this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
-2 points (37.5% liked)

Change My View

40 readers
27 users here now

A place to learn something new, or strengthen your own position. Progress is impossible without a willingness to change.

#Rules

  1. Remain civil and friendly. Personal attacks, excessive snark, or similar will not be tolerated. Downvoting based on disagreement (rather than quality of discourse) may also be bannable.

  2. All posts should contain a view as the title, and should have an explanation of the reasoning in the body.

  3. All top level comments should address the original viewpoint, either challenging it, or seeking clarification.

founded 1 day ago
MODERATORS
PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works
-2
Having a local, "age" flag used for filtering content isn't a bad idea. (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 12 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago) by PlzGivHugs@sh.itjust.works to c/changemyview@sh.itjust.works
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

With California's AB1043, this was on my mind, although wasn't specifically about that law. Generally, giving users more control is a good thing, esspecially when it means excluding potentially distressing or harmful content. In general, having filtering settings like this provides a way for users to pick and chose what they want to see. While I don't think an age value is the best way of implementing it, I do think it is likely to be better than having nothing at all.

So long as its only a local value, the only significant downside I see, is its use for fingerprinting and tracking. This is an issue, but being only one number, is relatively inspecific and unreliable. User agent strings provide far more data, and are far harder to manipulate meaningfully, for example. Furthermore, so long as its all managed locally, privacy focused software would also have the ability to either not provide the value, to use brackets in UI rather than a asking for a specific number, or to just use a default value, like 99. Given that, it seems like an age flag would be just another in a sea of fingerprinting methods, while the convenience and utility provided could be significant.

Ultimately, I feel like a series of boolean flags for different subject matters to filter would be better, but because an age value seems closer to being implemented, thats my focus.

So, having a local, "age" flag used for filtering content isn't a bad idea.

Change my view.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 3 points 11 hours ago

I feel that the responsibility is being misplaced on the OS rather than on the content providers.

And, tellingly, a lot of these laws are being pushed by content providers, namely Meta (Facebook). When you follow the money behind these law proposals to its source, Meta's fingerprints are all over it.

To put it charitably, they're trying to push the (potentially expensive) task of preventing minors from seeing objectionable content away from themselves and onto others where they don't need to pay for it. To take a more cynical view, they're pushing it in order to get yet another way to track (and then profit off of) users.