Google Family Link
families.google.com
families.google.com
- how to close/minimize/maximize/open a window.
- right click, left click common outcomes
- enter a site URL
- Google use
- save files
- navegate through local files
Etc
Edit: I know "I have plans" is worth nothing, but I am unemployed right now and on a carreer change. Once I have better financial stability I plan to pursue this more effectively.
I remember my family's first Mac (an SE) came with a bootable disk with some simple interface tutorials like these.
It's an 'unsexy' problem, and the average young developer/product person can't quite grasp the challenges the elderly have, but it's a significant, severely undeserved market.
If you're (thinking of) working in this space, feel free to shoot me an email and bounce ideas; I've been thinking about this domain for a while.
Give them a tablet with one big red button, no controls. They press the button, they connected to a real person. They tell the person what to do, it gets done. If the singularity hits before all your customers are dead: fire all your workers and replace them with AI.
If you don't feel like rolling out a custom piece of hardware, maybe you could piggyback on something most elderly people already own: a land-line telephone. Voice only, but probably good enough.
It's also going to cross over into health and social care, therapy and support for lonely seniors almost immediately. Your call center staff are not going to be adequately trained/prepared/certified for that.
Yes, "when we were young" we didn't have this. Long live freedom! But "when we were young" we also didn't have two-click-access to pedophiles and sleazy porn-ad websites on every corner.
There was another thread here where I went on a rant about the MS Office Ribbon. I had whatever number of years under my belt with the previous UI, and the Ribbon is awful. This change did illuminate something for me: UI change is a bitch as you get older. When you learn how to do something one way, then the common way changes and you are forced to deal with it, that change is bumpy.
I have two tricks for my parents:
- Gave them 1Password as a gift and I begged them to just try it for 2 weeks. Once Dad got the hang of the auto-fill and Mom realized she could share bank passwords, they are 100% on board with a password manager.
- When I teach my Mom how to do something on the computer, I often have her put her hand on the mouse / keyboard, then rest my hand on top of hers and click / type through her fingers. This way she can feel how to touch the device. Half the battle with touch screens or special operations is an unusual touch operation. Most times, I show her something this way ONCE and she gets it because she felt what I was doing.
https://families.google.com/familylink/privacy/child-policy/
The reactions in this thread and across the tech community toward Google are just baffling to me. There is a strong double standard.
Microsoft and Facebook are, quite rightly, criticised and scrutinised over the amount and the degree of tracking they undertake. Meanwhile, Google, who capture unimaginably humongous amounts of data on users, escapes any scrutiny.
From ChromeOS (an entire OS that tracks everything you do, and one heavily used in schools) to GMail and Google Analytics and CDNs, Google's digital fingerprints can be found in every corner of the web.
It's no longer an exaggeration to say we live in a time when millions of people are tracked online from childhood to death. This isn't a dystopian episode of Black Mirror, but real life.
I don't blame ordinary users for not fully understanding the privacy implications and the myriad and insidious ways they are tracked. But what excuse does the tech community have for giving Google a free pass on matters of privacy and online tracking?
You may be confused due to the name of this site. "Hacker News" is not, nor has it been for a very long time, by and for hackers.
The success of YC has turned this site, and the community around it, into a money-centric zeitgeist. Marketers, "growth hackers", salespeople, recruiters, and other forms of greedy, parasitic professions, are now the dominant voice in the so-called "tech community".
Anything for a buck, even at the expense of privacy and real technological advancement. That is the mantra of HN.
Perhaps you might want to try Slashdot.
I've broke my 20 years long love affair with Linux for Windows 10 just because their family features.
Technology is addictive, I want my kids to use technology, but not to be dominated by it. I'm tired of seeing a bunch of kids in a park all around a phone instead of being running.
Screen time limits is a fundamental feature of any modern Operating System.
there are lots of things google provides that are so valuable that I feel it's worth the pain of supporting an increasingly crappy company.
but having them track my kids isn't one of them.
yuck.
[1]: At least the ones they want you to access...
Email would cover a lot though as most of the rest allow for password resets if you control the email address on file.
You can also set a time limit for usage throughout the day and even the media type being consumed.
There is a monthly charge for each child, but well worth it.
"We need to feed your emails to our ad systems so we can give you better ads!"
"We need to know the engagement metrics for children specifically so we can better target them and do it in a way that is not displeasing to and counteracted by parents!"
The second point is weird, because Google provides only the basic apps. It's the third parties that would be interested in engagement metrics. And again - they already have access to them.
This adds new data, because now a parent-child link is established, and the user's "child-status"/age is confirmed by the parent using this tool on them.
Sure, there's going to be that one adult guy who does enjoy listening to the same Frozen song 5 times a day, but that's an acceptable anomaly.
And I agree on the use case for seniors, given this is Family Link but targeted mostly toward juniors. It's been joked about elsewhere that “Parental Controls” is to control one's parents.
(Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud Platform)
...
To be in the U.S
At this point I'm past being the surprised by this.
Lawyers recommended it I guess?
I'd think annoying customers was something to worry about too but then again.
Would be nice to see them switch it up a little now and then so everyone not in the US don't have to feel like 2nd class citizens.
Once they have ironed out the privacy issues here the rolling out to US should be a nobrainer : )
Yet another feature we will never see again, it seems.
It still takes my 13 year old brother just a few hours to figure out he has to put the Mac in recovery mode to allow the changing of system files (forgot what that security theater was called). Most parents haven't suddenly learned to set BIOS passwords or to protect the admin passwords, and even then, it's not too hard to burn and boot a disk that removes password checks from an unencrypted system.