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The Googles parental controls leave so much to be desired. There is a long running requests for disabling the Play Store app. Still this is not possible without

by Lutzb 3y ago

The Googles parental controls leave so much to be desired. There is a long running requests for disabling the Play Store app. Still this is not possible without using adb (which is not a good solution, it leads to other problems). It feels like no real kids are testing the parental controls: For a long time it was trivially easy to circumvent a set YouTube time limit restriction by just opening Play Store, browsing to an app with a video in the screenshot list and head over to YouTube from there. My son actually showed me this when he discovered it.

AtlasBarfed 3y ago
If Google care in the least for kids they would scrub all of those games that are predatory, introduce gambling addiction mechanics, use annoying and confusing in-game ads, and gateway to older even more addiction focused apps. Notice I didn't even mention all of the information hoovering. And of course the Play store is desperate for you to provide a credit card at every single opportunity so you can maximize the potential of kids doing accidental buying. It is a complete scam. I honestly don't know how television got such strict laws and regulations on children's programming, when viewed in comparison to the complete wild west, that is the modern app store.
- AndrewDucker 3y ago
  The sheer fact that I can't differentiate between "Has ads, and you can pay to get rid of them" and "Has 15 different currencies that make the game no fun unless you pay a fortune" in the Play store is proof that Google don't want to promote good business practices.
- willsmith72 3y ago
  > I honestly don't know how television got such strict laws and regulations on children's programming, when viewed in comparison to the complete wild west, that is the modern app store. With time and pressure. Right now you have a fun new technology which people are still infatuated with, bought by one of the biggest companies to ever exist, in a country which openly permits business-to-politician payments through lobbying. The wild west won't look anything like it does 50 years from now
  - astrange 3y ago
    No, it's because television was regulated as a tradeoff for using the limited resource of airwaves, but there isn't a limited resource of internet connections to game servers. > in a country which openly permits business-to-politician payments through lobbying. It's actually amazing how good of a tell this is. Nobody who says this ever knows anything about politics. I'm sorry, but politicians actually genuinely believe in most of the stuff they do you don't like, and so do their voters.
    - willsmith72 3y ago
      If you believe an entity has the ability to use funds to influence public policy, we agree. If you don't, you could let them know and save them billions of USD per year.
      - astrange 3y ago
        Do you have evidence for this claim?
        willsmith72 3y ago
        The claim that an entity has the ability to use funds to influence public policy?
        astrange 3y ago
        That they spend billions on it. But yes, that too, because even when they try it doesn't work. Here's today's election results in SC where the billionaire-backed* candidate got 1.4%. https://x.com/armanddoma/status/1753947901972418952 https://x.com/armanddoma/status/1753947901972418952 * morally, not financially, since you can't really do that unlike what people think
        willsmith72 3y ago
        it's not a secret that mega companies use huge amount of funds on lobbying to influence politics e.g. amazon in 2023, 19.8m USD https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders it's not like america is alone in this, they just have gigantic dollar figures. australia is a country which really struggles to move away from fossil fuels, and it also has gigantic coal-mining companies paying huge amounts to keep it that way https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-16797862 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-16797862 https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/23/apple-ramped-up-lobbying-spending-in-2022-outpacing-tech-peers.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/23/apple-ramped-up-lobbying-spe... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/09/big-meat-dairy-lobbyists-turn-out-record-numbers-cop28 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/09/big-meat...
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Not sure who is downvoting you, but you're absolutely right. Just like Meta/Instagram, they're playing lip-service to the concept, but not really taking action. Frustratingly, out of all the platforms & BigCorps, Microsoft's parental controls and support for child accounts seems the best. For many parents this might be no big deal. But there are genuinely children who've ventured into self-harm, eating disorder, etc. content on account of the wild-westness of the Internet combined with weakness of this crap. And it's absolutely maddening to see how pathetic they all (including Apple) are treating this.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  “Television” doesn’t have strict laws and restrictions. Over the air broadcasts do. The broadcast spectrum is considered publicly owned and is leased to television operators. I guess you could say the same about the cellular spectrum. But how deep do you want government regulation to go since Google operates over the internet? Do you really want the government controlling internet content “for the children”? And if they regulate app stores, especially on Android, do they also regulate what you can distribute from your own website?
  - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
    I see your point to some degree, but an app store is not the open internet, there is not freedom nor assumption of freedom. It is curated strictly in anticompetitive terms by both Google and Apple. So yes, I do expect strict child regulation in it, especially since there isn't the open internet issue of a) who pays for it and b) who is the central regulatory nexus point. It is google/apple in both cases.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      And how many of those apps could just be websites? Do you then regulate websites? If the US does something like the EU DMA, do you regulate all app stores for content? Exactly how do you do either in a way that the government doesn’t come in an regulate content that they don’t like?
      - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
        As a parent far on the liberal spectrum I am just fine with proper functioning government regulation, and the job they did in the 70s/80s/90s was perfectly fine. You are obviously arguing for zero-regulation, or you think you are in the libertarian sense. I always like to ask libertarians if they think murder should be illegal, which they usually do. Well, guess what, you are in favor of government regulation, it simply comes down to what line in the sand you are drawing that obviously is convenient to your own self interest.
Xeamek 3y ago
>It feels like no real kids are testing the parental controls I feel the same can be said about accessibility service: Once you get the accessibility permission, you have FULL control over the user's device. They could just split those permissions and expose a more fine-grained control api, but they (I suspect) have some one, verry extreme use case in mind and design the service around it (like ie. phone user being completly blind and requiring the accessiblity app to be an interface for literally all interactions with the device). Which means that whenever you want to use some feature of that api, you have to trust an app completely and give it a carte-blanche to do whatever it wants on your device. Which ultimately leads to gigantic whole in platforms security, for no other reason then 'this is the way and scenarios we intend people to be using it, and we give no compromises for anyone who has any other usege in mind'
TeMPOraL 3y ago
Parental controls are a strange beast. In general, they stand zero chance against even mildly interested kid, unless you're going to lock them up in a basement to isolate them entirely from their peer group. Those controls work best as a soft limit - strong enough that going around them would be clear, unambiguous disobedience. After all, they're parental controls, not NSA-proof security. Making them technically bulletproof would arguably be worse for everyone.
- tivert 3y ago
  > Those controls work best as a soft limit - strong enough that going around them would be clear, unambiguous disobedience. Which could very likely go undetected, therefore unpunished. It's not like it's a family-room computer that's easily monitored. > After all, they're parental controls, not NSA-proof security. Making them technically bulletproof would arguably be worse for everyone. It sounds like they're about as bulletproof as as screen door. I would be much better to have them as strong as an locked exterior door, maybe not "NSA-proof" (the door is vulnerable to locksmiths and battering rams) but strong enough to keep a kid out.
- philistine 3y ago
  I think you're describing the point of view of the phone makers. Parents I've interacted with are in a whole other world. If you limit YouTube, you're limiting YouTube. There should be no caveats.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    I'm a parent myself. But I also keep in mind that I owe my career and life comfort mostly to my parents being clueless about technology and too busy to supervise my use of computers since I was 9 or so.
- niemandhier 3y ago
  I agree with you, yet I can set up a sensibly controlled Linux notebook, but I cannot do that with either iOS,OSX or windows. I think that tells me something about the actual priorities of the people building all those systems.
oldandboring 3y ago
Google parental controls are basically abandonware, they function poorly and awkwardly, and don't integrate well with other products/services such as Google Home and Google TV. I have a dense 5 page document I wrote up detailing all of this, and I have nobody to send it to. Most of my frustrations come from the challenge of having 2 older (not toddler) kids, plus multiple Google devices (phones, tablets, Google TV's, PCs signed into Google Accounts). Google imagines parental control to be in the context of supervision, ie. this is Billy's phone and I'm going to physically hand it to him to use until he's done. And it's fundamentally device-level rather than account level, making it very cumbersome and easily circumvented -- let's say Jill has access via her account to 3 different Google TV's in the house. Family Link makes you say how much time she's allowed to spend on each TV per day. But to Jill, TV is TV, so if you leave her home alone unsupervised she'll just watch her quota on the first TV and then move on to the next. My prevailing theories, mind you I have no evidence at all for this: - These disparate product teams don't actually work closely together (and are probably incentivized to NOT work together) - These are dead-end teams at Google. If you end up on one, your goal is to nominally ship something so you can go somewhere else. - The product and engineering people who end up on the Family Link team don't actually have kids (they're too young), or if they do, they have like, one young kid.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  They probably realize it is hopeless to try to lock motivated kids out of their devices. And it might be a nostalgic memory for them, maybe they aren’t too motivated to implement this stuff. Most of us had full control of our devices growing up, right?
  - hunter2_ 3y ago
    Nostalgia time. > Most of us had full control of our devices growing up, right? Devices, yes. Internet connection: not at first. With the AOL app (not a separate appliance or OS feature) responsible for establishing the dialup connection, it only bridged internet access to the OS when the current AOL user had no parental controls. As a 10-14 year old whose AOL account was set to "young teen" (DNS allow list) and then "mature teen" (DNS deny list), I was free to use non-AOL apps but they had no internet access. Solution: download a keylogger* and subsequently use a parent's AOL account for the next few years until they removed controls from mine, giving full Internet access to the whole computer, without being found out. *The free version had a "pay for this" nag popup every few minutes. I opened the exe in a hex editor, typed over that nag string, and managed to corrupt it just enough that it would crash (with a totally generic fatal error) instead of nag. Launched it right before finding mom or dad to help me do some safe but blocked activity, which they were always happy to do, with increased supervision.
codeulike 3y ago
I don't think many people really use parental controls on Android or iOS. Its a feature thats there to make consumers feel safer, but anyone that tries to actually use it is going to quickly give up. Small example: On iOS 'Screen Time' you can restrict websites to a whitelist, which seems useful. But so many things break if you do that - all kinds of login screens for different apps - and you dont get given clues to as to what urls need to be whitelisted to un-break things. Sometimes with modern tech you're using a feature and you think "this is incredibly complicated and broken, there can't be many people actually using this" and I tend to get that feeling with parental controls.
- zwily 3y ago
  Most the parents that I know with kids do use iOS Screen Time. And yes, it's super frustrating.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
"It feels like no real kids are testing the parental controls" Or... hear me out... they don't really want adequate controls to be put in place in the first place? And, yeah, I have many many beefs to pick with Family Link.
renegat0x0 3y ago
I was using the parental control, however I have stopped using it. In the end it is surrogate of a parent. Either you care about your child and you know what it is doing, or not. If you think that your child would be vunlerable to anything in the web, then most likely you should not give the phone to your kid. If the kid is old enough to understand things, then it does not require software parental control, but a parent. A good parent does not need parental control in apps of their children. Parental controls also disables ability to install apps from other sources and I prefer fdroid apps from play store apps. The last thing is that it teaches that we are controlled by some software company, and 'kept safe from harm'. It gives that illusion. It trains that illusion. It enforces it.
- JoeAltmaier 3y ago
  True, but maybe a little idealistic? Every parent can use a little help. There's so much that your child sees and hears, you want to be there to help explain it to them when they have questions. Hand them a device that shows anything happening anywhere in the world? Maybe a little help there, limiting what they can easily stumble upon, is a good thing.
  - renegat0x0 3y ago
    Rising a child is difficult. Children, as people, are different. My children do not require it. It is not idealistic therefore. I do not say that everybody can now safely remove their safeguards.
- riku_iki 3y ago
  > If you think that your child would be vunlerable to anything in the web, then most likely you should not give the phone to your kid. phone has many utilities I want kids to use: make calls, check mail, maps, weather etc. The issue is that they are using it for secretly watching tiktok for example.
- Angostura 3y ago
  On iOS, the ability to prevent (say) the use of social media after 10pm is very useful. What would you, as someone who "cares about your child" do instead?
Scubabear68 3y ago
I have yet to find a really good online electronic control system. Having worked with the Apple, Windows, and Sony systems, they all suck. The Apple ones seem to have a hundred holes kids can break to extend screen time or download apps, and sometimes it takes awhile for a change to take effect. Windows was completely broken last time I checked on my son’s gaming machine. And Sony PlayStation - oh, so so painful. So it isn’t just Android. It’s everyone.
shantnutiwari 3y ago
Amazons Fire tablet allows you to block apps like Youtube with a password (or completely hide them), but I havent ever tried to "hack" them , so dont know how effective they are
- DamnInteresting 3y ago
  My kid has an Amazon kids Fire tablet. It allows parents to prevent specific apps from appearing on the home screen, and it seems to work fine, but it doesn't allow any kind of keyword blocking. For example, I have blocked a bunch of apps/videos/books by the YouTuber 'Blippi', but he releases new stuff all the time, and the new ones often pop up on the home screen. If I could preemptively block everything containing 'blippi' (or any other keywords) my life would be easier. Regarding YouTube, the YouTube Kids app lets me block videos and whole channels, and it's great. But there is no equivalent functionality in the main YouTube app. On various devices (e.g., Roku, Google Nest) the kid sometimes manages to find some YouTube channels I'd rather they didn't watch. But I have to manually intervene each time, I can't just block those channels from being watched or recommended in the future. YouTube/Google obviously know that it's valuable to block videos/channels, since that feature exists in the kids app, yet they omit the feature from the main app, even for a paying customer like me. It is obnoxious.
itslennysfault 3y ago
In my experience (granted I haven't been a kid in a long time), all parental controls leave much to be desired. When I was a kid I never once encountered something I couldn't eventually get around (at home and at school). Obviously, I wasn't a "typical" kid. I LOVED breaking through these types of things and eventually faced potential expulsion for this love, but my point is these things are typically half baked and security is only ever as strong as the weakest link. The worlds strongest door doesn't matter if its next to a glass window.
Osiris 3y ago
I bought my son a used iPhone SE specifically for parental controls. I have a legacy Google Workspaces account that all my family is on and now that it's considered a "business" product, I can't enable parental controls on my kids' Google accounts.

by Lutzb 3y ago

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

If Google care in the least for kids they would scrub all of those games that are predatory, introduce gambling addiction mechanics, use annoying and confusing in-game ads, and gateway to older even more addiction focused apps. Notice I didn't even mention all of the information hoovering. And of course the Play store is desperate for you to provide a credit card at every single opportunity so you can maximize the potential of kids doing accidental buying. It is a complete scam. I honestly don't know how television got such strict laws and regulations on children's programming, when viewed in comparison to the complete wild west, that is the modern app store.

AndrewDucker 3y ago
The sheer fact that I can't differentiate between "Has ads, and you can pay to get rid of them" and "Has 15 different currencies that make the game no fun unless you pay a fortune" in the Play store is proof that Google don't want to promote good business practices.
willsmith72 3y ago
> I honestly don't know how television got such strict laws and regulations on children's programming, when viewed in comparison to the complete wild west, that is the modern app store. With time and pressure. Right now you have a fun new technology which people are still infatuated with, bought by one of the biggest companies to ever exist, in a country which openly permits business-to-politician payments through lobbying. The wild west won't look anything like it does 50 years from now
- astrange 3y ago
  No, it's because television was regulated as a tradeoff for using the limited resource of airwaves, but there isn't a limited resource of internet connections to game servers. > in a country which openly permits business-to-politician payments through lobbying. It's actually amazing how good of a tell this is. Nobody who says this ever knows anything about politics. I'm sorry, but politicians actually genuinely believe in most of the stuff they do you don't like, and so do their voters.
  - willsmith72 3y ago
    If you believe an entity has the ability to use funds to influence public policy, we agree. If you don't, you could let them know and save them billions of USD per year.
    - astrange 3y ago
      Do you have evidence for this claim?
      - willsmith72 3y ago
        The claim that an entity has the ability to use funds to influence public policy?
        astrange 3y ago
        That they spend billions on it. But yes, that too, because even when they try it doesn't work. Here's today's election results in SC where the billionaire-backed* candidate got 1.4%. https://x.com/armanddoma/status/1753947901972418952 https://x.com/armanddoma/status/1753947901972418952 * morally, not financially, since you can't really do that unlike what people think
        willsmith72 3y ago
        it's not a secret that mega companies use huge amount of funds on lobbying to influence politics e.g. amazon in 2023, 19.8m USD https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders it's not like america is alone in this, they just have gigantic dollar figures. australia is a country which really struggles to move away from fossil fuels, and it also has gigantic coal-mining companies paying huge amounts to keep it that way https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-16797862 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-16797862 https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/23/apple-ramped-up-lobbying-spending-in-2022-outpacing-tech-peers.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/23/apple-ramped-up-lobbying-spe... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/09/big-meat-dairy-lobbyists-turn-out-record-numbers-cop28 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/09/big-meat...
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Not sure who is downvoting you, but you're absolutely right. Just like Meta/Instagram, they're playing lip-service to the concept, but not really taking action. Frustratingly, out of all the platforms & BigCorps, Microsoft's parental controls and support for child accounts seems the best. For many parents this might be no big deal. But there are genuinely children who've ventured into self-harm, eating disorder, etc. content on account of the wild-westness of the Internet combined with weakness of this crap. And it's absolutely maddening to see how pathetic they all (including Apple) are treating this.
scarface_74 3y ago
“Television” doesn’t have strict laws and restrictions. Over the air broadcasts do. The broadcast spectrum is considered publicly owned and is leased to television operators. I guess you could say the same about the cellular spectrum. But how deep do you want government regulation to go since Google operates over the internet? Do you really want the government controlling internet content “for the children”? And if they regulate app stores, especially on Android, do they also regulate what you can distribute from your own website?
- AtlasBarfed 3y ago
  I see your point to some degree, but an app store is not the open internet, there is not freedom nor assumption of freedom. It is curated strictly in anticompetitive terms by both Google and Apple. So yes, I do expect strict child regulation in it, especially since there isn't the open internet issue of a) who pays for it and b) who is the central regulatory nexus point. It is google/apple in both cases.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    And how many of those apps could just be websites? Do you then regulate websites? If the US does something like the EU DMA, do you regulate all app stores for content? Exactly how do you do either in a way that the government doesn’t come in an regulate content that they don’t like?
    - AtlasBarfed 3y ago
      As a parent far on the liberal spectrum I am just fine with proper functioning government regulation, and the job they did in the 70s/80s/90s was perfectly fine. You are obviously arguing for zero-regulation, or you think you are in the libertarian sense. I always like to ask libertarians if they think murder should be illegal, which they usually do. Well, guess what, you are in favor of government regulation, it simply comes down to what line in the sand you are drawing that obviously is convenient to your own self interest.

Xeamek 3y ago

>It feels like no real kids are testing the parental controls I feel the same can be said about accessibility service: Once you get the accessibility permission, you have FULL control over the user's device. They could just split those permissions and expose a more fine-grained control api, but they (I suspect) have some one, verry extreme use case in mind and design the service around it (like ie. phone user being completly blind and requiring the accessiblity app to be an interface for literally all interactions with the device). Which means that whenever you want to use some feature of that api, you have to trust an app completely and give it a carte-blanche to do whatever it wants on your device. Which ultimately leads to gigantic whole in platforms security, for no other reason then 'this is the way and scenarios we intend people to be using it, and we give no compromises for anyone who has any other usege in mind'

TeMPOraL 3y ago

Parental controls are a strange beast. In general, they stand zero chance against even mildly interested kid, unless you're going to lock them up in a basement to isolate them entirely from their peer group. Those controls work best as a soft limit - strong enough that going around them would be clear, unambiguous disobedience. After all, they're parental controls, not NSA-proof security. Making them technically bulletproof would arguably be worse for everyone.

tivert 3y ago
> Those controls work best as a soft limit - strong enough that going around them would be clear, unambiguous disobedience. Which could very likely go undetected, therefore unpunished. It's not like it's a family-room computer that's easily monitored. > After all, they're parental controls, not NSA-proof security. Making them technically bulletproof would arguably be worse for everyone. It sounds like they're about as bulletproof as as screen door. I would be much better to have them as strong as an locked exterior door, maybe not "NSA-proof" (the door is vulnerable to locksmiths and battering rams) but strong enough to keep a kid out.
philistine 3y ago
I think you're describing the point of view of the phone makers. Parents I've interacted with are in a whole other world. If you limit YouTube, you're limiting YouTube. There should be no caveats.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  I'm a parent myself. But I also keep in mind that I owe my career and life comfort mostly to my parents being clueless about technology and too busy to supervise my use of computers since I was 9 or so.
niemandhier 3y ago
I agree with you, yet I can set up a sensibly controlled Linux notebook, but I cannot do that with either iOS,OSX or windows. I think that tells me something about the actual priorities of the people building all those systems.

oldandboring 3y ago

Google parental controls are basically abandonware, they function poorly and awkwardly, and don't integrate well with other products/services such as Google Home and Google TV. I have a dense 5 page document I wrote up detailing all of this, and I have nobody to send it to. Most of my frustrations come from the challenge of having 2 older (not toddler) kids, plus multiple Google devices (phones, tablets, Google TV's, PCs signed into Google Accounts). Google imagines parental control to be in the context of supervision, ie. this is Billy's phone and I'm going to physically hand it to him to use until he's done. And it's fundamentally device-level rather than account level, making it very cumbersome and easily circumvented -- let's say Jill has access via her account to 3 different Google TV's in the house. Family Link makes you say how much time she's allowed to spend on each TV per day. But to Jill, TV is TV, so if you leave her home alone unsupervised she'll just watch her quota on the first TV and then move on to the next. My prevailing theories, mind you I have no evidence at all for this: - These disparate product teams don't actually work closely together (and are probably incentivized to NOT work together) - These are dead-end teams at Google. If you end up on one, your goal is to nominally ship something so you can go somewhere else. - The product and engineering people who end up on the Family Link team don't actually have kids (they're too young), or if they do, they have like, one young kid.

bee_rider 3y ago
They probably realize it is hopeless to try to lock motivated kids out of their devices. And it might be a nostalgic memory for them, maybe they aren’t too motivated to implement this stuff. Most of us had full control of our devices growing up, right?
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  Nostalgia time. > Most of us had full control of our devices growing up, right? Devices, yes. Internet connection: not at first. With the AOL app (not a separate appliance or OS feature) responsible for establishing the dialup connection, it only bridged internet access to the OS when the current AOL user had no parental controls. As a 10-14 year old whose AOL account was set to "young teen" (DNS allow list) and then "mature teen" (DNS deny list), I was free to use non-AOL apps but they had no internet access. Solution: download a keylogger* and subsequently use a parent's AOL account for the next few years until they removed controls from mine, giving full Internet access to the whole computer, without being found out. *The free version had a "pay for this" nag popup every few minutes. I opened the exe in a hex editor, typed over that nag string, and managed to corrupt it just enough that it would crash (with a totally generic fatal error) instead of nag. Launched it right before finding mom or dad to help me do some safe but blocked activity, which they were always happy to do, with increased supervision.

codeulike 3y ago

I don't think many people really use parental controls on Android or iOS. Its a feature thats there to make consumers feel safer, but anyone that tries to actually use it is going to quickly give up. Small example: On iOS 'Screen Time' you can restrict websites to a whitelist, which seems useful. But so many things break if you do that - all kinds of login screens for different apps - and you dont get given clues to as to what urls need to be whitelisted to un-break things. Sometimes with modern tech you're using a feature and you think "this is incredibly complicated and broken, there can't be many people actually using this" and I tend to get that feeling with parental controls.

zwily 3y ago
Most the parents that I know with kids do use iOS Screen Time. And yes, it's super frustrating.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

"It feels like no real kids are testing the parental controls" Or... hear me out... they don't really want adequate controls to be put in place in the first place? And, yeah, I have many many beefs to pick with Family Link.

renegat0x0 3y ago

I was using the parental control, however I have stopped using it. In the end it is surrogate of a parent. Either you care about your child and you know what it is doing, or not. If you think that your child would be vunlerable to anything in the web, then most likely you should not give the phone to your kid. If the kid is old enough to understand things, then it does not require software parental control, but a parent. A good parent does not need parental control in apps of their children. Parental controls also disables ability to install apps from other sources and I prefer fdroid apps from play store apps. The last thing is that it teaches that we are controlled by some software company, and 'kept safe from harm'. It gives that illusion. It trains that illusion. It enforces it.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago
True, but maybe a little idealistic? Every parent can use a little help. There's so much that your child sees and hears, you want to be there to help explain it to them when they have questions. Hand them a device that shows anything happening anywhere in the world? Maybe a little help there, limiting what they can easily stumble upon, is a good thing.
- renegat0x0 3y ago
  Rising a child is difficult. Children, as people, are different. My children do not require it. It is not idealistic therefore. I do not say that everybody can now safely remove their safeguards.
riku_iki 3y ago
> If you think that your child would be vunlerable to anything in the web, then most likely you should not give the phone to your kid. phone has many utilities I want kids to use: make calls, check mail, maps, weather etc. The issue is that they are using it for secretly watching tiktok for example.
Angostura 3y ago
On iOS, the ability to prevent (say) the use of social media after 10pm is very useful. What would you, as someone who "cares about your child" do instead?

Scubabear68 3y ago

I have yet to find a really good online electronic control system. Having worked with the Apple, Windows, and Sony systems, they all suck. The Apple ones seem to have a hundred holes kids can break to extend screen time or download apps, and sometimes it takes awhile for a change to take effect. Windows was completely broken last time I checked on my son’s gaming machine. And Sony PlayStation - oh, so so painful. So it isn’t just Android. It’s everyone.

shantnutiwari 3y ago

Amazons Fire tablet allows you to block apps like Youtube with a password (or completely hide them), but I havent ever tried to "hack" them , so dont know how effective they are

DamnInteresting 3y ago
My kid has an Amazon kids Fire tablet. It allows parents to prevent specific apps from appearing on the home screen, and it seems to work fine, but it doesn't allow any kind of keyword blocking. For example, I have blocked a bunch of apps/videos/books by the YouTuber 'Blippi', but he releases new stuff all the time, and the new ones often pop up on the home screen. If I could preemptively block everything containing 'blippi' (or any other keywords) my life would be easier. Regarding YouTube, the YouTube Kids app lets me block videos and whole channels, and it's great. But there is no equivalent functionality in the main YouTube app. On various devices (e.g., Roku, Google Nest) the kid sometimes manages to find some YouTube channels I'd rather they didn't watch. But I have to manually intervene each time, I can't just block those channels from being watched or recommended in the future. YouTube/Google obviously know that it's valuable to block videos/channels, since that feature exists in the kids app, yet they omit the feature from the main app, even for a paying customer like me. It is obnoxious.

itslennysfault 3y ago

In my experience (granted I haven't been a kid in a long time), all parental controls leave much to be desired. When I was a kid I never once encountered something I couldn't eventually get around (at home and at school). Obviously, I wasn't a "typical" kid. I LOVED breaking through these types of things and eventually faced potential expulsion for this love, but my point is these things are typically half baked and security is only ever as strong as the weakest link. The worlds strongest door doesn't matter if its next to a glass window.

Osiris 3y ago

I bought my son a used iPhone SE specifically for parental controls. I have a legacy Google Workspaces account that all my family is on and now that it's considered a "business" product, I can't enable parental controls on my kids' Google accounts.