7 ms·

No autonomy except when it comes to devices and the internet. Far too many parents are either ignorant of or too lazy to set up parental controls on new phones,

No autonomy except when it comes to devices and the internet. Far too many parents are either ignorant of or too lazy to set up parental controls on new phones, tablets, and computers before handing them to kids. The TikTok ban debate would have never been needed if there were basic parental awareness. They instead resort to manual snooping and device taking after the damage is done. They’re helicopter parenting the wrong areas of life.

nonethewiser 4y ago
Idk, seems like YouTube recognizes their responsibility with children. Can we really expect parents to do better than app level moderation?
ceejayoz 4y ago
> Far too many parents are either ignorant of or too lazy to set up parental controls on new phones, tablets, and computers before handing them to kids. To be fair, the parental controls on modern devices feel like they were developed by a bunch of childless early 20-somethings.
- vegetablepotpie 4y ago
  I’m curious what you think parental controls are missing that are needed by parents?
  - rch 4y ago
    Forced IRC only hours.
  - thom 4y ago
    Templated, reusable schedules so I don’t have to set up downtime for each kid individually. Allow overrides for holidays etc. Apple let you press a button for ‘one more minute’ that seems impossible to disable. Password management is horrible as a family, as is having to set up my fingerprint on all my kids’ devices to be able to help them with stuff without faff. More generally, every time I have to set up any sort of account for my kids it’s absolute torture. Try to log in with Apple ID, can’t cos they’re a kid. Try to log in with a google account, remember Family Link doesn’t work for my normal account because it was set up for a domain, so log in as my other google account, set kid up, still doesn’t work. Give me one place in my whole life to manage identity for my family, one that works, with permissions and downtime settings that integrate with every app and website in the world (including the half dozen each of my kids’ schools require us to use). I’ll pay loads of money for this.
  - 1123581321 4y ago
    Vastly smoother settings adjustment or profile selection per combo of kid/activity/device.
  - oakashes 4y ago
    The ability to make all content opt-in instead of opt-out would get you 90% of the way there. Very few services that I know of offer this. Most of them offer gating by age range into all content the service considers appropriate for that age, and most allow you to block specific content as well, but all I really want for my young kids is to know exactly what content is available to them because I have added it specifically. Beyond that, there are some nice things you could do like a workflow for a kid to request new content and a parent to review and approve/deny it. But that's definitely a nice-to-have.
    - cameldrv 4y ago
      This. There is some fantastic stuff for kids on YouTube (most of it though is actually made for adults and is not available on YouTube kids). However, there is a tremendous amount of trash, and the recommender loves it. I wish I could add a bunch of good channels and let the kids pick their own content, but only from that list.
- klyrs 4y ago
  > they were developed by a bunch of childless early 20-somethings. Can confirm, I know a few people who work in a social media "for kids" group and they fit this description to a tee and display significant naivety.
- scruple 4y ago
  Streaming services in particular are driving me crazy. They don't have parental controls. Not really. You can make a kids account or whatever but you can't dictate what can or can't be seen. I'm at a point with streaming services -- and this stems from the 24/7, 365 on-demand access we have to television and movies today that was not reality when I was a child -- where I'm ready to cancel everything and curate my our experience for myself and my kids with a NAS and torrents. edit/ So I check Netflix to see what they offer. Viewing restrictions limits content based on parental guidelines ratings. That's really it. It's like someone else commented, it's as if these places are staffed by people who don't have children.
  - eru 4y ago
    You can ban individual shows in kids' Netflix.
    - scruple 4y ago
      I can't find it, despite trying for the last ~10 minutes. edit/ You'll have to pardon the evening Dad brain, I googled it. Thank you, kind stranger!
      - eru 4y ago
        I had to look that up on the web recently, too. To remove some shows that have recently seen heavy rotation, or are otherwise too annoying for the parents.
    - wink 4y ago
      Sounds just as useless, I'd expect "allow these shows" and not "oh, I need to ban 500"
      - eru 4y ago
        Depends on your use case. We just use it to remove shows as they start to annoy us. Not to pre-emptively control what the kid watches.
mouse_ 4y ago
Parental control software is counterproductive, and will generally only lead to them trying to outsmart you, which is a bad precedent. If you really want to keep your kids safe online, the most important thing to do is establish trust and understanding with them that the boundaries you set are important and reasonable. You need to respect them as people, and they need to understand and appreciate why you set the limits that you do. On top of that, you need to supervise them, and even then, they should not be allowed to use social media, which ought to be 18+ anyways. I understand this is all a lot to ask in our society. There is no "good" answer to this problem. But we should all try to do the best we can, and not forget that big tech puts hundreds of millions, if not billions, into making social media as addictive as possible. I'd say we're at a point where it's sensible to conclude it's now more addictive and harmful than tobacco, though our society has yet to come to terms with this fact. Even if we put a stop to it now (we won't), our current social media infrastructure will likely haunt us for centuries.
- Dalewyn 4y ago
  What's sad is parents today all grew up with the internet. They should know how children should interact with it. To put it into context: Facebook was founded in 2004. That is 19 years ago. Youtube was founded in 2005. That is 18 years ago. Twitter was founded in 2006. That is 17 years ago. Google was founded in 1998. That is 25 years ago. The World Wide Web (remember that name?) came to be in 1989. That is 34 years ago. Social media is old enough to be in the history books, let alone the internet at large. What the hell are the parents and would-be parents of today doing to be this fucking incompetent?
  - sli 4y ago
    You're very much overestimating the average persons knowledge or ability to care about the internet beyond their relatively narrow use of it. It's hard to think critically about things that one takes for granted, and non-tech people frequently just take tech for granted. Tech people frequently do the same thing and appear completely out of touch with the average person's needs, but we call those "disruptive startups" instead.
chrisco255 4y ago
The TikTok ban isn't about teenage responsibility on the internet. It's just that it's a Chinese owned communications network in an era of increased tension with US gov. > They’re helicopter parenting the wrong areas of life. Helicopter parenting is always a bad idea. Either you teach your kids ethics, morals, responsibility, self-respect, and assertiveness or they will fail as adults.
29athrowaway 4y ago
Don't underestimate kids. https://www.fastcompany.com/2681011/ethiopian-kids-hacked-their-donated-tablets-in-just-five-months https://www.fastcompany.com/2681011/ethiopian-kids-hacked-th... “We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  I don't underestimate kids, but I suspect healthy skepticism towards 1st graders 'hacking Android' is warranted. What exactly did they do?
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    The OLTP devices distributed to them had the camera disabled. They figured out the way to correct the problem.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      That is much too vague to be useful.
- maphew 4y ago
  I surmise those kids had near complete freedom to do whatever they wanted with those tablets. No parental helicoptering.
kube-system 4y ago
> The TikTok ban debate would have never been needed if there were basic parental awareness. The TikTok issues have never been about the health or safety of children. If it was, it the discussion would involve other social media. It has always been about the TikTok’s governance structure, which legally and functionally enables espionage and/or psyops against a significant portion of people who do may be involved in things that are of a US national security interest. For example, you don’t want your government personnel doing important things while carrying a device that sends important contextual data to organizations which have CCP oversight.
- jonathanlb 4y ago
  > It has always been about the TikTok’s governance structure, which [...] enables espionage and/or psyops [...] The proposed solution to the TikTok problem is the RESTRICT Act, with language so broad and vague that it would make VPN usage a felony. It may just be incompetence on Sen. Warner's behalf, but otherwise, it's also about an opportunistic power grab by the US federal government.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    That bill surely has problems, but the way it is worded throughout, it seems fairly apparent that any impact it might have on VPNs was not the intended target. (Presuming that the language actually would ban VPNs, which is not entirely clear) Regardless, my point is that it definitely isn’t about the kids, and that is very clear in that bill.
pteraspidomorph 4y ago
Well, if the recent Utah thing is any sign, they're ready to overdo it when it comes to the internet, too. > The bills will give parents full access to their children's online accounts, including posts and private messages. Where "children" is defined as anyone younger than 18. I can see the point of some of these controls, but legally disallowing a 17 year old from having privacy from their parents? Absolutely not. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65060733 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65060733

nonethewiser 4y ago

Idk, seems like YouTube recognizes their responsibility with children. Can we really expect parents to do better than app level moderation?

ceejayoz 4y ago

> Far too many parents are either ignorant of or too lazy to set up parental controls on new phones, tablets, and computers before handing them to kids. To be fair, the parental controls on modern devices feel like they were developed by a bunch of childless early 20-somethings.

vegetablepotpie 4y ago
I’m curious what you think parental controls are missing that are needed by parents?
- rch 4y ago
  Forced IRC only hours.
- thom 4y ago
  Templated, reusable schedules so I don’t have to set up downtime for each kid individually. Allow overrides for holidays etc. Apple let you press a button for ‘one more minute’ that seems impossible to disable. Password management is horrible as a family, as is having to set up my fingerprint on all my kids’ devices to be able to help them with stuff without faff. More generally, every time I have to set up any sort of account for my kids it’s absolute torture. Try to log in with Apple ID, can’t cos they’re a kid. Try to log in with a google account, remember Family Link doesn’t work for my normal account because it was set up for a domain, so log in as my other google account, set kid up, still doesn’t work. Give me one place in my whole life to manage identity for my family, one that works, with permissions and downtime settings that integrate with every app and website in the world (including the half dozen each of my kids’ schools require us to use). I’ll pay loads of money for this.
- 1123581321 4y ago
  Vastly smoother settings adjustment or profile selection per combo of kid/activity/device.
- oakashes 4y ago
  The ability to make all content opt-in instead of opt-out would get you 90% of the way there. Very few services that I know of offer this. Most of them offer gating by age range into all content the service considers appropriate for that age, and most allow you to block specific content as well, but all I really want for my young kids is to know exactly what content is available to them because I have added it specifically. Beyond that, there are some nice things you could do like a workflow for a kid to request new content and a parent to review and approve/deny it. But that's definitely a nice-to-have.
  - cameldrv 4y ago
    This. There is some fantastic stuff for kids on YouTube (most of it though is actually made for adults and is not available on YouTube kids). However, there is a tremendous amount of trash, and the recommender loves it. I wish I could add a bunch of good channels and let the kids pick their own content, but only from that list.
klyrs 4y ago
> they were developed by a bunch of childless early 20-somethings. Can confirm, I know a few people who work in a social media "for kids" group and they fit this description to a tee and display significant naivety.
scruple 4y ago
Streaming services in particular are driving me crazy. They don't have parental controls. Not really. You can make a kids account or whatever but you can't dictate what can or can't be seen. I'm at a point with streaming services -- and this stems from the 24/7, 365 on-demand access we have to television and movies today that was not reality when I was a child -- where I'm ready to cancel everything and curate my our experience for myself and my kids with a NAS and torrents. edit/ So I check Netflix to see what they offer. Viewing restrictions limits content based on parental guidelines ratings. That's really it. It's like someone else commented, it's as if these places are staffed by people who don't have children.
- eru 4y ago
  You can ban individual shows in kids' Netflix.
  - scruple 4y ago
    I can't find it, despite trying for the last ~10 minutes. edit/ You'll have to pardon the evening Dad brain, I googled it. Thank you, kind stranger!
    - eru 4y ago
      I had to look that up on the web recently, too. To remove some shows that have recently seen heavy rotation, or are otherwise too annoying for the parents.
  - wink 4y ago
    Sounds just as useless, I'd expect "allow these shows" and not "oh, I need to ban 500"
    - eru 4y ago
      Depends on your use case. We just use it to remove shows as they start to annoy us. Not to pre-emptively control what the kid watches.

mouse_ 4y ago

Parental control software is counterproductive, and will generally only lead to them trying to outsmart you, which is a bad precedent. If you really want to keep your kids safe online, the most important thing to do is establish trust and understanding with them that the boundaries you set are important and reasonable. You need to respect them as people, and they need to understand and appreciate why you set the limits that you do. On top of that, you need to supervise them, and even then, they should not be allowed to use social media, which ought to be 18+ anyways. I understand this is all a lot to ask in our society. There is no "good" answer to this problem. But we should all try to do the best we can, and not forget that big tech puts hundreds of millions, if not billions, into making social media as addictive as possible. I'd say we're at a point where it's sensible to conclude it's now more addictive and harmful than tobacco, though our society has yet to come to terms with this fact. Even if we put a stop to it now (we won't), our current social media infrastructure will likely haunt us for centuries.

Dalewyn 4y ago
What's sad is parents today all grew up with the internet. They should know how children should interact with it. To put it into context: Facebook was founded in 2004. That is 19 years ago. Youtube was founded in 2005. That is 18 years ago. Twitter was founded in 2006. That is 17 years ago. Google was founded in 1998. That is 25 years ago. The World Wide Web (remember that name?) came to be in 1989. That is 34 years ago. Social media is old enough to be in the history books, let alone the internet at large. What the hell are the parents and would-be parents of today doing to be this fucking incompetent?
- sli 4y ago
  You're very much overestimating the average persons knowledge or ability to care about the internet beyond their relatively narrow use of it. It's hard to think critically about things that one takes for granted, and non-tech people frequently just take tech for granted. Tech people frequently do the same thing and appear completely out of touch with the average person's needs, but we call those "disruptive startups" instead.

chrisco255 4y ago

The TikTok ban isn't about teenage responsibility on the internet. It's just that it's a Chinese owned communications network in an era of increased tension with US gov. > They’re helicopter parenting the wrong areas of life. Helicopter parenting is always a bad idea. Either you teach your kids ethics, morals, responsibility, self-respect, and assertiveness or they will fail as adults.

29athrowaway 4y ago

Don't underestimate kids. https://www.fastcompany.com/2681011/ethiopian-kids-hacked-their-donated-tablets-in-just-five-months https://www.fastcompany.com/2681011/ethiopian-kids-hacked-th... “We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

bigDinosaur 4y ago
I don't underestimate kids, but I suspect healthy skepticism towards 1st graders 'hacking Android' is warranted. What exactly did they do?
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  The OLTP devices distributed to them had the camera disabled. They figured out the way to correct the problem.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    That is much too vague to be useful.
maphew 4y ago
I surmise those kids had near complete freedom to do whatever they wanted with those tablets. No parental helicoptering.

kube-system 4y ago

> The TikTok ban debate would have never been needed if there were basic parental awareness. The TikTok issues have never been about the health or safety of children. If it was, it the discussion would involve other social media. It has always been about the TikTok’s governance structure, which legally and functionally enables espionage and/or psyops against a significant portion of people who do may be involved in things that are of a US national security interest. For example, you don’t want your government personnel doing important things while carrying a device that sends important contextual data to organizations which have CCP oversight.

jonathanlb 4y ago
> It has always been about the TikTok’s governance structure, which [...] enables espionage and/or psyops [...] The proposed solution to the TikTok problem is the RESTRICT Act, with language so broad and vague that it would make VPN usage a felony. It may just be incompetence on Sen. Warner's behalf, but otherwise, it's also about an opportunistic power grab by the US federal government.
- kube-system 4y ago
  That bill surely has problems, but the way it is worded throughout, it seems fairly apparent that any impact it might have on VPNs was not the intended target. (Presuming that the language actually would ban VPNs, which is not entirely clear) Regardless, my point is that it definitely isn’t about the kids, and that is very clear in that bill.

pteraspidomorph 4y ago

Well, if the recent Utah thing is any sign, they're ready to overdo it when it comes to the internet, too. > The bills will give parents full access to their children's online accounts, including posts and private messages. Where "children" is defined as anyone younger than 18. I can see the point of some of these controls, but legally disallowing a 17 year old from having privacy from their parents? Absolutely not. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65060733 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65060733