On Monday, August 25, 2014 1:54:30 PM UTC+2, [email protected] wrote:
> I like this, but I feel that the administrator should be able to turn on
> Parental settings for an account, but not have it percolate to Firefox. The
> reason is that Prefer:Safe gives more information to the websites which track
> you, and, more importantly, it helps scammers tweak their scams to suit their
> visitors.
I'm with Manish here (well, the bug and the request, not the 'I like this'),
but I want to continue from there.
1) This header sends information to every server and there seems to be no way
to opt out, for the responsible person (that's Manish's bug). Right now it
would leak information, potentially allowing server operators to identify
minors easily. It's a privacy leak, you're sharing information behind the back
of the parents and admins (let's face it: If it's a feature that you turn on by
default, most of the people out there wouldn't notice and start sending this
mess).
2) This header is utterly useless, because it cannot do anything of value. If I
turn on parental controls that means that I explicitly restricted a machine in
a very specific way. It doesn't mean that I want to share that fact with the
world, nor does this mean that the (internet) world should change randomly. I
question the whole idea here. What would you have websites do when this header
is sent? YouPorn should redirect to disney.com? I - as the admin of my network,
as a father - might be absolutely fine with a 16yo to watch porn and might
consider a block like that stupid, but use parental control features to make
sure that the computer isn't keeping that teen awake at 3am. I might consider
sites like the NRA offensive (Where should they redirect, what should they
hide?).
2 boils down to "There's no moral value system that you can encode in a bool".
Restricting a Windows machine to disallow running certain games ("You did
something wrong, son. No more Awesomenauts for you for a week") doesn't mean
that the internet should know about it and should have _zero_ consequences on
the content online (If I wanted that, I'd restrict stuff w/ a filter/proxy).
The whole IETF draft is nonsense, and that's easy to see by its use of
quotation marks around "objectionable" and "safe". There's no consensus what
that means here. Discussions elsewhere about this announcement/this "feature"
in Fx quickly lead to 'COPPA' being used as an excuse, but that's quite a US/NA
centric view. Nudity isn't a huge deal in large parts of Europe and a nipple
seems (not that I'm an expert of foreign moral systems, but .. hey, neither are
you or the website operators) to cause a major scandals in the US. During the
Soccer Worldcup in Germany there was a flyer going around that helped US
tourists prepare themselves for quite some cultural differences and "Things
that you consider okay might be too violent" was on that list, together with
the nudity reference before, i.e. "Expect a certain amount of nudity on TV,
even during family times".
I summarized this feature elsewhere as asking the YouPorn admins to help with
my parenting, to ask the internet to guess my moral boundaries. A "My parents
didn't allow me to see unspecified things, take your guess" header. How can
that NOT fail?
I'd be glad if you could reconsider this .. feature or at least postpone the
introduction until Manish's bug is fixed. That'd still be a wrong opt-out (if
you keep the announced behavior) thing instead of a more sensible opt-in - like
Do Not Track, but it would be a lot more tolerable.
(Parent of two, although they're too young to browse the net yet: That is, they
cannot grasp the concept, the older's not quite two. I'm not keeping them away
from it in my role as a parent and discussing the future with my wife usually
ends with "We won't do that" - ignoring punitive measures like I listed above,
the "So you came home late, no FB for 10 days" way. Education and enlightment >
Relying on random people online respecting a random header and doing what I
think is best for my kids)
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