It can be done like that, but then it’d be (trivially) fake-able by anyone with root permissions on their own computer. But then, my point is that kids shouldn’t be root of their computers, so let’s just parents vouch for children’s age, and leave everything more complicated out.
From what I understood, the rules (in California?) would be : a) Every operating system provider must collect the user’s age or date of birth during the initial account setup process. b) The OS must classify the user into one of the four defined age brackets: under 13 years old, 13–15 years old, 16–17 years old, or 18 years and older. c) This information must be made available to application developers through a real-time API as soon as an application is launched or downloaded.
Unless I’ve missed something, I could definitely live with that. I haven’t seen anything more acceptable when it comes to age verification. Point a) doesn’t need to prove age or date of birth.
Now there is a small issue that came to my mind since my first post, which might be quite problematic : if ANY website is able to tell whether ANY user is a child, it’ll be as easy to keep children out of certain sites that it’ll be easy to keep adults out of others.
Imagine a bulletin board with highly disturbing/predatory content which would ONLY show to kids? Whenever mom or dad checks, website is all normal. And that would be real bad, probably worse than our current, no age verified situation.
Just because they are responsible doesn’t mean the have the means to exert their responsibility. Demanding birth-date upon (local) account creation would allow them to better exert that responsiblity.