Show HN: I've built a child monitoring app with mitmproxy and WireGuard

Projecting all your own personal shit onto the children of the future is no way to deal with your own shit.

You feel that you needed to be protected from the bad old world by you parents. Who you now wish had more control over you. You bad bad boy!

Children, believe or or not, are very good at discerning what is right and wrong.

No longer believing in god is a good thing. Santa claus is and always has been a lie.

What is wrong with Atheism? I'm an athiest.

It seems like you want to take away choice from children.

Children are monitored far too much these days and you want to make it worse so you can make a few quid

Get some therapy before you start taking it out on the kids.

Muppet!

Even if what you say is true, why would you take that risk? Would you feel this way if you child became sucked into far-right content, or if they tried to change gender and later attempted suicide?

r/atheism is just a personal anecdote, as the future of the product will be infinity granular filters using LLM's. It's not that I'm personally opposed to atheism, it's that I became one before I stopped believing in Santa as a result of online communities. Every day, children who have no idea what they're talking about decide they're a Nazi or Socialist because they saw a meme online, and it's neither healthy for the child or good for our society to have this. The central premise, that many online communities aren't suitable for kids stands true, and I'm sure there are topics which you would be highly opposed to your six year old child viewing and incorporating into their personality if you thought about it.

Funnily enough, nazism or far-right content isn't something you filter...

I mean we’ve only recently launched to early access, we don’t filter most things yet, including far-left or socialist content.

One of the big features I’m working on now though is self-descriptive filters, so a patent can input exactly what kind of stuff they do and don’t want, without us getting in the way, and an LLM will choose which posts are and aren’t filtered out. It’ll hopefully resolve this sort of discrepancy between what we want to filter out and what parents actually want filtered out.

There are parents who believe they are guardians of children until they become adult humans themselves, and are to provide a safe and nurturing environment for said small humans to become their own people, and parents who believe they own their children and are entitled to mold them into an ideal they believe. It is likely your service caters to the latter, versus the former, and while I don't think you're going to be very successful (it’s a niche product that isn’t very sticky), I do think your service is going to cause harm versus protect children from content that would cause them harm. By the time that harm has been done, you'll be long gone, having moved on to something else.

I appreciate your post because it demonstrates why there is a potential need for more robust safety systems (policy, people, technology) against certain parental cohorts. For sure, there is substantial harm to be found in online content and it’s a very hard job overseeing access children might have to the greater Internet. But also, similar harm potentially within the home (depending on the home). This is a technical attempt at solving for a people problem.

> Every day, children who have no idea what they're talking about decide they're a Nazi or Socialist because they saw a meme online, and it's neither healthy for the child or good for our society to have this

Children also believe all sorts of stuff simply because their parents told them so. That doesn't seem healthy for the children or society either, especially if they can no longer look at opposing viewpoints because of evil 'products' like this.

I was the kid that helped other kids bypass their nannyware so I’m not the best person to ask but how are you going to handle prompt injections? If I’m understanding, you use a LLM to decide if §content is in violation of §policy?

This will break anything that does certificate pinning like Spotify. As crapware tls proxies become more common, cert pinning and data encrypted before it’s sent will become more common.

This won’t work on fb and their related properties or iMessage where I assume kids spend a lot of time now? No idea about TikTok but if they’re not cert pinning yet… they should be!

We don't use an LLM in real-time production yet (although what you described is coming). At the moment I used one to help classify different communities/etc into filters, and we use ImageNetV2 for image classifying. That said, the way it's set up now the prompt is specific to each parent, and so if a parent breaks their prompt, it will only break their kids internet. If anything, I'm more worried that parents will accidentally break the prompt and there isn't currently a good way for parents to debug it or even know until their kid complains to them.

The other big concern with our LLM (at least in my opinion) is that it's not fast enough. Decrypting each post, sending to our LLM with a gRPC call, and then getting the response back just takes too long. It's certainly going to be possible to do, but I need to launch and start getting customers before I can properly tackle that problem.

Also we add a root certificate to the host machine, which is how we get around HSTS. It's also why we don't have a phone client yet, as it's much harder to add root certificates to an iPhone than it is to add them to a windows or linux machine.

I will say though I also got around three different child monitoring systems when I was a kid lol. Unfortunately the prize was a porn addiction.

Extremely gross that filtering LGBT content is one of your main points.

Your service is founded on some ideas and points of view that I personally don't understand.

Instead of focusing on teaching children robust strategies for dealing with the Real World, you're advocating for inserting some interposing technology to achieve this ill-defined goal, namely that "your kid turns out normal".

Tech is often unfairly littered with the graves of bright ideas that were ahead of their time, or didn't happen to catch on, but there's also a large population of deservedly dead ideas that keep trying to solve deeply human problems by blindly substituting technology -- and this is firmly in this latter camp.

I wish you (as a human) no ill-will, and I hope you will build different solutions in future, which marry human strengths with technology, instead of bypassing them via black boxes.

You've created a monster. You're MITM'ing children. You're giving children's data to {whomever}.

You've cherry picked your own beliefs and inserted / removed them along the way.

This is disgusting

I think your service should not exist, that the advocating the enforcement of ignorance is pretty close to Evil, and that providing a paid service to do it actually is Evil. With the capital.

Obviously not everyone agrees, so perhaps you'll have happy customers. If I ever meet their victims I will take great delight in teaching them how to fix their routing and avoid your service.

Good luck finding better uses for your abilities.

All content is not suitable for all people of all ages, especially kids.

You think something available on the internet shouldn't be.

Because it's evil. With a capital E.

And you will be glad to help people affected to stop it.

...

Interesting.

Avoid. not stop. The people that want to pay someone to spy on their children are free to do so.

>...because there are companies actively working against you.

...and you are now one of those companies.

Be careful, thee who would fight monsters, that you not in the end become that which you hate. For just as you stare into the abyss, the abyss dost stare back into you.

Your children must learn to navigate the world as it is. It's on you, not to shield them from the truth, but to nurture them such that they can make those decisions on their own.

If you fear that you were so easily influenced into this course of action by the conspiring of others, the answer then is to share that with them so they need not walk the same path you walked. Instead, you're doing just what all those schemers you fear have done. Placed yourself transparently into the stream of of an exploring mind with the intent to shape it and mold it as you wilt; instead of providing them the tools of the sculptor, and letting them hew themselves out of the rough with the benefit of your life experience as a template.

Not to belabor the point, but it is unambiguously disgusting, and evil to me; and I'm not one who is known to quickly pass judgement on such things. This one is from the start pretty obvious though. I have heard that my point of view would be different were I to sire children of my own; but I figure the active role I play in many youngster's lives gives me enough exposure to the subject matter area to know I most assuredly would not change in that regard; any child entering my custody is treated as my own flesh and blood.

You likely haven't put enough thought into alternative use cases you enable, and the harm that can be done. Nor have you likely done any work creating a way of knowing whether or how it is being abused. Like by an abusive or controlling spouse, or other such thing. Really think about that aspect; because the same people you're making this available to are the same people who had hands in "manipulating" you in the first place.

Burn it. Destroy it, and be done. I've had to get similarly destructive ideas out of my head before. Some things just don't deserve to see the light of day. This would be one. If you really must make it, then suffer it only to exist as a concession to your own convictionsDon't just put it out there. Part of the journey of mking such a thing is hopefully the gaining of enough wisdom to recognize it is not the right time for such a thing.

I beg you, do not persist making something so likely to turn into something you'll ultimately regret.

Having grown up in a family where I was barred from learning about or viewing much of the content listed in your filters, I can only say I feel for the children of parents who buy this product. It’s gross that some of the content filters include LGBTQ discussion and content. Thanks for helping to perpetuate bigotry and generational trauma.

I have to ask, why did you block atheism?