Ask HN: How do I make sure my kids are safe online?
Inspired by a recent post ("Ask HN: How do I make sure my non-technical parents are safe online?"). Any tips, trick, software suggestions are welcome.
Everyone I know whose parents had their passwords had a second set of secret accounts, and felt like they had to hide things from their parents.
Case in point: I rented a room to a girl once (she was 19) whose mom came along with her to every meeting, and bragged about how her and her daughter shared an email address.
When I was at the house once after she moved in and her mom was gone, without even bringing it up, she was very proud of the fact that she had a secret email address, a secret boyfriend that her mom didn't know about, and a secret stash of "sexy clothes" that her mom didn't know about.
That right there made me realize the futility of trying to spy on your kids. Kids are smart and they see each other every day. They will figure out how to get around your technology and share that info with others.
As others have said, honest conversation seems to be the best answer. Just like before the internet existed.
I’m not sure how a five year old could not share passwords, much less remember.
I just realized I have the same password as my dad because we used to do project together (when I was 10-11) and the habit is hard to die.
Have a computer in a common space like the living room for when they want to be online. You don't have to be watching over their shoulder.
You could try to keep up with all the shit you have to be wary of your kids encountering online (e.g., age-inappropriate pornography, political extremism, social media "influencers", games with microtransactions, etc.) or you could be proactive and intentional and just nip it in the bud with how and when and where they have access to the online world at the access point.
There's a reason we wait until kids are 16 to give the freedom to drive a heavy hunk of metal at speeds that can kill themselves or other people. We should seriously re-evaluate when we give them the freedom to encounter the worst of humanity. The internet of the 90s and early 2000s is a distant memory; we live in a world of carefully engineered experiences designed to exploit our minds' flaws, online social environments our minds never evolved to navigate, and a host of other things I could mention that suggest that we should focus on providing childhoods in which they're engaged in things we know to be relatively safe, if not beneficial (e.g., play outside, read books, watch movies, play video games that aren't connected to the internet, etc.).
Source: that's basically how I got into cybersecurity
1. Teach your kids that the most important thing is to treat other people with respect. The most likely harm to kids comes from bullying. No one wants to think of their kids as a bully, but by focusing on not bullying others is the best way to teach them what to participate in and what not to participate in. They will be able to say they are being bullied.
2. Teach them not to talk to strangers, but understand that Fortnite and other games do and will involve talking to strangers. Most of the other players are kids, but they need to know that just because someone says they are a kid, they can't trust they really are a kid.
3. In order to develop socially, you kids need to be online.
Explain that until they are old enough you will walk on them and check what they are doing, and do so regularly.
Denying children, growing up in a digital connected age, access to connected technology is very damaging.
I.e. you have a high income highly educated tech savvy population in your immediate vicinity and you primarily mix with other highly educated high income people physically day to day in your immediate surrounds.
while I agree that it is detrimental for society and problematic for these bubbles to be forming, I'm not immediately seeing the disservice to the child from a locally optimal point of view in denying them media consumption and social networking, if you assume that 'a digitally connected world' is essentially marketing speak to get lower class and less educated people to normalize media consumption and social networking.
By all means I agree a child needs access to, and ideally to understand programming and computers, but I'm not convinced participation in those other activities are necessary from a locally optimal social perspective except to work in the interests of those who control those mediums and want people to participate in them.
obviously?, if you're at a vanilla middle class school and everyone is watching marvel comics, consuming Disney, and sharing their lives on Facebook, and your kids is the only one that isn't, they're going to have a bad time. And I'm not saying I'm a member of that higher class (far from it, although I don't yet take it as a given that I live in a community that doesn't primarily deal face to face, or that my neighbors aren't for the most part highly educated). indeed, I would say this attitude that adtech and media consumption and large scale social networking is harmful isn't a strange position to take amongst those with experience with those things. Like junk food and trash television, sometimes the ability to exclude is a privilege, not a cost...
It's not going to protect them from being pressured for nudes. It's not going to stop them from committing felonies and producing and transmitting underage pornography. It's not going to stop rumors and gossip and drama from spreading across Facebook even if your router is off for the night.
My brother is a middle school math teacher. Find the nearest middle school teacher you know and ask them how pervasive these issues are. Just from their small middle school, they had dozens and dozens of students disciplined, just for nudes. One was supposedly going to be charged after the 6th+ time of soliciting nudes from a fellow student and then sharing them. The quiet nerdy kid built a categorized Dropbox collection from the entire school and was quietly sharing it. It means so little to them.
I'm actually sort of getting worked up here thinking about this. If you've sat on your hands until your kid is 12, you have no trust or dialog with them, god bless your hearts for thinking a firewall or Android app is going to help a single ounce. All you've done is setup a tiny puzzle. Most of us likely know the workarounds, they will figure it out, just like I did 15 years ago.
Of course, I think "tech" is probably an invaluable tool for setting time limits and helping with screen addiction, but it's not going to fix any of the other psychologically damaging aspects of youth+tech.
EDIT: I really appreciate and would like to echo jedberg and ziddoap's comments here as well.
Ouch. That’s nasty. I wonder though, is it really a technological problem? I wonder how those guys were raised and what role models they had if they so blatantly ignores other persons’ privacy. Of course it’s technology that enables the rapid spread of photos etc. But their parents and other adults around them are still responsible for trying to teach them how to behave decently.
Technology makes a lot of things easier. I think the most effective thing is raising kids so that they want to do the right thing. But I also sort of think this all bottoms out on active, involved, caring parenting.
I have a python script that pulls down posts from /r/funny. Reddit has some filtering options in their API, which I use. My script then rejects any that have caption words on my blacklist. It also does OCR to look within the image, and applies the blacklist there, too.
The remaining images I review manually. They show up on my phone along with large "accept" and "reject" buttons. When I click accept, the image and caption become available on that little website I made for my daughters. Many images aren't funny, and I personally still wade through lots of trash. But overall it has been fun for my family.
Other than that, my kids now being 12 and 15: their computers are desktop machines in the kitchen. My wife and I look over their shoulders throughout their online time, and help keep them on track.. as well as having very open discussions about which things to look out for.
Use any excuse to teach a lesson, but keep it short. One example, my youngest was asking about online advertising and "what's the big deal?". I explained how easy and quickly their movement online is tracked, then decided to show it: we loaded up google and did a fairly unique search, in this case alligator skin cowboy boots for kids, and clicked a few links.. then asked her to go to a big newspaper site.. lo and behold a banner ad for the same item we searched for less than minute ago. Got the point across rather firmly.
Spend time with them, talk to them about their interests online, get them to show you sites they go to, Youtube stuff they like, etc. I try to point out new stuff that is "better" than what they are familiar with and sidetrack them with learning sites like Khan Academy.
Teach them how to do research, so they can fact check and know what is a scam. Show them snopes, so they can know how to spot bogus stories..
Oh, and lastly, I have told my kids not to panic if they come across a bad site, just close the window and they should be fine. But do let me know so we can check the machine together afterwards. Yes, that includes porn sites.. I know some of these clicks won't be accidental, but I don't care.
I've done enough tech support that i'd rather they be safe than start hiding stuff from me.
Oh yeah, I really need to sign up for the Family version of 1Password.
I don't personally agree with using software to monitor activity for a few reasons. There are two main reasons for my opinion of this: It rapidly erodes the trust between you and your child, and I tend to stay away from any tech targetted at/for kids (or parents for the purpose of monitoring kids) due to the numerous scandals (insecure, data problems, whatever).
The single biggest influencing factor for online safety, in my opinion, is education. Explaining what the internet is, how it works, etc. _without fear mongering_. Present the dangers, and the benefits, without bias. The best way to approach it is by being honest. There are dangers, here's the reality of them, here's how you should deal with them, and here's when you can come to me without fear of judgement. The key here: don't try to "scare them straight" - it doesn't work. Just be honest.
More helpful than any monitoring is encouraging a home where your kids want to come to you with their problems, instead of hide their problems from you. In my (admittedly anecdotl) experiences, monitoring widens the gap between parent and child - not closes it. Don't forget that kids deserve some privacy in their lives, too.
In general, I think it comes down to "be a good parent". Be available, be helpful. Educate. Don't lie or overexaggerate to get a point across - no matter how valid the point. Ask about your childs day and try to pick up on non-verbal cues that something might be going awry.
The internet is out there, your child is going to find it. Help them make it through that, rather than shelter from that.
Thanks for listening to my tedtalk
Same thing about drugs, pregnancy, STD, etc... The stakes are too high to just rely on apparent understanding.
I agree 100% about education. Educate, but verify (in a healthy way).
Just my 2cents.
>Same thing about drugs, pregnancy, STD, etc... The stakes are too high to just rely on apparent understanding.
Drugs is not prevented by monitoring - but by education. Pregnancy is not prevented by monitoring - but by education. STD's are not prevented by monitoring - but by education.
>I agree 100% about education. Educate, but verify (in a healthy way).
I do agree, there is a bit of a balance to be struck and being able to verify gives a lot of relief to the parents.
It’s also pretty handy for improving education and conversations.
Others have a conversation with their parents before they start, because they trust them. Those are the parents you want to be.
I don’t know what kind of parents I want to be and wish I had the certainty you do in this area.
I agree that kids need help understanding the world. My point is that they will accept it (and even seek it) if they are respected and trusted.
I want to agree with everything you said, but there's some crazy things on the net. With children being the curious and impressionable creatures that they are, I find it scary to think how much they could be influenced by what they happen to come upon or search on a whim.
Monitoring is a whole other matter.
Unless you rely on catching them by accident, that seems to reintroduce the need for monitoring that we were avoiding, so I replied asking how we're supposed to know such things without it.
Monitoring is related. The whole subthread is about avoiding it.
For what it's worth, I couldn't even monitor all my teenager's Internet traffic even if I wanted to. We have had the "there's a lot of wierd stuff on the Net" talk, and there has been other kids at school who apparently MMS'ed some pretty bad stuff to the other kids, which resulted in a very productive discussion about peer pressure and the importance of being responsible.
I believe that approach is better than trying to control everything. Otherwise you'll simply end up with a bunch of kids in a small bubble that bursts when they move out, and then the World will simply come crashing down on them no matter what. It's better to prepare them for what's to come.
Also if kids are comfortable talking to you about what they do because parents are understanding rather than judgemental ("how dare you watch X" etc) then they're more likely to tell you if they do come across something like that accidentally.
(My kids are <2 and <0 right now, but I teach teenagers about technology for a living and kids self-report dodgy stuff all the time.)
It’s pretty much impossible to fully block whatever you consider negative. But you might be able to reduce it or make it less accessible.
Really, just focus on the time sink.
IMO, trust is vital when trying to raise stable and self-aware persons. If my kids will do really stupid stuff online I think I would rather take away their phones for a limited time rather than monitor what they do.
I think it’s valuable to get insight from kids and ex-kids, but I think it’s more important to get insight from parents and now you can even get insight from parents who were once digital kids.
I appreciate the backhand compliment regarding any insight I provided, though.
My confusion is that describing a situation of education doesn’t remove the need for monitoring. I missed the part where monitoring wasn’t useful and read a bit about education. I think if you described the anti-monitoring independent part separately than education it would help because the entire education suggestion can be carried out in addition to monitoring.
Reads pretty back-handedly considering I mentioned that I am a parent. Even if I didn't or wasn't, it reads (to me, at least) as "pat on the head for writing something, but let the adults speak". Where adults = people with kids, and adults without kids can't supply as valuable of an opinion. Which really, is kind of silly when you think about it. I clearly remember many things my parents did which created distance between us, eroded trust, or did the opposite. Why are my experiences with my parents not as valuable?
Anywho, I could just be tired and reading malice into it, when it wasnt intended. If that's the case, my apologies. I'm trying to get into the habit of reading in a positive light, rather than a negative one - but I read this with a negative light.
First issues seem like non- negotiable to me: ad-blockers, no social media while young, no YouTube/streaming while very young. Shows or television downloaded and scheduled locally/limited to stop the addiction and consumerist problem. I don't have any objections to physically blocking things at a very young age. Education-wise all the usual stuff about online behaviour and safety: don't use your real name, don't give it your details, don't click on ads, or anything sent to you, etc.
No explicit media consumption devices: ipads and phones.
The main issues I have are questions of when and how to introduce more computer time and access and how/when to drop these controls.
I'm less concerned about porn (assuming young kids aren't really interested in it, and by the time he is interested in it I doubt there's much I can do bar education) than I am digital + media addiction, consumerism, gore/ shock sites and nutter ideologies/bubbles (although again on that last I'm assuming education, an actual relationship and exposure probably inoculates best).
Any thoughts on when and how to introduce kids to the digital world when my main fear/thing to protect them from is digital consumption, addiction, consumerism and tech companies?
With respect to pornography, I was collecting it since I was 13. Yes it makes parents uncomfortable. I don't think it has made me a worse person, primarily because I was raised to still respect people. The problem with porn is when other things (ads again) imply that hypersexualisation is normal, and the boundary is blurred. Problems with pornography also get raised when peers talk about it as if they can emulate it. All of these things are out of your control.
I am already thinking of a pi-hole like system. I sort of have this dream of a 90's early 00's filter system, but that can't last much beyond 10 years of age. Further, with DoTLS etc, ad blockers are going to become more difficult. Maybe later on, once a mobile phone becomes neccessary, it needs to be a smartphone with a custom rom with full app isolation and anything and everything to cull tracking.
Despite all these measures, I suspect the only real solution is to keep your kids occupied with hands on stuff that is not on the computer. Treat computers as a tool. You use it to program other devices. Do some gardening (if you can). Use computers to track growth and research techniques.
I suppose if you only pick a single site to block for your kids, you get the most bang for your buck by blocking YT.
And of course, the ads are terrible.
My problem is that it is tailored for young audiences.
I used OpenDNS on my router, and it probably worked for a while, but now I think my kids probably know their way around it, now that my 15 year old is has setup multiple Linux distros on USB drives. I also found a VPN app on his phone once, which will circumvent OpenDNS and anything else I try to do. We had our first online porn accident when he was 8 or 9. He was traumatized by getting caught and became paranoid about letting us interact with his devices or see any of his history, even when he wasn’t doing anything naughty.
Definitely wish I could have held back on games and devices longer, and these days it’s getting more difficult to limit their screen time. Their YouTube use is pretty out of control. OTOH, we had all kinds of fears about our oldest getting too deep into games. We thought he might not make friends because he wouldn’t talk about anything except games, and for a while didn’t want to do anything except play games. It’s mostly passing now, and he seems to be turning out very normal. There was some amount of my wife and I spazzing unnecessarily.
I only know one person who stopped his kids from using devices at all, and his kids turned out truly amazing, but I suspect that’s a really difficult road to go down as a parent.
I grew up in the tv and telephone age, and i simply never had my own of either. I know other kids probably threw tantrums to get theirs, is that what you are talking about?
There’s an obvious implication about parenting being more difficult with screens excluded - that using screens is potentially somewhat lazy. As a parent, I think I have been lazy and allowed iPhones and Playstations to keep the kids occupied and let me work on side projects. Road trips with devices is Nirvana compared to not having them; the kids fight for hours without, and it’s silence when they have games.
I didn’t have a screen to myself when I was growing up either, until I camped on the family IBM PCjr as a teenager. This generation just has it quite different than we did, which in a way makes it harder to evaluate what we should do as parents. That said, sitting in front of the TV was something we would do as kids, and also something the adults were warning against.
One way to consider this is to think about whether we adults can go without screen time. I find it pretty hard myself, much harder than it used to be. Of course kids are a different case, but as parents we’re setting an example, and we also have to realize how much of life went online in the last 20 years. It might be harmful to prevent kids from going online entirely. On the other hand, there seems to be an emerging global consensus that considerable limits for kids is healthy and necessary.
I suppose I rankle at the problem statement, keep them safe, instead of 'how do we teach independent thought and action', but i tried to answer your question helpfully and positively.
The internet is many things, and the idea that it shouldn't be used for fun seems very odd to me. Like saying "The city is not a toy. You go there with a specific task, you get done what you want to get done, and you walk away." - you'd miss out on a huge amount of what cities have to offer.
Then get a computer and put it in the main room of your house. Let that computer be the YouTube/Minecraft/roblox/whatever so computer use is around other people. Put an adblocker on it.
Otherwise block YouTube from phones and iPads and such. It’s a cesspool, especially for kids.
Fight social media accounts for as long as you can.
Pay for an email account so they don’t have to use gmail. Pick something easy so they can keep it their whole life.
Look into a smart WiFi hub that lets you set screen time limits. I like the Uniquiti AMPLIFI. You can set profiles for each family member, turn off and on, etc.
Set up screen time limits on devices. Apply limits to the adults as well. They will want to model after you.
Set up a pihole to block ads and whatever else at the network level.
As all the fathers I think they are smart and intelligent. We talk not just about the perils of the Internet, but also of the world at large. I tell them the etiquette on and offline. I think the monitoring functions are almost useless. They get annoyed and sometimes angry, like when he searched for Isis, the Egyptian goddess, and it was blocked due to terrorist category match. I really don't know if it will be necessary when they start to search for pornography.
BTW, Kaspersky has a terrible interface. I really hate it, but other options are much more expensive or does not work (e.g. Windows 10 parenting features).
Is the internet that much worse than when we were kids?
I'll give you an example: my kid used to like to watch a show called Peppa Pig, so I would find clips on YouTube. Within about a year, people started posting really disturbing fakes in which Peppa is stabbed, raped, etc. They have the same thumbnails as the real clips, and Youtube suggested them, and autoplayed them after real clips. Including after clips from the official Peppa Pig Youtube channel! Truly a WTF moment for me.
Weird shit has existed on the Internet for decades, but it's only recently that it is being shoveled in front of regular folks as the default experience. I mean, these Peppa videos were the types of content that 4chan folks would have worked really hard to inject into normie websites a decade ago. Now, not only is it super easy to upload them to Youtube, Youtube will promote them to everyone for you! And seemingly not care about it!
It's one thing if a curious 12-year-old goes seeking porn or gross stuff or whatever... there's some inoculation in the fact that you had to go find it.
It's another thing entirely when the default experience for a 5-year-old on Youtube is to get served a video of her little cartoon friend getting murdered.
My dad wasn’t very friendly with me as a kid, and got angry quickly whenever I made mistakes. So I grew up with a fragile personality, prone to addictions, and always trying to do things behind his back.
Even though we didn’t have internet at home until I was 18, I always took money behind my parents back and skip classes to go to the internet cafe. He also restricted the set of TV channels we can watch, but I knew how to have my “secret” set of channels that I can easily add/remove whenever my parents weren’t home.
I’ve discovered a lot of dark corners in the internet, and developed a porn addition since the age of 13 which I’m still struggling with (I’m 25 now).
It’s always a good idea to setup a DNS filter to avoid accidental harmful content or define a screen time, but keep in mind that a determined kid can be as smart as you are and bypass it, or can encounter such content via their friends smartphones or other means. The best you can do is to educate them to make conscious good choices when they browse the internet, educate them so that they can define their own screen time and understand why it is a good idea. And be a person of trust to them : Make them feel you respect their privacy and trust them, and when they do something wrong, talk to them quietly about it, it would have a much better effect that expressing anger.
You want that when your kids find harmful content come to you and say : “Hey dad, I saw such and such on YouTube”, so that you can educate them about it, not that they continue watching it behind your back.
We also talk about it, so when they become a teenager and start to get some freedom, they have some idea of how to behave. We tell them to let us know if they see something that they know we wouldn't approve of... not to get in trouble, but so we can be sure that everything is put into a context that helps them understand what it was, why we don't want them seeing it, and at what point in their life it may or may not be appropriate.
Finally, all the computers are in our living rooms, with the screens facing the room. I'm sure the kids can find times to still look for things I wouldn't like... but at least this adds some transparency to what they are up to. And it feels far less invasive than monitoring.
I think kids should grow up using PCs and not phones/tablets. I doubt kids can grow up to be computer literate if they spend their screen time in front of smart phones instead of PCs.
Here's what I would do: Put a PC with usable specs and the latest Windows in a semi-public place in the apartment. They're supposed to have some semblance of privacy but still have an adult passing by every now and then. Give them a Windows computer that's isolated from the rest of the network, and set up an unprivileged user with an adblocker. Give them access to the administrator account (or let them figure out the password as you type it in front of them), and tell them to be careful what they run on their computer, especially as admin. Sternly tell them not to plug in USB's/CD's/whatever into any other computer except that one computer which they're allowed to use.
The expectation is that they'll catch some adware sooner or later, download dubious game cracks, and generally mess up their computer. This is fine, you they're supposed to be allowed to experiment in moderation. If you fix something, try to have them around watching so that they see you solve the problem. Another good option is to take the computer away for a few days because "they messed it up, and now it has to be fixed". Even better if they have friends coming over to use the computer, as kids learn a lot from each other. Over time they might try to solve problems themselves and screw up Windows, at which point you'll reinstall it and incidentally wipe all their data.
Let them surf the web, as long as they stay away from porn, violent content, etc. Instruct them to stay pseudonymous, and not to tell people or websites/games who and where they really are. Tell them it's perfectly fine to lie on a login form. Tell them that there are all kinds of people on the internet, that everyone lies on the internet and that websites are competing for their attention. If something is bothering them, they can always just close the computer and talk to you about it. Most importantly, let them make mistakes and learn from them.
To me that sounds like encouraging them to be afraid. I would rather try to assist my kids to develop a sound judgement.
My kids are still too young to be online. I know with YouTube if your letting them watch, you have to be very careful about the sidebar
That's what I'm doing at home, I also monitor news for threats happening and some sample payloads, IPs, and add to my block list.
Its not bulletproof, but I'd say 70% at least gets blocked.
You see your son/daughter upset at 5:30 PM.
Suppose logs show your son/daughter was accessing IPs associated with Facebook/Messenger at 5:28 PM.
One could reasonably infer that something/someone upset them.