3 ms·

Why not just take away their phone?

by lapcat 11mo ago

phantasmish 11mo ago
iPhones have excellent parental controls (by the abysmal standards of consumer software more broadly). You can just not allow insta and such, or set time limits on them per-day (30 minutes, say). I assume Android has something similar. You can set the Web to allowlist-only. Kids can send requests to bypass limits, sends the request right to your own Apple devices, easy to yay or nay it. It’s damn good. Phones are among the easiest devices to manage.
- lapcat 11mo ago
  > iPhones have excellent parental controls If those work, sure, although kids tend to be pretty clever about getting around parental controls and are sometimes quite a bit more technically sophisticated than their parents.
  - phantasmish 11mo ago
    It ain’t the ‘90s and this ain’t Windows 95 with bypassable-by-accident OS account logins and half-assed website blocking made by the lowest bidder. Getting past app installation restrictions and time limits on iOS would be… challenging. It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”. (And on some platforms it is, for practical purposes, impossible—looking at you, Linux, not just because it’s a powerful open platform but because its permissions and capabilities system is decades behind the state-of-the-art and tools for sensibly managing any of that on a scale smaller than “fleet of servers” and in the context of user-session applications are nonexistent)
    - lapcat 11mo ago
      > It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”. I didn't claim that it's impossible, merely that it's difficult sometimes, as you also implied ("putting in tons of work"). The advantage of physically consfiscating phones is that it's a low tech, brute force method available even to the least technically sophisticated parents.
      - jmathai 11mo ago
        heh...see my comment above about bypassing screen time limits on ios by simply deleting and reinstalling the app.
    - hellojesus 11mo ago
      To that extent can't kids just pop in a live USB and get a totally ephemeral and open os? I'd push the implementation to the router and force root certs on devices and have all clients run through your proxy or drop the packets. That way even live usbs will not get network access. Have some separate, hugely locked down network for kids' friends. Maybe put a separate honeypot network up with some iot devices on it with wifi and a weak password, and let the kids have some freedom once they figure out how to deauth and grab the bash upon reconnections. Idk. I'm some years away from this problem myself,but someone recommended this in another thread recently. https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump
      - DaSHacka 11mo ago
        > To that extent can't kids just pop in a live USB and get a totally ephemeral and open os? That's a lot more difficult if you leave secureboot enabled on the computer. Plus, most devices, especially newer ones, allow you to pin your own certificates and sometimes even disable the OEM certs. That, in addition with locking the BIOS with a password (and if the device does not have known OEM override passwords like on bios-pw.org), should be more than enough to keep a kid out.
        hellojesus 11mo ago
        Thanks for the tips!
- jmathai 11mo ago
  Found out last year that simply deleting an app and reinstalling it will reset time limits.
  - phantasmish 11mo ago
    App deletion and installation were among the first things I disabled :-)
jmathai 11mo ago
I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives. My son's cross country team communicates via GroupMe and it's very difficult for him to stay up-to-date with the web version from a laptop. My daughter's friend group communicates via snapchat. This doesn't mean parents have to allow everything. My daughter doesn't have Snapchat, for example. But there are definite tradeoffs like her being left out of many conversations and slowly getting excluded from friend groups as a result. It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.
- lapcat 11mo ago
  > I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives. It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban. A kid could be limited to an hour a day or phone use or something like that. > It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking. The inevitable result would seem to be that all adults, parents or not, would be forced to present their identification online to use the internet. I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice, regardless of how noble the goal.
  - jmathai 11mo ago
    > It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban. Limits help, for sure. But it's like setting limits for addictive products like "one cigarette a day". It's better than a pack a day but the impact addictive products have on kids don't stop once their limit is up. > I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice That's why I started by saying I don't have the solution. Regulation and fines for companies that target kids feels plausible. While not exactly the same, we curbed teen cigarette use by imposing marketing restrictions and issuing fines to tobacco companies (and drastically reduced adult smoking too for that matter). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_Un...

Why not just take away their phone?

by lapcat 11mo ago

Why not just take away their phone?

iPhones have excellent parental controls (by the abysmal standards of consumer software more broadly). You can just not allow insta and such, or set time limits on them per-day (30 minutes, say). I assume Android has something similar. You can set the Web to allowlist-only. Kids can send requests to bypass limits, sends the request right to your own Apple devices, easy to yay or nay it. It’s damn good. Phones are among the easiest devices to manage.

lapcat 11mo ago
> iPhones have excellent parental controls If those work, sure, although kids tend to be pretty clever about getting around parental controls and are sometimes quite a bit more technically sophisticated than their parents.
- phantasmish 11mo ago
  It ain’t the ‘90s and this ain’t Windows 95 with bypassable-by-accident OS account logins and half-assed website blocking made by the lowest bidder. Getting past app installation restrictions and time limits on iOS would be… challenging. It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”. (And on some platforms it is, for practical purposes, impossible—looking at you, Linux, not just because it’s a powerful open platform but because its permissions and capabilities system is decades behind the state-of-the-art and tools for sensibly managing any of that on a scale smaller than “fleet of servers” and in the context of user-session applications are nonexistent)
  - lapcat 11mo ago
    > It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”. I didn't claim that it's impossible, merely that it's difficult sometimes, as you also implied ("putting in tons of work"). The advantage of physically consfiscating phones is that it's a low tech, brute force method available even to the least technically sophisticated parents.
    - jmathai 11mo ago
      heh...see my comment above about bypassing screen time limits on ios by simply deleting and reinstalling the app.
  - hellojesus 11mo ago
    To that extent can't kids just pop in a live USB and get a totally ephemeral and open os? I'd push the implementation to the router and force root certs on devices and have all clients run through your proxy or drop the packets. That way even live usbs will not get network access. Have some separate, hugely locked down network for kids' friends. Maybe put a separate honeypot network up with some iot devices on it with wifi and a weak password, and let the kids have some freedom once they figure out how to deauth and grab the bash upon reconnections. Idk. I'm some years away from this problem myself,but someone recommended this in another thread recently. https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump https://wiki.squid-cache.org/Features/SslBump
    - DaSHacka 11mo ago
      > To that extent can't kids just pop in a live USB and get a totally ephemeral and open os? That's a lot more difficult if you leave secureboot enabled on the computer. Plus, most devices, especially newer ones, allow you to pin your own certificates and sometimes even disable the OEM certs. That, in addition with locking the BIOS with a password (and if the device does not have known OEM override passwords like on bios-pw.org), should be more than enough to keep a kid out.
      - hellojesus 11mo ago
        Thanks for the tips!
jmathai 11mo ago
Found out last year that simply deleting an app and reinstalling it will reset time limits.
- phantasmish 11mo ago
  App deletion and installation were among the first things I disabled :-)

jmathai 11mo ago

I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives. My son's cross country team communicates via GroupMe and it's very difficult for him to stay up-to-date with the web version from a laptop. My daughter's friend group communicates via snapchat. This doesn't mean parents have to allow everything. My daughter doesn't have Snapchat, for example. But there are definite tradeoffs like her being left out of many conversations and slowly getting excluded from friend groups as a result. It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.

lapcat 11mo ago
> I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives. It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban. A kid could be limited to an hour a day or phone use or something like that. > It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking. The inevitable result would seem to be that all adults, parents or not, would be forced to present their identification online to use the internet. I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice, regardless of how noble the goal.
- jmathai 11mo ago
  > It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban. Limits help, for sure. But it's like setting limits for addictive products like "one cigarette a day". It's better than a pack a day but the impact addictive products have on kids don't stop once their limit is up. > I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice That's why I started by saying I don't have the solution. Regulation and fines for companies that target kids feels plausible. While not exactly the same, we curbed teen cigarette use by imposing marketing restrictions and issuing fines to tobacco companies (and drastically reduced adult smoking too for that matter). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smoking_bans_in_the_Un...