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I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself

lof.flounder.online

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Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself

#81

Post by lelanthran »

lrvick wrote: post #61
2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even teachers use Whatsapp to communicate with pupils nowadays. Here in Finland, from 13 and up, it's pretty much total social exclusion and severely reduced ability to participate in school work if you don't have a smartphone. Teenagers without phones is pretty much uneard of, apart from in some religious circles. The thing about those teenagers is that they rarely meet outside school. Covid made damn sure parents a…

If a teacher could not figure out how to communicate with a kid without routing those communications through Facebook servers, I would kindly teach them how e-mail, matrix, or other neutral internet protocols work. Honestly -most- of the time I tell people I don't have a phone they say something like "That is super cool, I wish I could do that. My phone has ruined my life. How would you prefer we keep in touch since…

> If a teacher could not figure out how to communicate with a kid without routing those communications through Facebook servers, I would kindly teach them how e-mail, matrix, or other neutral internet protocols work.

I get the feeling that your worldview is extremely limited, and you have not experienced the world of kids.

We choose schools based on how successful their graduates are. The more CEOs, doctors, etc that a school produced means that that school is more successful.

Once the school is chosen, you adhere to their rules. For my kids, some of those rules included online-only stuff. Sure, I could send my kids to a shittier school, but I don't want to do that.

Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself

#82

Post by lrvick »

jedberg wrote: post #5

Seems like a bit of an overreaction. My kids are just a few years younger than OP's, but I'm not going to cut them off. I will teach them the dangers of being online and will force the phones to use a VPN through our house with PiHole installed. I may or may not go as far as putting a custom cert on the phone so I can monitor all the traffic -- that will depend on if I catch them violating my trust. My default stance…

When I was about 12 I routed my parents dialup connection through -my- computer so I could monitor (and sometimes manipulate) -their- internet usage.

When they didn't like the content of my livejournal, I simply used my MITM to serve them a copy different from what the rest of the world saw.

The more you teach a kid about how tech works, they sooner they will use it to defy you.

It is not a big surprise I ended up in infosec.

Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself

#83

Post by [deleted] »

zo1 wrote: post #40
lynguist wrote: post #25

During the Facebook hearing, they said that its internal data shows that Facebook is most harmful for 14 year old girls. I believe that if you can somehow shield your daughter of that age from social media, she will be fine. I had a no display rule for our toddler but during my absence, her mother introduced her to the iPad, and now she watches YouTube on it whenever I’m not around. I know that the American Pediatric…

We took away Youtube Kids access after a few days. It's filled with so much very low quality "spam" content. E.g. random indians with thick accents singing to random recordings of them playing with toys and 5k iterations of that for every single kids song imaginable. And that's even excluding the potential of them finding content along the lines of "Elsa Gate". Youtube-dl is your friend. Download (or pirate) quality…

[deleted]

Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself

#84

Post by raverbashing »

lrvick wrote: post #74
raverbashing wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Smartphones are harmful" are the new "videogames cause violence" (a bit justifiable, but blown out of proportion) And on average most people will use it, so a kid that can use better than it is already on top of the pack

"Smartphones are harmful" is the new "Smoking is harmful". Smoking and football were once both pretty much required if you wanted to be popular, but time eventually revealed the interests of the cool kids often ended with lung cancer and brain damage. Teach a kid to build computers, write software, design and solder their electronics. They will be miles ahead technically of most of their tiktok scrolling peers.

The analogy doesn't stand.

Some uses of social media can be "as harmful" as banging your head on a wall, but a smartphone is much more than that.

> They will be miles ahead technically of most of their tiktok scrolling peers.

Life is not only about technical skills. And I've had plenty of these "technically minded" people spewing complete BS about vaccines here on HN, so I guess they think they're technically minded but aren't

Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself

#85

Post by Freak_NL »

lrvick wrote: post #61
2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even teachers use Whatsapp to communicate with pupils nowadays. Here in Finland, from 13 and up, it's pretty much total social exclusion and severely reduced ability to participate in school work if you don't have a smartphone. Teenagers without phones is pretty much uneard of, apart from in some religious circles. The thing about those teenagers is that they rarely meet outside school. Covid made damn sure parents a…

If a teacher could not figure out how to communicate with a kid without routing those communications through Facebook servers, I would kindly teach them how e-mail, matrix, or other neutral internet protocols work. Honestly -most- of the time I tell people I don't have a phone they say something like "That is super cool, I wish I could do that. My phone has ruined my life. How would you prefer we keep in touch since…

> If a teacher could not figure out how to communicate with a kid without routing those communications through Facebook servers, I would kindly teach them how e-mail, matrix, or other neutral internet protocols work.

And some (few) would appreciate your effort, but quite pragmatically have to acknowledge that there is no way they can support a classroom full of kids with those solutions, and that even if they could, it would get in the way of the curriculum. In the Netherlands too, WhatsApp is decidedly not (or only nominally) optional in high school. This is not something that can be solved by going to individual teachers (and really, most won't understand why you can't 'just' use WhatsApp); you need legislation to break open those silos and technological support at a national scale for non-commercial alternatives. The former is happening in the EU (so give it a few years before you can chat with people on WhatsApp without a smartphone from a Linux laptop, maybe); the latter is a non-starter in many countries due to government IT projects failing constantly.

Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself

#86

Post by em500 »

psiops wrote: post #46

My oldest just got her first smartphone at 11. But it comes with rules. Screentime is limited. The phone does not go up to her room, it stays downstairs. She's allowed to take it out with her only when that makes sense for keeping in touch. No mobile internet (yet). We have open and frank talks about the dangerous sides of the internet and social media. And at 11, she can understand those warnings.

If you disable data altogether (wifi, not just mobile), you don't really need any screentime limits or other rules such as where she is allowed to use it. She'll very quickly self-limit the amount of time she spends on it. Keeping in touch works fine with voice and sms.

As we all know., the internet is an infinite time sink.

Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself

#87

Post by Certhas »

The attempt at an individual/technological solution to a problem that needs to be solved at a societal/regulatory/legal level.

It's a bit like talking about buying better gas masks and forcing your kids to wear them, when we should be advocating for stricter emission standards.

Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself

#88

Post by sillysaurusx »

I think we should embrace it. Take a step back and look at what happened here.

Remember that for 99% of people, seeing a video of their friends is a happy interaction. It's the kind of thing an ML model would notice, even if TikTok didn't.

As the author points out, of course TikTok uses wifi data to know. It's not even wifi -- it's "Both people connected to our service from the same IP. These people are related in some way."

If you think that's sinister, you must think Dan's pretty sinister too. Checking IPs is moderation 101, and dates back to the dawn of chat rooms.

I think everyone is nervous (and rightly so) that bigcos know so much about us. We've also seen how quickly the political situation can change -- it's easy to imagine a dictator using this knowledge to purge undesirables.

But other countries are already doing that. That is the reality in which we live. My wife and I are doing IVF in June, and with any luck, I'll have the opportunity to help guide a new soul into the world. I feel that my main responsibility is to prepare them to lead the happiest life they can -- all else being equal, optimizing your family tree for happiness seems like a reasonable approach.

Cutting out "the entire future" in the name of protecting one's children isn't something that I'm particularly interested in trying. To each their own; but someday my kiddo is going to realize that I can't protect her, the same way my father can't protect me from ruining my life by tweeting out certain combinations of words. I want her to be prepared to take advantage of the world, not hide her from it.

I'll be bookmarking this comment. In 14 years, I suspect I won't feel the same way when she's running around with the local boys. Parents don't share in the upside, only the downside, so it's hard to resist the urge to shut down their behavior and box them up for their own protection.

It's good we'll have data points on both approaches. I don't know that the author's approach would be bad, but it's hard to imagine myself being who I am today if I were their kid.

(One of the neat things about IVF is that you can choose the gender of your children. Deciding to have a daughter was a very "we live in the future" moment.)

Re: I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself

#89

Post by lrvick »

barrkel wrote: post #11

Avoiding Google Search is already a sign of being at the more radical end of the spectrum IMO. I don't think avoiding big tech is really possible without joining a separate offline society. You can reduce it but you're not going to keep your kids offline without their friends also being offline.

I have hundreds of friends both IRL and online, hang out with lots of different people every week, have piles of hobbies (many involve tech), and run a b2b company serving major silicon valley tech firms.

I also don't have a smartphone and I almost exclusively use open standards and open source software, most of which I self-host in a rack in my closet. The only way I can be reached is e-mail and matrix.

You do -not- need a smartphone or FAANG to live a rich technical life in 2022 though many in the US sure seem to think you do. In the USA, you go to Defcon and see google/apple/discord nonsense everywhere. Even the privacy village (ugh). Go to CCC in Germany and you will see thousands of people gathering and exchanging ideas with only open software and protocols, because they don't trust US big tech.

The fact so most in the US, like you, think that app culture and surveillance capitalism is required to thrive in our online world is evidence of some very successful marketing.

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