151–160 of 265 posts
> She said she heard about the Tin Can on a Facebook group. Nice to safe the kids from that... But who will save the adults? ^^ Yes, social media is bad for kids. You start to realize that. It only took 15 years. The thing is: It's equally bad for you... And you prove that every minute. Whenever you say something, and after three sentences, basically every topic ends up in something related to Instatoktube. My only h…
Smartphones are good and we shouldn't demonize them.
Before the smartphone did all this, no one would have come out and campaigned to build a new kind of free library outside every middle school where all these things were advertised and made readily available to kids anonymously. We do have real libraries, but they don’t just automatically accept and push books donated by any random company, foreign country, or random pervert. Because that’s an insane thing to do.
The burden should have been on the “smartphones are good” people to prove that giving kids all that was worth the downsides, or to have shown how any supposed benefits could be had more safely, without requiring all parents to become experienced MDM admins, which they just won’t do.
I "made" something like this 7-8 years ago for our first kid. When I say "made" I mean I bought a "fixed wireless terminal" for $40 on eBay, a classic landline phone for $30, and a cell phone subscription for kids ($5/month). Then I connected the parts, and voila, we had a landline for kids. Obvious benefits include low cost, full interop with all other phones, and having the kids learn our phone numbers by heart aft…
Why does it seem like many parents are unaware that a hand me down iPhone can be heavily locked down with screen time settings? A list of things you can do: - allowed list of apps, can reduce it to just phone, imessage, and utilities like weather app - effectively permanent downtime, just set the end time less than start time such as 3:00 am to 2:59 am (technically 1 minute of non downtime). This blocks apps except f…
A year ago, I got my 8 y/o a landline (we used Ooma). It has been absolutely wonderful. By far the best thing is that he makes his own playdates. I'm not the middleman anymore. He just makes plans and asks me if it's ok. And if his friend doesn't have a landline, I let him call their parent. It surprises them, but when he leaves a message, they love it. He's definitely had more time with friends because of it. Anothe…
A year ago, I got my 8 y/o a landline (we used Ooma). It has been absolutely wonderful. By far the best thing is that he makes his own playdates. I'm not the middleman anymore. He just makes plans and asks me if it's ok. And if his friend doesn't have a landline, I let him call their parent. It surprises them, but when he leaves a message, they love it. He's definitely had more time with friends because of it. Anothe…
Funny enough, China already ran this experiment. Kids' smartwatches started as call-only devices for safety. Then they added friend lists, status updates, like counts, popularity rankings. Little Genius now has 48% of the global kids' smartwatch market [1]. Kids delete real-life friends for not having enough likes on the watch. Once a device enters a kid's social life, there's no market incentive to keep it simple. […
That sounds absolutely horrible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also note that if you buy a Tin Can unit, there's a noncompete clause: You agree not to "build, benchmark, or develop a competing product or service." So don't buy this if you work for a telco, or a voice communications service of any kind.
This is laughably unenforceable, and all the more ridiculous for it.
Off-topic, but I hate sites like this. All links in the article are for other pages on businessinsider.com, but there's no link to Tin Can, not that I can find at least. It's getting more and more normal that sites won't link out of their own "property".