I see it more like a question than a rule.

"The service is free. Am I the product?"

That is a valid thing to ask. Even with FOSS sometimes.

Some FOSS projects are backed by companies, then yes, plausible to ask.

Otherwise, I would answer with a clear no.

(Projects can still collect telemetry and other data and sell that, though the sell part should be very rare, imo...)

Edit: Was that a bad faith argument or a honest question?

Sometimes I can't tell, maybe because of old or ESL...

No. This is not the way.

> give parents the ABILITY to advertise the users age to browsers, apps and everything in between.

Accounts and Applications to services that provide countent are set to a country-specific age rating restrictions (PG, 12+, 18+, whatever). That's it.

None of the things you mentioned have any point to concern themself with the age or age-bracket of the user in front of the device. This can and will be abused. This is very obvious. Think about it.

Why should the applications get to decide if they are appropriate for a particular age? Shouldn't that be up to the parent? I shouldn't need to tell my kid: "Well, to use this compiler software, you need to set your age to 18 temporarily, because some product manager 3,000 miles away decided to rate it 18+. But, set it back to age 13 afterwards because you shouldn't be on adult sites." It's stupid.

I get what you mean, but I might have miscommunicated a bit.

Clarification: "are set to" means by the parent. "Accounts and Applications to services that provide countent" like media content providing apps like discord, netflix, etc. that ARE able and/or bound to rate their content.

Package Manager and Software Installation in general are usually locked behind root/admin passwords anyway. Especially on kids' devices their user should be non-admin, no?

So, when any piece of software is installed, it is by choice of the parent.

That's not unreasonable then?

That is what I meant by age(-rating), you are correct. However, drop country specifics - too complicated. Age brackets are enough: child, preteen, teen, adult. At around 16-17 these should be dropped anyway since at that point people are smart enough to get around these measures anyway and usually have non-parent controlled devices.