Using Internet Standards to Keep Kids Away from Adult Content Online

In an effort to block kids from online content intended for adults, some have argued that age-verification or age-assurance tools offer the possibility of simple, effective guardrails. 

In our brief to the Supreme Court last year, CDT laid out serious concerns these tools raise regarding privacy and First Amendment freedoms – in addition to questions about their efficacy. 

But that doesn’t mean technical solutions can’t address some valid concerns about adult content. In particular, two policies related to internet standards are worth pursuing right now.

First, parents can already set most children’s devices to block adult websites, which depends on sites labeling themselves as adults-only via metadata. Most adult content sites are happy to label themselves as adults-only: it’s cheap and easy, and allowing children to view their content raises legal, regulatory, ethical and commercial concerns that sites would rather avoid. Making these tools more robust — well-defined standards, widely adopted by websites and interpreted by web browsers and parental control tools — can make them more effective.

Alternatively, just as we allow users to request “safe mode” of Google search or YouTube, devices could be configured to request “safe mode” of other sites on the internet. Proactively alerting sites that there’s a young person (or just someone avoiding NSFW content) on the other end of the connection has the advantage of working on platforms that contain content appropriate for general audiences alongside content for adults only.

There’s plenty of work to do to implement these tools, but standards for sites to self-label and for users to indicate their content preferences are already being proposed.

It’s possible that in the future age-verification and age-assurance systems will be able to avoid the worst problems of the current systems, perhaps by associating a government-issued ID with unlinkable digital tokens that can be presented to a website without requiring someone to send a photo of an actual ID card or revealing a government-issued identifier. But for the time being, standards-based solutions like these provide the most practical opportunities both to protect children from adult content and to protect the rights of adults to access the content they want, while also avoiding severe privacy and security issues.