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Comment by tjpnz | Hacker News Reader

The parenting argument is a complete cop-out. There's no universe where you can be shoulder hovering 24/7. This could've been solved years ago with robust parental controls. But companies like Google just didn't want to because they wanted to shove ads in kids' faces.

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I think we can approach this from more than one angle. Yes, it cannot be entirely on parents, but parents should bear some responsibility to not just hand a device over to their children with unrestricted access to the entire internet.

Up until relatively recently you would have to install custom VPNs and maybe add Pihole into the mix to achieve anything close to that. Easy for us here, but we're in a small minority.

Parental controls have been part of mobile devices for years, but so have bypasses. For instance, you can bypass Google's parental control settings by opening the help page in the Google settings and clicking links until you get to the Google homepage.

I doubt it matters because nobody seems to configure the parental controls that are there, anyway. Only schools seem to try, and only because they're legally held responsible for what kids do on their computers.

Parental controls are complicated and obscure, IME. Setting up a child to play Minecraft through Microsoft was like setting up a web server with firewalls and reverse proxy... only less sensible. I'd appreciate that is so they can get parents to set accounts as 'adult' so Microsoft can exploit them.

You can set up, for example a child friendly DNS (Family version of OpenDNS) then Firefox come along and bypass it (DoH).

Probably, we need an OS level setting, per account, browsers would need to expose it to websites, apps installed would have to check and provide content according to local legislation/rules. Bypasses would have to be performed by an "adult" account.

The main issue is that adults would be able to set themselves as children and avoid negative commercial activity. That's a problem because it means FANG, etc, will lobby against it and then ensure their implementations are convoluted and broken.

Parenting doesn't have to mean become a helicopter either. In fact, that's the worst kind of parenting because it doesn't prepare the kid for a future without a parent around.

Good parenting is not shoulder hovering... It's teaching and instilling values and lessons that get the child to make the right choices in regard to what they do with technology. Like how we teach kids not to talk to strangers.

Parents should be teaching kids from a early age how to use technology responsibly.

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