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Comment by izend | Hacker News Reader

Are you a parent?

I have personally used the parental controls on Android, iOS and ChromeOS and to be honest they are terrible. Issues with syncing changes, the terrible UX for parental access control (iOS...), issues around audit/access logs, issues around prompting the parent for access.

I am honestly shocked that Apple known for its polished experience hasn't been forced by angry parents.

My daughter's school actually advised parents to not enable parental controls on her ChromeBook because it would interfere with the school's education websites but my daughter was caught playing web games in class so we decided to lock her down anyways.

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> my daughter was caught playing web games in class

Hilarious to me. The biggest game of whack-a-mole ever. I would love to know if this lockdown was successful (and if so, how it worked).

In my city, there is a district that is so “locked down” that the images from Wikipedia don’t even load. But guess what? Kids still find ways to play games.

Of course, that whack-a-mole is an intrinsic part youth and adolescence too. I think back to my mostly analogue school days. We found ways to disobey and amuse ourselves in the classroom.

Imagine pusing for locked down paper so kids can't pass notes nor make spit-wads and airplanes. Or locked down pens to prevent tic-tac-toe, doodling, lewd drawings, or scrawling graffiti on those old desks.

Some kind of KYC rules so that the older kids at school cannot pass their broader understanding of the world and cussing vocabulary down to the impressionable younger kids. Age restrictions on the trail to the woods, where kids somehow always knew about that stash of dirty magazines...

I liken this process to a losing game played by authoritarians all over, normalizing a game of "subvert the man" I see the battle fought over sex, drugs, piracy, probably many other topics. Take drugs (for example) "drugs are bad m'kay" but then there are mind expanding opportunities tucked in there as well, yes most have some risk or delayed consequences associated but the lack of nuance (hard to impart on young minds granted) leads to the drugs are bad talk from someone authoritive, and those that dabble bring amazing tales that refute the earlier information that drugs are bad, and survivorship bias and a "new way the authorities were wrong" takes over and undermines the good intentions of those that see the negative impact drugs can bring. Chances are kids seeking a less locked down experience may dabble in much darker places on the net and it may be that this new "KYC" push actually widens that devide instead of protecting the children (which is merely the story used to push for this enhanced customer identity goldmine.)

This is definitely Google's fault. Google allows kids to make webpages at sites.google.com where they embed web games. And because teachers also host content on the same domain, IT will never block the entire domain. They might block a specific URL, but then the kids just spin up a new google site. It's only whack-a-mole because Google allows it.

This could be stopped instantly if student accounts had no write access to new pages at sites.google.com. It isn't worth the distractions nationwide. If it's an absolute must for a class somewhere, then provide teachers with an easy tool to whitelist their class for it.

Would some kids still find ways around that? Of course! And more power to the kids who figure it out. But right now it's too easy for kids to flood game content to their Chromebook peers.

They need to be using deep packet inspection to get reliable and useful blocks.

If you cannot install their self-signed cert on your device (i.e non-managed device) then you likely aren't being MitM and thus, restrictions are hard.

It hasn't completely but she was watching TikTok style mindrot youtube videos so that least that is blocked now.

We blocked a bunch of domains on her laptop so it is just very painful for her now.

Parental controls on devices are not hard because they are intrinsically hard. The companies just do not care about them, because nobody has forced them to be implemented sensibly. There is absolutely zero reason an Android device could not have a shiny button saying "Kid's device" when you set it up and never need configuring again. So this is not a criticism of the approach, and only a criticism of the companies.

This is the improved iOS parental controls. When they shipped it (and for years afterward) it simply did not work https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/apples-parental-contr...

It really is surprising given Apple's reputation for UX and safety.

Cross-platform support is very poor (iOS/Android/Windows/Mac)if ur trying to use family link. After trying to make FL work for weeks, i moved to another service that has morel granular features than FL and detailed activity reports with web filtering rules but its paid but it atleast works instead of those unusable knobs on FL.

I do feel that if there were actually decent parental controls on the most used systems out there then we might not have got to this point in the first place! It is either a nightmare or impossible to set any sort of sensible controls on internet and social media access for children and teenagers.

Probably parental control do not bring any profit (they actually add responsibilities, like restriction on ads, collection of data) so the large companies sabotage them by making them too complicated or broken?

Sounds like a technical issue that is not better solved by remote devices doing age verification, but instead by fixing the already existing implementation.

Being parent is not supposed to be easy

Why does your daughter have a Chromebook in the first place?

Schools in some places seem to require them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kpHaYze8kI&t=90

> We are being Forced to Buy Chromebooks [...] The school sent a list of requirements for the specs and functionality

Shameful.

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