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Parental controls aren't for parents

beasthacker.com

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Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#191

Post by Bluecobra »

fn-mote wrote: post #63

Dear All, As you post, please be clear what age range child you are discussing. There are a lot of posts here advocating strategies that make sense for a 10 year old but are ridiculous for a 15 year old. Remember: once the children have friends with unrestricted cell phones (essentially all 14+ year olds in the us), there are many many more options for them to go online. Also, I got my start as a “hacker” gaming, che…

> Be aware of unintended consequences when you (try to) cut a child off from computer use.

In the mid 90’s I got my first PC when I was 13 but my parents would not let me online. I ended up finding a way via nefarious means. I bought a 25’ telephone cord from Radio Shack and when my parents weren’t home I would unplug their bedroom phone. I discovered that if I ran the Prodigy installer it would connect to the Internet briefly to download the latest phone numbers in my area. I found that I could alt-tab out of the full screen installer and use the lnternet unfiltered for about 10 minutes or so before they kicked me off. This worked for about a year or so.

I then had to resort to stealing my parent’s credit card and signing up for free trials and cancelling them before the charges incurred. I eventually screwed up big time. I downloaded a “free porn” BBS dialer and it made an international call to South America and ran up the phone bill $300 or so. I lost my computer privileges for a couple of months. I guess the silver lining was when I turned 16, I immediately got a job and my drivers license so I could pay for my own phone line. I kept my grades up to maintain privileges and was a straight arrow since.

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#192

Post by beasthacker »

vorpalhex wrote: post #51
hnlmorg wrote: post #26

I really want to sympathise with the author but this feels more like a one-sided rant piece than a constructive article. For example, in one paragraph they complain that “I don’t want my son to get online” then literally the following paragraph they complain that they need a Switch Online membership to get their son online. If you want your Nintendo Switch to “behave like a Gameboy” then don’t get the online membersh…

The issue is that the kid wants to play a game with his friends. So that is "online" in the sense that it uses the internet.. but it isn't the same as a web browser, or an open store of every online app. I run game servers for my nephew. I know he only adds his friends and I can keep a loose eye on them. I don't care if his friends talk about boobs or make penis jokes (they're 14), I only care that there aren't any p…

Yes, this is exactly the distinction I was struggling to articulate.

“Online” has collapsed into a single bucket that includes friends-only play, strangers, stores, chat, downloads, etc. What I want (and what you’re describing with running servers) is a way to scope online access: friends-only communication, no discovery, no stores, no strangers.

The frustrating part is that many platforms either (a) force these things to come as a bundle, so saying “yes” to playing with friends implicitly says “yes” to a much larger surface area; or (b) make the unbundling process so complex that well-meaning parents fail and exhausted parents give up.

jonathaneunice put the incentives behind this more sharply than I did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465547

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#193

Post by selectively »

The Gabb thing is the fault of the parent.

By buying a child a locked down device - a hostile device that few would have accepted for themselves as a child - they marked them as 'being a child' rather than blending in with the rest of the people on the Internet.

By marking them this way, they advertise the child to the predators of the world.

This is someone who is twelve. They aren't six. Life involves risk. Stop playing with account controls and let the person play Minecraft. This really isn't that hard.

Having thoughts about physically breaking a child's holiday gifts - of doing that in front of them - is suggestive of being a pretty awful person. You can't figure out something that the child does not want, so you want to break their stuff?

How much longer do you intend to keep this routine up? Is your objective for them to go no contact? What are you seeking here?

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#194

Post by Rohansi »

knallfrosch wrote: post #180
mjg2 wrote: post #128

This HN post fits into the category of "Pithy blog title with casually anecdotal content." Software companies will never earnestly attempt to protect children because that action ("acknowledging children are in danger by using our product") acknowledges risk and introduces liability. (VCs hate that shit, especially Silicon Valley VCs.) In the United States, decades ago, laws were introduced to induce accountability o…

A GameBoy would have been cheaper, offline and worked without an account. Yet the author chose to spend his money on the Switch2. What's the market to learn from this? You're saying one thing but voting with your wallet.

I agree with you but you can't just go out and buy a Gameboy anymore. And gaming is more of a social activity now where you'll need internet access.

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#195

Post by whythough1234 »

rolymath wrote: post #132
whythough1234 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beasthacker is a hilarious identity to assume for someone so keen on using tech that does the parenting for them.

Hardly a comment worth singing up to HN to post.

All of your comments are gold and worth signing up to post. You’re an intellectual no one can touch. Oooh look at you and your comment worthiness.

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#196

Post by whythough1234 »

jameskilton wrote: post #9

My daughter will not get a phone at all until she's at least 16 and probably finally actually needs one. As for the Switch and Nintendo Online, I didn't find it confusing or difficult at all to set up a child's account, make sure they can't buy anything without my permission, and then I make sure my daughter knows what she can and can't do, and I keep an eye on it to make sure she follows my rules. I don't trust pare…

I didn’t have a cell phone until I was 17, but still used the house phone to call and talk to friends. A house phone a parent can always listen in to conversations but still respect the child’s privacy. The child also knows that they can be listened in on and that their privacy is restricted.

The child may also learn about making social effort to keep in touch rather than relying on a beacon to ping them about social events.

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#197

Post by artyom »

petermcneeley wrote: post #108

What was the punishment for the 12 year old? This will tell us everything we need to know about this story.

I'm kind of with you on this one. 12yo is old enough to understand the rules (assuming they were clearly set) and if he/she was willingly communicating with a stranger, that phone should get the hammer with no replacement whatsoever. I've seen this done, it works.

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#198

Post by sowbug »

It's easy to say "oh, this is just enterprise controls, and your family is an enterprise."

But then I remember every time I've had to delve into actual enterprise administration, and yeah that's its own full-time job.

Side rant: when will businesses acknowledge that an account might be owned by two people (spouses, for example) and allow separate logins for the same account? Their terms of service almost always prohibit sharing passwords, and because the lost password flow would require sharing an email address, you didn't want to do that anyway.

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#199

Post by SoftTalker »

mjg2 wrote: post #75
Aurornis wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. As a parent it feels hard to sympathize with someone who outsourced their child’s app usage selection to another company and didn’t even bother to check what apps were allowed first. I visited the Gabb site they linked to and “Communication with strangers” is clearly listed as one of the tags they put on apps allowed on the phone. You’re supposed to review them as a parent, not just assume that 100% of the n…

I agree. Parents in the 21st century need to realize the call is coming from inside the house: it's their obligation to protect their child. Unsupervised usage without full due-diligence will lead to incidents like what the blog author describes. The dilemma of online protection is a false crisis because parents would rather let their children play with fire than nurture their babies.

No, we've always had effective societal gatekeeping on what kids can access.

Cigarettes, liquor, porn, R-rated movies, all had general barriers to access for kids in the pre-internet world. Parents could rely on most store clerks not selling alcohol, tobacco, or adult magazines to a child. Parents did not have to hover over everything their child did. Was it perfect, of course not, but it worked fairly well and didn't require constant monitoring. You could let your kids go to the mall and be fairly sure that they would not be let in to an R-rated movie. They could ride their bikes to a convenience store and the worst thing they could buy was candy.

With online accounts and apps, everything needs review and permission. Every. Single. Thing. That is the main complaint in TFA. He wants a single device level setting so that he doesn't have to constantly vet everything.

This is precisely why many parents support age verification laws for social media and adult sites. Tech companies could have solved this on their terms but they just punted it to "parents" with an insane level of complexity, and the parents don't like it.

Re: Parental controls aren't for parents

#200

Post by epiccoleman »

PaulHoule wrote: post #153
epiccoleman wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have kids? I'm guessing you don't, because the answer is pretty obvious to those of us who do - the vast majority of parents seem to give not one single fuck about what their kids do with technology. I've known families who have a cell phone - a dedicated device - for their four year old . My armchair diagnosis is that parents who are just a little bit older than me (I'm 34) and especially parents who didn't g…

There is enough general public concern about minors having access to online pornography that jurisdictions all over the world are passing age restrictions but I think the HN discussion is one sided. That is, HN users see the costs, the difficulty, the privacy concerns, etc. But they're also dismissive of the harm, which in terms of the young Gen Z men that I know personally is real. I can't attribute online pornograp…

Yeah, I think this is a sort of similar issue to the kind of thing I describe above, where parents of a certain generation / certain technical background might not be fully aware of the sorts of harm that can come in through technological channels.

I would never actually do this, but there's a part of me that would like to just give my kids a magazine to hide under their bed, or even some sort of curated private video site on the LAN, just to allow for some expression of natural puberty urges in a way that is ... if not "healthy," per se, then at least "harm reduced?" Obviously that idea in practice would be way too weird to consider, lol.

But this comes back to the balance thing I was talking about on my other post in this topic. Full abstinence is probably practically impossible and I'm not sure it's even the right approach. The other end of the spectrum - throwing the kids into the waters of Pornhub, OnlyFans, and whatever the TikTok equivalent of porn is (surely that exists, right?) - that seems pretty fraught too. The taboo nature of this discussion makes things harder - but I have tried to overcome the weird feeling and have fairly frank discussions about these sorts of things with my oldest.

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