@erincandescent "only ever going to be filled in on the machines of children administered by parents who want such restrictions enforced"

You say this as if it's not a huge problem in itself. We should not be building or shipping tools for abusive parents to use to surveil or control their children.

@erincandescent That doesn't justify being part to it and essentially forcing distros to ship an abuse-mechanism unless they actively patch it out (thereby having to make a highly charged political statement).

Yes a determined parent with technological know-how can always find a way to put such malware onto their child's machine. We should not be making it an out-of-the-box feature of "Linux".

RE: https://social.treehouse.systems/@mgorny/116274748222570834

@erincandescent Combined with other things, yes. See for example:

@erincandescent Right now, there is no standard place for a DOB field to be stored or for applications to know how to access that information or use it to enforce rules blocking access to information.

By creating standard places to store it and standard APIs to access it, you setup the infrastructure needed for these abuses to be something available out-of-the-box rather than requiring a ton of custom hackery by the abuser to setup.

@dalias i’m not sure what your actual argument is here.

Is it

• “We shouldn’t provide parental controls because instead of using them responsibly to give children access to developmentally appropriate things they’ll abuse them to restrict what they can see”, or
• “We shouldn’t provide parental controls because instead it should be the responsibility of those same abusive parents to watch over what their children are doing”, or
• “We shouldn’t provide a system level age restrictions API because the parent might provide an accurate age to the relatively trustworthy computer (which will inevitably result in them providing it to relatively untrustwothy apps instead)”, or
• “There is absolutley nothing harmful to children available on the internet and we should just provide them 100% unrestricted unmonitored access without age gates of any kind”?