[LarryMullins]

TikTok offers their service to people they know to be teenagers, during school hours, when those teenagers are inside the school building (with TikTok's tracking of users, they surely know it.)

I don't expect this lawsuit to succeed, but it's not entirely without merit and I do think the school district has some standing if for no other reason than because TikTok is serving videos to, and accepting uploads from, students who are actually in school.

[zdragnar]

Every school system sets its own vacation days, and home schooled kids don't share the same set hours or days as the local school districts.

I don't doubt that the harms are real, but I do suspect that you are putting an unreasonable burden on tik tok here.

What I'm actually most curious about is when did schools start letting kids have cell phones during the school day? I was in school roughly just before smart phones were a thing, but texting was starting to become popular if you could get a plan that didn't charge per text.

The expectation was your phone stayed in your locker if you brought it to school, and anyone caught with one during class or in the hallways during class hours would have it taken away until the day was over.

[LarryMullins]

> Every school system sets its own vacation days,

You're missing the part where TikTok knows where their users are, and know when a thousand kids are clustered together inside of a known school building in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. It's not rocket science to figure out those kids are in school. They know it.

> home schooled kids

The inability to perfectly know when a kid might be "in school" doesn't make much difference in my eye. They could easily detect it most of the time, and probably do, but choose to serve those kids anyway.

[ashwagary]

>They could easily detect it most of the time, and probably do, but choose to serve those kids anyway.

Seems ridiculous to push this responsibility on companies and app engineers. It isn't society's job to child proof the world for distracted children. Parents and guardians have to take the reigns and deal with discipline issues directly.

[danielfoster]

This is an interesting point. I agree with you that TikTok clearly knows what is going on and could disable accesss during school hours if they wanted to. Although not exactly a parallel, there are already laws protecting children from tobacco advertising near schools.

I wrote a similar comment below. This will still be a very difficult case to win. No one ever went after Nintendo even though they knew their devices were being used during class time. AT&T can also see teens texting in class but also do not have a legal responsibility to prevent this. Parents already have a tool-- parental controls-- to prevent social media use during school hours.

If the plaintiff can show that social media companies went out of their way to specifically target children during school hours (versus any other time of the day), there might be a stronger case. But ultimately the courts will not write new laws. This is the job of the legislature. Definitely write your congressperson.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

Since Google/Apple have location services data on the phone, map databases that know where schools are, and the ability to limit use of specific apps or the entire device, do you figure they are similarly liable? It would seem a lot easier to have the platforms solve the problem once than delegate it out to be solved a millions times by every app in the store.

[niij]

Or the schools could make and enforce rules without relying on tech companies to make decisions for them? This is so ridiculous.

[LarryMullins]

Yes, I think they should be.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

It seems completely wrong to me that every app should have a legal obligation to track the location of children to find out if they are at school.

To me the whole enterprise is totalitarian, but if I were trying to build a solution, it would look something like this:

1) Add a school control mode to the devices, similar to existing parental control mode. In this mode the school can block categories of content or usage during school hours. The school administrators don’t get to look at the student browsing data.

2) Schools can enforce a policy that unenrolled devices are banned from campus. The device can make it easy to check using something like NFC or an indicator accessible from the lockscreen (similar to the existing medical ID).

[LarryMullins]

> It seems completely wrong to me that every app should have a legal obligation to track the location of children to find out if they are at school.

Start with the big social media apps, then work from there if the general problem persists (I think it won't.)

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

From what I’ve heard from relatives, a big portion of what the kids are doing on their phones these days is just messaging in iMessage/sms group chats.