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It’s not like I want to reinvent the wheel or something, but wouldn’t it be possible to design tablets and smartphones specifically for children, just as there are crappy mobile phones designed for old people, with a some sort of built-in set of restrictions regarding apps? With all the enthusiastic narratives regarding the digital revolution and whatnot, one would think that this is feasible.
The issues would be mostly in work arounds which both the kids and the companies would want to subvert. If you trust a kid to not immediately try something like that, you’re not around many kids.
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There are smartphones specifically for kids. This is a major topic of discussion among parents.
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I think the solution to age-gating would be to have internet-connected devices to have a birth year set on the network card or somewhere that would be hard to reset. When anyone orders a device online or in person, they have to input the birth year of the primary intended user of the device. Then internet sites can query the device for (is user > 14? Is user > 21?) and the device would tell them that and nothing else. It would be possible to change this setting but the average person would need to bring it into a repair shop to do so.
There are also lots of devices that have age gating features. Kindle Fire tablets are what I'm most used to - you can order one that looks like Bluey and it comes with a years subscription to a selection of apps that Amazon thinks are appropriate for a given age range. That said, I have trouble trusting other people's judgement on these sorts of things.
If you want the best paranoid kid entertainment, get a Yoto player and hand select every card.
I think Fire tablets are pretty popular with parents, because they are cheap and able to be locked down. My understanding is that there is kind of an uncanny valley of restriction though – that there is a mode appropriate for very young children (with individual books and such managed by parents as shortcuts on the home screen) but that the step up from that is too big a jump.
I am not a parent, so I don’t have that experience myself, and I don’t envy parents having to find the intersection of what is wise and what is reasonably possible.
The Fire is actually pretty good if you don't go with Amazon's kid subscription but just hand select apps you want. What is weird is sometimes the tablet would reboot into another kid's account, or even my account (which should have been password protected,) and I didn't find out right away. After they broke down (as these things do after a few years) we didn't buy more.
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You could technically speaking. This is what prisons do for instance, there's an obscure genre of laptops made to be used by inmates that are insanely locked down and made of clear plastic so you can't hide contraband inside.
But the final destination of any attempt to make computing two tier like this is widespread digital id based controls. It's just too convenient for state capacity not to make everyone into a prisoner if the tech exists and is made practical.
I hate this because I think I have a right both to a free internet and one where I don't have to engage with 14 year olds as if what they say has any bearing on reality. But the path to both of these at once is narrow.
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I'm sure products like that exist on the market. The problem, historically, with this approach is that parents and teachers are rarely able to stay ahead of kids who are more tech-savvy than themselves. Technological solutions to protecting children from "adult" content invite creative problem solving, but don't tend to work all that well at actually preventing children from seeing the content. Hence the more draconian age-verification approach.
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