

Hope you are happy with this the current situation then. I know that I am not because I do not wish to share my id with Google.

Sounds good. Say I'm a non-technical parent that wants to give my child access to YouTube but not allow them to watch content that they're not old enough to consume on their own. How should I do this? I want to give them the freedom to explore topics they're interested in so downloading some pre-approved videos isn't going to work. And my kid is smart and will realize that any account-specific setting can trivially be bypassed by logging out.

What should I do? Not allowing my kids access to the internet at all is a non-answer in 2020. Hell it was a non-answer in 1995.

Say I'm a regular member of society and want to watch the trailer for a new Battlefield game. How should I do this? YouTube asks me to give them pictures of my ID for that. This is the mechanism that will be used for this right now.

And it's all in the name of "protecting" children. This isn't some future hypothetical - it has already happened. I've been barred from a whole slew of content on YouTube because of this.

Right now it's only used by Google. It's likely that in the future most websites will use this, because it's government regulation.

I mean this already existed prior to YouTube, it's just that before you couldn't access the 18+ trailer at all outside of an R rated movie theater or late night TV because it had to be made for prime time and print where content restrictions were enforced.

I don't see this as any different than a theater asking to see your ID before letting your buy an R rated movie ticket. I sympathize that it's annoying hell but you probably also don't want Google deciding for themselves what your age is.

There is a real different between showing your ID to a person in front of you compared to uploaded a digitized image of it to the internet. The threat vector completely changes once you do that.

If only real 18+ content was the only thing that was affected – unfortunately random other stuff which might at most warrant something like PG (if even that) currently shows up as age-restricted, e.g. the original Tetris God video or the official upload of the Scatmans World music video.

Yes, it existed before and it was moronic even then. But recent EU regulation pushes it onto streaming sites too and that's a different beast altogether considering the enormous amount of tracking that goes on.

The standard we're comparing this to is the past 30 years of Internet Freedom where these invasive nags were nowhere to be found. Nobody was excited about the MPAA in 1995. But we were all excited about the Internet. Now "The Web" has become the MPAA et al. Lame.

The real answer is the behemoths are going to become irrelevant, being inescapably bound to government control and surveillance capitalism. The more hoops and restrictions they add, the more tech people will move to decentralized solutions that don't suffer such bullshit, and eventually the normies will follow. It's just a tragic end to the past few decades of revolutionary energy, pointlessly wasted on centralized dead ends. And in the short term, it's fucking frustrating when trying to get anything done.

You should sit down with your kid and watch it watch the content until it's grown so far that you won't be able to keep it from finding the dirt on the net. By then you've hopefully educated it enough so you can be sure that no harm will come to it after it watched the adult stuff.

Because one thing is sure: your kid WILL see it all because it's 2021.

I mean seriously...you're not closing off all lakes because some kids could drown in them. You teach them how to swim.

Your argument doesn't make sense. There are a huge number of sites that host adult content that are easily accessible by a simple Google search. What can you do?

> What should I do? Not allowing my kids access to the internet at all is a non-answer in 2020. Hell it was a non-answer in 1995.

A non-answer is not allowing everyone else to surf the web without giving their credit card or ID to every website that hosts adult content. It would have a huge impact on privacy of the users and the freedom of the whole internet in general.

A parent should educate their children, but I know that is simpler to set a bunch of restriction, give to the children a computer, and let him sit hours in front of YouTube while you do something else.

I grew up with libraries and video stores for access to analogous materials and didn't have regular internet access until 1999. I really don't see why it's reasonable to expect the internet to supplant parenting duties that would have been reasonably expected in the pre-Youtube state of affairs.

If you want to control what your kids see, don't let them have internet access. This is simply reality. I know that from the time I got internet access, I began to see things that would horrify my parents on a semi-regular basis that they didn't know about. (I had an SA forums account.)

This isn't supplanting parenting duties, it's giving parents the tools to actually parent. Without this your options are basically no YouTube access at all or full YouTube access with zero granularity in-between. The default for logged-out people has to be restrictive or else it's trivial to bypass. The current rules for porn, alcohol, and mature games are a joke and have been since their inception. Everyone being born on Jan 1 1901 is a meme at this point. It's checking a regulatory box without actually doing anything and if YouTube tried it they would be raked over the coals.

Libraries do restrict the materials that can be checked out by minors and I doubt that counted as supplanting parenting. How else could you give your kid any level of independence without the cooperation of other people?

The restriction previously happened at a device level, moving it to google seems like an elaborate justification to move the default to restrictive and break external video viewers and apps like yt-dl.

You should control your kids device and make restrictions there, not place them by default on the entire internet.

Even if you locked them down to YT for kids, do you honestly trust Google to accurately decide what is acceptable for kids? Yeah, no. I don't. (Remember when they had porn in there?)

So how does this help, anyway?

Lately, they have been good. I don't blame you for mistrusting them because it took at least 4 scandals (I lost track), but they seem to have sorted it out.

Still much worse than just letting parents create an allow-list of channels or videos from any part of YT, including the non-"YouTube Kids" part :-/

It'd be nice to be able to turn them loose on a YouTube that was just educational videos I've curated, no weird toy unboxing shit, without having to, like, maintain my own file server and streaming service.

> without having to, like, maintain my own file server and streaming service.

Why not? Doesn't take that much to downlod the videos and let them watch locally - we are in a thread about youtube-dl after all.

There is kind of no reasonable way to do it. Because the content is classified into two groups: for kids and not for kids which is too rough.

And a lot of what they want to watch is formally not for kids and you will be absolutely ok with them seeing it. Especially non English content.

I suggest that you have a talk with somebody who grew up as a kid with unrestricted Internet access. It might turn out that it's not actually a big problem after all.

This is a tough question and I share it, with two elementary-age kids myself who love youtube. I don't have a good answer either. We put time limits on youtube and require that the kids use common-area computers to access it, but it would be nice if I could feel more confident about the content they're allowed to be exposed to.

Sit down next to your kid.

Or anything else that doesn't fuck with my ability not to be tracked by google.

If you're concerned about this, stop letting your kids use a computer unsupervised. This seems like a no-brainer to me.

It _sounds_ like you're speaking in absolutes though, lacking nuance. If you are, my reply to absolutes would be that we should stop enforcing alcohol sales to minors, as it's the parent's job to ensure kids their don't drink.

Personally i think age verification is good. This implementation is moronic, though. And all around it's very, very difficult. So difficult that it may never be useful.

> my reply to absolutes would be that we should stop enforcing alcohol sales to minors

We absolutely should. Thankfully it is already not enforced in a lot of places (such as in greece).

I hope I won't be considered presumptuous, but I suspect you don't have children? It is simply impossible to monitor absolutely everything.

And you should not do so.

I would say YMMV. If you have a child in a problematic scenario, your opinion might change.

Cool, so don't let them freely browse the internet if you're that worried.

It's not exactly an age restriction, it's just getting permission from a parent. Either the parent puts in their ID information or they don't. Age restriction would be like movie theaters banning minors from certain movies.

Who cares about the age restriction? The issue here is obviously having to put in government ID to use the internet.

The same argument you are using is the justification for this. “It’s should be the parents decision to allow children to watch this content, not Google”

Parents' authority over their children does not extend to forcing random strangers to enter government ID to use the internet.