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.