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Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

> The solution is parents using the parental control feature on their children’s devices.

This is a stopgap at best, and to be blunt, it's naive. They can go on their friends' phones, or go to a shop and buy a cheap smartphone to circumvent the parental controls. If the internet is locked down, they'll use one of many "free" VPN services, or just go to school / library / a friend's place for unrestricted network access.

Parents can only do so much, realistically. The other parties that need to be involved are the social media companies, ISPs, and most importantly the children themselves. You can't stop them, but they need to be educated. And even if they're educated and know all about the dangers of the internet, they may still seek it out because it's exciting / arousing / etc.

I wish I knew less about this.

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>> This is a stopgap at best, and to be blunt, it's naive

Not if the rule includes easy rule circumvention. For example, if you could parent-control lock the camera roll to a white list of apps.

Want to post on social media so your friends would see? No can do, but you can send it to them through chat apps. Want to watch tik-tok? Go ahead. Want to post on tik-tok? It's easier to ask parent to allow it on the list, then circumvent, and then the parent would know that their child has a tik-tok presence, and — if necessary — could help the child by monitoring it.

The current options for parent control are very limited indeed. You can't switch most apps to readonly, even if you are okay with your child reading them — it's posting you are worried about.

But in ideal world there would be better options that would provide more privacy and security for the child, while helping parents restrict options if they fell their child isn't ready to use some of the functions.

yeah I think there is a way to do this elegantly. I didn't have my own device until I was 20 or so actually, and it wasn't a big problem. As a young teenager I could use the family desktop for education and entertainment. I had online friends in my late teens I played games with, and would have done much more so if I had a more more powerful cpu lol. Should mention though, these friends were through in person networks on discord, so I wasn't really in the public square I guess.

So I could explore things but not get into anything naughty.

When I decided to get into software dev I got my own cpu and my own phone once I had a job in dev.

Might seem pretty conservative but it worked, and I'm technical enough now. I wish I would have got into coding earlier but I've done alright so :shrug: Depending on the environment for my kids I'd move the timeline back a little, but not too much. Having too much time and just the unfiltered internet to fill it is too dangerous for young teens.

In what universe do you live where children have enough disposable income to buy a smartphone ?

You can get smartphones for 80 dollars (like the moto E15)

You can get a usable smartphone for well under 100 USD on AliExpress or a reasonable secondhand one from a reputable brand for about the same price here in Norway on online trading sites. Don't teenagers get pocket money or do weekend jobs any more? My sons were grown up by the time smartphones were affordable but No. 2 son bought his own Siemens C65 with saved up pocket money when he was in his early teens.

You only need $25-30. It'll be locked to a carrier, but that doesn't matter and is perhaps preferable (no monthly fee for a subsidized device) if you are able to use wifi. There's an ETA prime video which explores using a 2025 Moto 5G as handheld game console: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ad5BrcfHkY

tl;dw it's quite capable for the money and would could easily get on social media apps/sites.

if you make smartphones an 18+ item like alcohol many of these problems would go away.

That would also spur the market to produce actually nice pure communication devices. Flip phones could stop being for people with AARP cards again and would give better options to adults who don't want the smart phone all the time.

And have schools stop giving kids laptops or tablets. I wonder how much of the Chromebooks for school incitive was to develop a new market for Google

It's wild seeing these opinions on hackernews of all places. Do we want future generations to know nothing about computing?

I would not be here if I didn't get my start in my early teen years.

When I was an early teen I had access to the internet but my activities weren't entirely unsupervised (and I doubt yours were either). Since it was a new technology there was a lot of discussion around how best to talk to children and make sure they felt safe reporting threats or harms to parents.

A smart phone is too disconnected of a device when compared to the desktops we all grew up on. No one is talking about fully banning <18s from the internet (at least no one serious) - it's a discussion about making sure that the way folks <18 use the internet is reasonably safe and that parents can make sure their children aren't being exposed to undue harm. That's quite difficult to do with a fully enabled smart phone.

Mine was not supervised cause immigrant parents that didn't know anything about computers really. So more or less entirely unsupervised.

By 16 I was regularly ignoring my parents to go to bed when I was up coding or gaming and doing dumb script kiddie stuff on IRC.

I had an adult introduce me to Astalavista (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk)

Thinking back to that I was very well aware of the fucked up part of the internet much more so than most adults around me. People did in fact meet up in person with strangers from the internet even back then.

I think it's more important to teach around age 10-14 about the dark side of the internet so that late teens can know how to stay safe. Rather than simply throwing them into the reality of it unprepared as "adults".

Also frankly I don't want to know the search history of a late teen. There's a degree of privacy everyone is entitled to.

Do you think the younger generations are properly prepared to view the internet as having a dark side? My impression has been that such an early introduction has caused those warnings to be delayed and lost and younger folks are much more trusting of the internet than most millenials were.

It's also important to acknowledge that kids that used the internet weren't everyone in our day and the usage of the internet varied wildly. While now-a-days it's an expectation for everyone to be at least moderately online (often required by academia) and often that their presences are tied to their real names.

I think so yes. What's acceptable changes over time. Gore "content" of WW2 is now presented to 12 year olds as history.

It's not the porn or the LiveLeak gore content that would have me worried. It's groomers and other adults with bad intentions. Not something you can easily block and not something this ID check will stop. A groomer will slow burn a social relationship with someone until they are legal adults. That's something you can only teach someone to look out for. And even adults are susceptible to this.

I remain skeptical. I have some 20sish cousins that seem to be highly aware of the potential dangers online and were pretty clear eyed about it in their teens - but the relatives I have that are five years younger seem absurdly trusting. This is empirical of course but it's concerning to me.

Many parents of preteens and young teens that I know simply do not allow their childrend to use social media on their own devices. Doesn't sound like that bad a solution.

Age verification clearly does not work either. Teens will circumvent it, or use alternative technologies.

just make internet 18+, solves everything. demand ID's at the time of purchase.

ICE agents will LOVE this one neat hack

purchasing alcohol must be a dream come true for them lol

Weird jump between voicing your political points online and which beer you prefer, but okay.

sorry, I probably needed to spell it out for you, when you buy an 18+ or 21+ age limited product, you have to physically show up for it and show your id. registering to vote is also pretty age limited. Now at least for the alcohol thing, parents I think can actually give their kids drinks and get away with it if they don't get caught heh I remember my dad gave me my first beer but you can rest assured that if I proceeded to be knocking back my brothers secret stash of 90 proof shit on the regular in front of my dad, well shit would have turned out pretty much the same as when my brother ratted me out for stealing his own hash pipe lol

oops forgot to mention, you can check the potential internet customer's id also at the time of purchasing the internet connection or obtaining a wifi login. I hope that I've clarified the similarity here and that there was actually no "Weird jump between voicing my political points online and which beer I prefer"

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