To be fair, the parental controls on modern devices feel like they were developed by a bunch of childless early 20-somethings.
I'm at a point with streaming services -- and this stems from the 24/7, 365 on-demand access we have to television and movies today that was not reality when I was a child -- where I'm ready to cancel everything and curate my our experience for myself and my kids with a NAS and torrents.
edit/ So I check Netflix to see what they offer. Viewing restrictions limits content based on parental guidelines ratings. That's really it. It's like someone else commented, it's as if these places are staffed by people who don't have children.
edit/ You'll have to pardon the evening Dad brain, I googled it. Thank you, kind stranger!
We just use it to remove shows as they start to annoy us. Not to pre-emptively control what the kid watches.
Youtube Kids lets you set a whitelist, but I found that too much of a hassle. I don't mind if the toddler finds new things to watch. But she's also under light supervision when using the phone. (Ie in the same room, but not being constantly hovered over.)
Can confirm, I know a few people who work in a social media "for kids" group and they fit this description to a tee and display significant naivety.
Apple let you press a button for ‘one more minute’ that seems impossible to disable.
Password management is horrible as a family, as is having to set up my fingerprint on all my kids’ devices to be able to help them with stuff without faff.
More generally, every time I have to set up any sort of account for my kids it’s absolute torture. Try to log in with Apple ID, can’t cos they’re a kid. Try to log in with a google account, remember Family Link doesn’t work for my normal account because it was set up for a domain, so log in as my other google account, set kid up, still doesn’t work.
Give me one place in my whole life to manage identity for my family, one that works, with permissions and downtime settings that integrate with every app and website in the world (including the half dozen each of my kids’ schools require us to use). I’ll pay loads of money for this.
Beyond that, there are some nice things you could do like a workflow for a kid to request new content and a parent to review and approve/deny it. But that's definitely a nice-to-have.
> The bills will give parents full access to their children's online accounts, including posts and private messages.
Where "children" is defined as anyone younger than 18. I can see the point of some of these controls, but legally disallowing a 17 year old from having privacy from their parents? Absolutely not.
On top of that, you need to supervise them, and even then, they should not be allowed to use social media, which ought to be 18+ anyways.
I understand this is all a lot to ask in our society. There is no "good" answer to this problem. But we should all try to do the best we can, and not forget that big tech puts hundreds of millions, if not billions, into making social media as addictive as possible. I'd say we're at a point where it's sensible to conclude it's now more addictive and harmful than tobacco, though our society has yet to come to terms with this fact. Even if we put a stop to it now (we won't), our current social media infrastructure will likely haunt us for centuries.
To put it into context: Facebook was founded in 2004. That is 19 years ago. Youtube was founded in 2005. That is 18 years ago. Twitter was founded in 2006. That is 17 years ago. Google was founded in 1998. That is 25 years ago. The World Wide Web (remember that name?) came to be in 1989. That is 34 years ago.
Social media is old enough to be in the history books, let alone the internet at large.
What the hell are the parents and would-be parents of today doing to be this fucking incompetent?
Likewise, you don't need an in-depth knowledge of computers to teach your kids how to handle the internet. Even moreso if you literally grew up with the thing, seeing both the absolute best and worst the internet has to offer.
Not setting restrictions because they will resist them doesn’t make sense. It seems like you started from the premise that parental controls are bad.
Not necessarily..
> They’re helicopter parenting the wrong areas of life.
Helicopter parenting is always a bad idea. Either you teach your kids ethics, morals, responsibility, self-respect, and assertiveness or they will fail as adults.
https://www.fastcompany.com/2681011/ethiopian-kids-hacked-th...
“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut.
No instruction, no human being.
I thought, the kids will play with the boxes!
Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box,
but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off
switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were
using 47 apps per child per day.
Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs
[in English] in the village. And within five months,
they had hacked Android.
Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had
disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a
camera, and they hacked Android.”They figured out the way to correct the problem.
The TikTok issues have never been about the health or safety of children. If it was, it the discussion would involve other social media.
It has always been about the TikTok’s governance structure, which legally and functionally enables espionage and/or psyops against a significant portion of people who do may be involved in things that are of a US national security interest. For example, you don’t want your government personnel doing important things while carrying a device that sends important contextual data to organizations which have CCP oversight.
The proposed solution to the TikTok problem is the RESTRICT Act, with language so broad and vague that it would make VPN usage a felony. It may just be incompetence on Sen. Warner's behalf, but otherwise, it's also about an opportunistic power grab by the US federal government.
Regardless, my point is that it definitely isn’t about the kids, and that is very clear in that bill.