Right; which is why allowing teenagers to be safe at home instead of exposed to it 24/7 is a smart choice.
Allowing these teenagers who are being bullied to explore spaces where they feel safe and comfortable seems like a good idea too though. As someone who was bullied in school, being online did not make that issue any worse, and allowed me to find friends I couldn't otherwise have.
In my case, as you said it may not have exacerbated it, but for me it certainly perpetuated it.
A retreat into the online world seems like a comfort in difficult times but it is a retreat, and the longer you stay retreated, the less likely it is you'll regain the ground again.
These are not mistakes. These are not implementation errors or miscommunication between different business units. What you are witnessing is an intentional setting of a revenue dial to the maximum allowable setting that still permits the original sale.
> These are not implementation errors or miscommunication between different business units. I don't think the companies such as Google*, Microsoft, Valve or Nintendo** have a Child Safety business unit. If they did, the software they produce would work and I would be able set some sane settings once when creating a group of users which contain children. What I am experiencing is user hostility when trying to limit wh…
It's not an accident that its so hard to get this stuff right, I've heard countless stories like this from friends who are parents. If the market wanted parents to be able to figure this out it would be getting it right. It's obviously a dark pattern that benefits everyone but the parents and their children. If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.
I disagree. I think it is an “accident” that stems from organizations rather than anything sinister. Companies generally want good parental controls, but let’s face it, it’s not the cash cow or particularly interesting. This leads to understaffed teams of b-list developers with high churn, hence the overly confusing and half-baked features.
I've seen this first hand and yes, it's not sinister, getting dozens of services coordinated and permissioned under a single, easy to use, system is too much cognitive load for the team that inevitably gets tasked to do these things. Think about Privileged Access Management or Active Directory, but an 8 year old has to get it to work with a stay at home mom's 5 year old android device, and the PM's working on it can't think through second order effects (or even first order effects sometimes). And of course anything that negatively affects metrics will get rolled back (that part might be sinister).
> Apple hires talent, they don't care about anything else. Again, I am speaking to things I know from my actual life and people I know in the physical world. How many people do they hire without college degrees? I am legitimately asking. I understand that was a thing in the tech world decades ago but my understanding was that big tech’s idea of “talent” has evolved to include mandatory education credentials like at l…
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Where are the faangs hiring people with skills sans the credentials? Everyone I’ve talked to at faangs has basically described it being the next step after college for everyone they hire, other than Amazon
That's essentially the rule in our house. No screens not visible to other members of the family. In US, we restrict alcohol kids until they're 21. Pornography is poison.
It's so bizarre to me that in "The Land of the Free", 18 year olds, who are considered old enough to go to war, are not allowed to drink. Especially because this isn't some archaic law from the 18th or 19th centuries but instead from 1984 and only came about after the federal government withheld funds to force the states' hands over a period of 4 years.
Drinking is an archaic caveman activity that newer generations dont really care about, observed on a global trend. GenX and older millennials ring this bell continuously for a crowd that doesn't care. Shouldn't you focus on issues that actually impact and hurt people instead of trying to point out some "inconsistency" about the usage of the land of the free slogan that no one ever brings up in any conversation about america?
This pervasive desire to block, protect, monitor, and control your children's online activities through nebulous supervision tools seems like a particularly American solution to a particularly American problem. Much like how little Timmy simply can't go out to play without a GPS anklet and an air tag behind each ear, so too can't he go online without a supervised account on a supervised device on a supervised connect…
> I agree, but I also see absolutely no reason why 5 years old children would have access to a gaming device. Pretty much any other activity I can imagine is better for them. I suggest expanding your imagination skills. There are definitely worse activities, like watching TV. And there's physical limit to how much physical activity one can be doing. There's definitely a point of diminishing returns there. And the ski…
> And there's physical limit to how much physical activity one can be doing Do you hang out with many 5 year olds? They're made of energy. > I could have him do math but it's a lot more boring I did Math all the time with my 5 year old and he loved it, but then I also love math, and it's easy to make fun.
> I did Math all the time with my 5 year old and he loved it, but then I also love math, and it's easy to make fun.
I have 4 kids; two of them also found math fun at age 5, the other two did not. I do not believe my ability to make math fun differed significantly between the attempts.
It's not an accident that its so hard to get this stuff right, I've heard countless stories like this from friends who are parents. If the market wanted parents to be able to figure this out it would be getting it right. It's obviously a dark pattern that benefits everyone but the parents and their children. If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.
I disagree. I think it is an “accident” that stems from organizations rather than anything sinister. Companies generally want good parental controls, but let’s face it, it’s not the cash cow or particularly interesting. This leads to understaffed teams of b-list developers with high churn, hence the overly confusing and half-baked features.
Maybe companies could set up comprehensive granular APIs for managing device/store permissions and outsource the parental control software that actually manages the settings. This way a vendor is getting paid to make those settings comprehensible and effective, so they have an incentive to do it well. This would also allow conservative/overly cautious parents to buy different software than more permissive parents. So everyone gets the permission model they want.
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.
What I believe the author did was instead of teaching their child that they may not talk to strangers, they believed there just is a magic button to have these strangers not exist.
If that's the case, then rules weren't clearly stated, if stated, at all.
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.
Kids make mistakes. You do not want predators to use the threat of your punishment as a lever on your kid.
You can't control or decide what predators will do. And very likely won't be able to imagine the extent of every single of their convoluted predatory practices by yourself.
So instead of trying to cover every possible theoretical danger, setting clear rules and boundaries with your kid sounds like a way more sensible and pragmatic approach.
And nobody said kids should be punished or held fully accountable on their first mistake.