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For comparison, and as a rant to substantially agree with you.... Microsoft has e.g. actual child Hotmail accounts, where the parent can whitelist who they can
by cmrdporcupine 3y ago
For comparison, and as a rant to substantially agree with you....
Microsoft has e.g. actual child Hotmail accounts, where the parent can whitelist who they can email and who can contact them. Gmail does not and has no intention adding such a thing. They did eventually add child accounts as part of the Family Link effort, but there's really no controls at that level. I recall seeing internally at Google that instead of adding such facilities to Gmail, they just preferred to a) cover their eyes and pretend that <13 year olds didn't have accounts by tossing that into the agreement and asking for a birthday b) proposing some blue sky alternative communication system for children (I forget the name of this effort, but it was I think 2016ish time frame?), but it had mock-ups and hand waving and big discussions and PRDs etc but was guaranteed to go nowhere because it was a giant vision parallel to y'know... actual-reality...
Microsoft also has global time limits across all devices. And far more granular control.
Anyways, you're substantially right about all this. It drove me nuts that we struggled to deal with access to harmful content and had no control over it, and the worst part of it was working at Google at the time and seeing just how not--seriously this is taken or at least the level of organizational paralysis that was preventing action.
Apple's system isn't much better than Google's FWIW.
- ryandrake 3y agoMy kid (under 13 y.o.) and all her friends know that when you sign up for some online service, you always need to give a birthday such that your age is 13+. Many services are totally nerfed to the point of uselessness if you say you are under 13, and/or won't even let you sign up. Also, some companies blacklist your E-mail address if you ever say you are under 13, so you can't try to sign up as a 10 year old, realize your mistake, and then try to re-sign up with the same E-mail as a "14 year old". Consequently, circumvention techniques get around pretty quickly among the pre-teen circles.
- monkpit 3y agoMicrosoft’s family thing is better but still not good. Simple things like adding more time or allowing purchases or adding funds with gift cards routinely fail with meaningless errors along the lines of “failed”. Or worse, a success message but there was a failure and the action doesn’t actually take effect. The moral here is all parental controls are crap because they don’t directly drive revenue. (Yes, you can say “but I would prefer to use a service with better controls, which drives adoption”, but let’s be honest - we are a minority there). Nobody’s getting promoted for making the best parental control suite.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoSure, and for ad-revenue driven companies like Google and Meta having good parental controls actually harms their business instead of improving on it. The incentives are all wrong. That, and parents only have kids of the age that this is of relevance for, for maybe 4, 5, 6 years. So you're targeting a feature not only for a small segment, but one that is transient. And if you screw it up, there's all sorts of potential for liability. You have to be careful about what you promise, etc. etc. All the more reason why the answer probably comes down to: gov't regulation instead of expecting them to do this voluntarily.
- zwily 3y agoMicrosoft just nuked their shared global time limits across devices. They force you to split the time up now.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoSigh. Well, I was thinking of buying an XBox but now...