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> a number of parents not savvy enough

This is an important factor that extends into all aspects of tech that I've worked around. Us tech savvy people take a staggering amount of knowledge for granted, I think - partially due to how technical knowledge can compound and transfer so well.

People use the term whitelist - why not supervise kids with a whitelist? I understand that idea (I've written the behaviour into software), and I'd even seek it out if I wanted to protect my kids. But to some people, this concept won't make sense at all. They'll ask things like "Why does the phone know what my kid can see?" or "How can the phone know what each app/website is?" – questions that almost make no sense if you know how these things work. But, that's the world we live in. I personally think it's my responsibility as someone privileged enough to be technical to help those who don't understand. Whether it's my kids or their grandma or the people I work with. Most people learn these concepts readily, but they have no idea where to start or what to look for to learn. It's not really their fault (not that you or anyone suggested it is).

> games that you purchase vs games that are free don't have anywhere close to the same tilt toward addiction, ad feeds, timed rewards, etc

Absolutely, it seems analogous to watching a movie vs watching T.V.

> Social stuff though...zero chance. None. It's a disease.

100%

> a number of parents not savvy enough

I’m sure this is probably a thing overall, but I also distinctly remember some extremely tech savvy friends, people making their livings in tech from the 90’s, using iPhone with games and YouTube as an opium stick whenever their 7-10 year olds wouldn’t sit still in public.

They fought about it, so maybe it was a cultural thing, but it definitely wasn’t because they didn’t understand the mechanics of adtech.

I also have super techno-illiterate friends whose teenage son spends maybe an hour a day online.

I don’t pretend to know the parenting solution but my anecdata suggests the tech-savvy parents are not automatically better at this than their less-teched counterparts.

Oh, even as cautious as I am, letting a small child have a tablet for a few minutes so you can have a peaceful dinner conversation is absolutely a tradeoff I'd be willing to make now and then.

I don't know you start to mess with their dopamine loops at that point.

This is the nature of an addictive technology that has an influence on peer groups.

If it's flashy, exciting, looks cool - other children are going to want to have the same thing too.

In a situation like that, even if your own preference is to have a quiet, slow existence for your family -- and even if that's what other families want too -- the environment has been altered by this external factor.

Adults aren't immune to these kind of peer effects either, to be honest - but it's particularly pathetic for multi-billion dollar companies to intentionally market towards children with the hope of holding on to their attention and customer data.

I agree completely. There is probably no shortage of tech savvy parents out there who don’t care to apply their understanding to furthering their parenting. All of that takes real work and consideration, which is fundamentally just good parenting. That doesn’t come as part of the tech package - tech prowess is just a convenient asset to apply to problems.

> All I hear about is "Everybody else can do X! We're the only ones that can't."

This is the main issue. If they don't participate in online communities where their friends are, they will have significant social disadvantage.

As a grown up, I had quit Facebook for about a year, and I noticed my social life was declining slowly. Someone would forget to invite me to some event. Someone might be shocked that I didn't know so and had a baby. And I am sure people started to label me as weirdo for not having Facebook.

Back to kids, yeah this is a social issue, not something that one can solve alone for just their family.

> And I am sure people started to label me as weirdo for not having Facebook.

They probably just don’t think of you. That’s the more likely scenario. People who engage with social media will stay in people’s minds more. If you’re not on there or not engaged, people will likely just forget about your existence. If I’m not connected to someone on social media or they don’t engage at all, there’s quite a bit of me forgetting they ever existed. After all, it’s not like we all see each other in physical spaces all the time. (Even pre-pandemic)

I quit facebook roughly seven years ago. Like you, I did notice a decline in my social life over the following year. However, things did slowly improve over time and now I have no complaints (the last year has been tough to keep up with people due to the pandemic, though).

The difference is I have to go out of my way to keep up with people over text, calls, or email. It's not that hard to do, though, since it's how I lived my life before facebook. Some people do think it's weird that they can't find me on facebook and I am probably missing out on one or two people who moved to "only facebook" communications, but honestly I don't really miss them.

Let me say I don't have children of my own, and I want to send you positive vibes and encouragement. Stay attentive and positive with your kids, and I hope we can stop the monopolists from monetizing our children.

Thank you

If people are not tech-savy enough, that just means there are a number of products to be built (and should be built) to steam line it.

I remember I had email way before my parents, and now they use email everyday. People can learn how to use technologies, they just need the right training and simple UIs.

I feel for the parents that are not tech-savy, I do not feel for the parents that can see how social media is having negative effects of their children's brains.

> I explained how the games work to make them addicted and the things that we saw changing in their behavior they understood and at least now they take a lot of what I say more seriously

This is very interesting, can you give more details please?

How did you explain this stuff to them, and the behavior you noticed. How did they take it? How about having social media?

" I imagine there are a number of parents not savvy enough to know how to lock these things down."

I recently decided to start using Netgear's parental controls (after many years of ignoring it) on our wifi router and found that they discontinued it due to a lack of use.

discontinued it due to a lack of use.

...wait, how would they know it wasn't being used, unless they were also spying on your router?

Spying has very negative connotations, it's just analytics on what features are enabled or possibly based on traffic of the parental control blocklists. Spying is a harsh term to use. More like snooping

We put snoopers in jail.

"I wasn't looking in your child's bedroom window for bad reasons. I was just gathering telemetry and analytics."

If you genuinely don't see the difference between spying on a child and determining which features are more used to better allocate developers, I'm sorry.

There’s no difference these days. Just search up youtube kids lawsuits for an eye opener.

I still do not see how collecting a simple yes or no for whether a feature is enabled is at all related to spying on kids, even collecting their data. it is not browsing habits. It is just on or off

Because once the data collection starts it only grows, it never gets smaller. They also never just grab a few flags but everything the environment allows them to take and employ "growth hackers" to find more.

When new employees walk in, any moral conviction that existed in the first implementation takes its leave.

Honestly, given the near certainty and repetition of history, your disbelief comes off as naivete.

And when that happens, you can complain. But until then, I think it's widely considered okay to collect small amounts of data (literally a single bit) on which features are enabled, so features can be better worked on. Firefox does it by default for example.

Complaining doesn't help when your data has already been bought and sold by ten different brokers.

And I'm a strong supporter of privacy. Collecting statistics on whether or not you enable a feature is basically universal. Use DDWRT, I do.

Wondering why this shit community is down voting this comment. It is a relevent observation about an extremely common device and service related to the topic. Wtf

Not savvy enough to not give their kid a smart device though?