Paper: Effective control of age restricted material for young people
slides-agews-paper-effective-control-of-age-restricted-material-for-young-people-00

Tom Newton & Tim Levy

This paper explores the multifaceted challenges associated with age-based restrictions on online content access for young people, encompassing technological, ethical, business, privacy and practical considerations.

Contemporary views on age based restrictions view platforms as the gatekeepers of content and so aim to fix safety at that level. Such a view places the onus on publishers but is awash with issues including imprecision and error rates, susceptibility to avoidance, concerns around privacy, the prohibitive costs for small platforms and the removal of practical choice by parents.

Alternative network-based filtering models for age-gating access have different but similarly challenging issues including misalignment with the IETF’s core mission of end-to-end privacy enhancing Internet protocols.

As an alternative, this paper proposes a reliable and secure alternative. An architecture whereby guardians (whether parental, or in loco parentis, e.g. schools) can, and are indeed expected to, install or configure reliable safety technology on devices.