https://jeannecolemanlaw.com/the-legal-emancipation-of-minor...
i.e. even as an emancipated minor, being treated as a "legal adult" does not mean you can buy alcohol or tobacco.
If we assume parents are involved enough to "buy the thingy that advertises a parental lock", then a whole bunch of less-dumb options become available... And more of the costs of the system will be borne by the people (or at least groups) that are utilizing it.
I haven't read the legislation myself but I don't see why this couldn't still be done, I doubt the legislation specified _how_ to do it.
So no, that wouldn't work right now.
If we're already trusting a parental-locked device to report minor-status, then it's trivial to also have it identify what jurisdiction/ruleset exists, or some finer-grained model of what shouldn't work.
In either case, we have the problem of how to model things like "in the Flub province of the nation of Elbonia children below 150.5 months may not see media containing exposed ankles". OK, maybe not quite that bad, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere.
Rating: RTA-5042-1996-1400-1577-RTA
in HTTP responses that include adult content, and every parental controls software in existence will block it by default, including the ones built into iPhones/etc and embedded webviews. As far as I know all mainstream adult sites include this (or the equivalent meta tag) already.
In general, I don’t think communicating to every site you visit that you are a minor and asking them to do what they will with that information is a good idea. Better to filter on the user’s end.
It's much easier to regulate and enforce that websites must expose these headers so that UAs can do their own filtering. Adult Content = headers in response, no ifs, ands, or buts
Response headers are encrypted in the context of HTTPS, so there's no real sacrifice in privacy. Implementation effort about as close to trivial as can be. No real free speech implications (unless you really want to argue that those headers constitute compelled speech). All in all, it's a pretty decent solution.
A better solution is more robust device management, with control given to the device owner (read: the parent). The missing legislative piece is mandating that social media companies need to respond differently when the user agent tells them what to send.
I should be able to take my daughter's phone (which I own), set an option somewhere that indicates "this user is a minor," and with every HTTP request it makes it sets e.g. an OMIT_ADULT_CONTENT header. Site owners simply respond differently when they see this.