| Back in 2006 I cofounded a company called IMSafer. My co-founders went on to be S09 class with Y!Combinator. We grew up as hackers and thought we could end around the problem of kids removing safe guards to our software. What we quickly found was that (surprising no one at all, least of all us) kids have way more time on their hands and are willing to expend way more energy to remove blockers than parents do to enforce them. It's a tricky issue - kids and online. We actively encouraged parents to have dialog with their kids about what they were doing online. The issue we were attempting to solve was keeping bad people out of the child's social networks. All of the other solutions were, and still do, focus on keeping porn off the computer. That's a doomed system. Parents need to be involved and have a on-going dialog. I believed it when we founded IMSafer 13 years ago, and I believe it now (as a parent with 3 kids, two of them teenagers). Our service did a lot of very novel things for the time (machine based analysis of chat conversations looking for patterns of predation), but I continue to be amazed at how much energy we put into the "but my kids keep uninstalling it" problem. We came up with some pretty good solutions, which were P95 effective, but (again, surprising no one on the technical team) the kids who figured out how to circumvent came up with some pretty amazing solves. The most impressive was this one kid who basically took over their parent's account, gave themselves admin access, set their parents to minimal access, but then changed specific .exe file pointers to give the parents the perception that they still had admin access to their machine when they were trying to run applications. |
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limiting screen time isn't a technical issue, it's an economic issue - kids and parents have different levels of effort they're willing to expend to deal with these limits. Ultimately the kid needs to incentivized to conform to the limit set by the parent.