As state legislators around the country seek to regulate teen smartphone use, Apple is gearing up for a battle with app makers and legislators over child safety. The question at the heart of the fight is whether regulation of teen social-media use should happen entirely within apps or whether smartphone makers and app stores also have a role to play.
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Social-media platforms and many youth-safety advocates argue that effective content restrictions will require some form of age verification from Apple and Google, the duopoly that oversees operating-system software for the world’s billions of smartphones. [...] An Apple spokesman said websites and social-media companies are best positioned to verify a user’s age and that user privacy expectations would be violated if the company was required to share the age of its users with third-party apps. Apple provides tools that allow parents to control the devices of their children, the spokesman said.
The U.S. technology giant, working to boost revenue globally from services including apps, payments and media, is set to offer free music and video streaming to many of Bharti Airtel's 281 million customers.
The deal is likely to greatly expand the user base for Apple TV+ and Apple Music in a country where Apple has long emphasised the manufacturing side of business to diversify its supply chain beyond China.
He and other Apple executives are promoting "Disclaimer," an Apple TV+ limited series that will premiere at the festival and then debut worldwide in October.
What is a operating system? It is messy…
On paper, getting Apple and Google -- the operating system providers -- do the age verification first before allowing children onto social media apps sound simple. (If you agree children should be restricted from social media, that is. But that's a different kettle of fish.)
But then, we will need to confront the question: what is a operating system? How about Mozilla's Firefox on, say, macOS? Must it also do age verification before allowing its customer to log in to a social media? Perhaps Firefox must also get age verification details from macOS first as well as getting the list of social media URLs that may be prohibited from showing to the user?
Now, how about Firefox on Windows or Ubuntu where, perhaps, the operating system does not provide age verification? Does it still need to get the list of social media URLs and block them from all users?
How about the web browser on your Samsung fridge? Or that webview in your RSS reader? Can I (someday) ask ChatGPT to log in to a social media platform for me and summarize my social media feed?
Next, if I create a website. Can my website pretend to be a social media website, and ask the operating system for the age of my visitor? Can all websites ask for the age of visitors? Pretty soon, each time I visit a web site, I have to click to accept all cookies, click to reject notifications, and click to reject sharing of age information.
I think I am going back to Gopher.
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Thanks for reading.