Haven't you noticed that more state driver's licenses are showing up in the Apple Wallet? Soon the US Passport will be loadable into the Wallet as well. Those do provide excellent checks on the age of the account holder, provided a child doesn't get ahold of an adult's passport.
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iOS 26.2 Adds APIs for Texas App Store Parental Consent Law
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Haven't you noticed that more state driver's licenses are showing up in the Apple Wallet? Soon the US Passport will be loadable into the Wallet as well. Those do provide excellent checks on the age of the account holder, provided a child doesn't get ahold of an adult's passport.
Is sex really a vice? Not for me. I don’t gamble, smoke & I have 1 cocktail about 6 times every year. Sex can be fun, recreational & bring intimacy in the right circumstances. Now I had my first sexual experience at 18, I guess I was a late bloomer. From 13 onwards I was one very horny kid & as I mentioned before I created a porn collection from clippings from magazines & the Sears catalog underwear section. I went at it relentlessly, my imagination knew no bounds. But having actual sex was totally unexpected & very different. It would have been nice to have parents I could talk to about it. But back then it was don’t ask, don’t tell. Seems like that’s coming around again. Sex is a natural part of life, it’s not a vice. So why are people acting like it’s this taboo subject? If you force things into the dark, dark **** happens. Bring it into the light, and things are better. For heaven’s sake people still worry about the books kids have access to. Are books a vice as well? Some folks think Harry Potter is satanic, shall we remove those from libraries? 😱
I never said sex was a vice, but thank you for that unsolicited description of your masturbation habits as a young teen.
Pornography is a vice, and we are looking at the most sexually dysfunctional generation of all time as a result of how easily available it's become. Sex and pornography are different things, as you yourself can confirm based on that story you just told. And having a collection of naughty images stashed under your bed is very different from having completely unrestricted access to an HD video of literally any sex act imaginable, at any time of day, anywhere you are.
This is getting off topic, anyway. This thread isn't about porn, it's about the App Store, which famously doesn't allow porn. The focus here should be on what this will actually stop children from getting access to in regions where it's enforced, like dating apps and games with microtransactions, control of which is well within the rights of their parents.
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According to society at large. That's why you can't buy a porn magazine when you’re twelve.
All proscriptions are culturally relative and will have people who don't agree with them. That's how that works. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be any laws.
A vice is a practice, behaviour, habit or item generally considered morally wrong in the associated society. In more minor usage, vice can refer to a fault, a negative character trait, a defect, an infirmity, or a bad or unhealthy habit.
That description is somewhat at odds with age restriction gating
By having it allowed later, it doesn't really fit with the framing of "morally wrong", I guess unless calling it "bad or unhealthy", but those are exceptionally subjective things.
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thanks for oversharing. sex education desn't have to involve exposure to actual sex.
have they taken Twitter off it yet?
Maybe, except most Americans don’t have a passport and 38 states don’t have digital IDs, including Texas.
Or put it another way, do you think it should be illegal for parents to serve alcohol to their children?
No, I don't. But that has nothing to do with what I'm saying, except to reinforce my point that parents should be the deciders on what their children are or are not exposed to. Children can still have whatever they want on their phones — with their parents' approval. That's all this is. Do you see?
So it would be OK with you if a dad sent porn to his 14 year old son to carry on his iPhone? That’d be an awesome dad in my thinking.
What's a child in your view here?
Beyond that question, I think parents can decide for themselves on this.
No, I would not be okay with that. I would never do it and wouldn’t be friends with anyone who did. But that doesn’t mean I think it should be illegal.
Again, all these proposed changes do is give parents the authority they already had. If some freak wanted to give his kid unlimited rentals from an adult video store back in the 90s, they could do that. But if a kid tried to go get them himself, he would run into road blocks along the way.
We just need digital versions of those roadblocks to help the 99.99% of parents who wouldn’t be willing to help their kids download BetMGM or Tinder. To that last .01%… good luck, I guess. No law’s going to help them.
a child is not a teen to begin with, and social services exist, at least where I live, for a reason - to make sure children have a start in life without becoming drunk porn addicts first, just because their idiot parents decided it's OK.
I physically see, face-to-face, when someone checks my ID for alcohol purchases. This is vastly different than an online verification check.
Now to your point about Apple. I do trust them over 99.9% of every other application. But my concern is more global than JUST APPLE.
Every application will have their own solution, or use a shared solution that is not secure.
ID photos of 70,000 users may have been leaked, Discord says
The platform says hackers targeted a firm that helped to verify the ages of its users.
www.bbc.com
This is much more of a problem than some Liquor store physically checking your ID.
Many parents do, in general if the adults are having a beer, wine, spirits or a cocktail with dinner sometimes kids will ask about it. Decent parents will let their child try a small amount knowing they will not like it at all. It normalizes drinking as an adult thing, not some mystery that leads to binge drinking in young adults. When I was a kid they served wine at mass with a small flour disc that stuck to the roof of my mouth, disgusting!
Reducing this issue to porn is an overly simplistic take. This is about informed consent, which children are functionally and legally incapable of providing. One of the defining traits of children is that they lack the cognitive development to provide informed consent.
And as a father of two young daughters, I can assure you that there's so much more to consider than porn. Chatrooms are used for grooming. Recommendation engines serve up radicalized content. Photo and social media feeds create unrealistic body image and lifestyle expectations. Just a few months ago, graphic footage of Charlie Kirk being murdered was autoplayed to millions of people who didn't want to see it. Peer reviewed study after study demonstrates that content like the above is a cause for increased rates of issues like depression, eating disorders, suicide, and more. The list goes on.
Mind you, I'm not sitting here clutching my pearls. I'm doing my job by preparing them to be functioning, healthy adults, which means exposing them to age appropriate content and conversations. So, no "bubble boys" here, but I'm also not needlessly putting them at risk by prematurely exposing them to potentially harmful content that could desensitize them to risks like predatory behavior, misinformation, or other dangers.
Those sorts of dangers are also why society has a role to play in this. All functioning, healthy societies must protect and invest in the next generation: society's survival literally depends on it! Because of the "Wild West" mentality of the early internet, we threw an entire generation of kids to the wolves before they were ready. That's not the model for how things should work, and society is slowly realizing the disservice we did to that generation. As a result, kids of this next generation may actually have the safeguards in place to ensure that—while "kids will be kids"—they can also enjoy the innocence of being a kid while it is still right for them to do so, thanks to the fact that parents have more of the tools they need to parent effectively.
To be fair, I admittedly don't like that this information is being shared—even as a range—with Facebook et al., and I wish the law did more to protect the use of this information (e.g. requiring that it be discarded after validation, with teeth to back that up), but the hand-wringing seems out of proportion for what's actually happening.
You sound like a very good dad to your girls. Social Media is a real danger as it’s impossible to control what your exposed to there, the Charlie Kirk video is a great example. Sextortion has been a plague on teens recently as well. It’s hard protecting kids in this digital age.
I'm sick of lawmen and bureaucrats handholding me and treating adults like children.