[dosman33]

It's not an accident that its so hard to get this stuff right, I've heard countless stories like this from friends who are parents.

If the market wanted parents to be able to figure this out it would be getting it right. It's obviously a dark pattern that benefits everyone but the parents and their children. If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.

[basket_horse]

I disagree. I think it is an “accident” that stems from organizations rather than anything sinister.

Companies generally want good parental controls, but let’s face it, it’s not the cash cow or particularly interesting.

This leads to understaffed teams of b-list developers with high churn, hence the overly confusing and half-baked features.

[rafaelmn]

It's nearly impossible to block YouTube on a smart TV without third party apps, even worse on non-android ones. And the app is not uninstallable. I don't think this is b-tier devs, feels like intentionall neglect.

[paulryanrogers]

LG let's me put a PIN on apps like YouTube, so the kids can't watch it alone.

[rafaelmn]

Why does this have to be TV based and not baked into YouTube app ? Considering how addictive YouTube scrolling is, and how quickly algorithm captures kids it should be mandatory.

My PS5 has play time built in.

[galleywest200]

Your kids will figure out that PIN.

[ToucanLoucan]

Parental controls and accessibility both suffer from the fact that they are good features to add but fundamentally do not drive revenue. They only exist in the average as much as is required by regulation.

No business would build wheelchair ramps unless they were made to, that's why we make them. There's no reason to not do the same for parental controls.

[pavel_lishin]

I would easily believe that Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., explicitly staff these teams with childless adults.

[baq]

Given how easy it is for my 13yo daughter to get around screen time restrictions on iOS in ways I wouldn't believe are possible I'm not sure these people are even adults.

[hn92726819]

How does she get around the restrictions? I'm not aware of a way to do that on iPhone

[dan12ha]

Change the region. Not time and date, that can be blocked by screentime. Change the region. Sometimes takes multiple attempts but it does work. I had to pay a bug bounty to my child to get them to tell me how they did it

[baq]

uninstall app when limit runs out, reinstall used to work.

[selectively]

Apple has an engineering base that includes people who were recently children.

Think about it that way: why would they make things harder for who they were in the very recent past.

[lovich]

> Apple has an engineering base that includes people who were recently children.

What?

I didn’t realize Apple with in the habit of hiring people straight out of high school instead of after going through enough university education that ends up with candidates in their early to mid 20s

[selectively]

Yep. They hire talent. University grads will work alongside red team folks that are maybe 22 years old and have been at Apple for two years. It's a thing.

I personally know more than one person who has a background along those lines.

[naravara]

Workaholic office cultures tend to filter out adults with kids by default so it doesn’t need to be an explicit effort.

[fpauser]

> Companies generally want good parental controls

Nope, parental controls are fucked up since ages. And this is by design, and not because of some "b-list developers".

[hulitu]

> Companies generally want good parental controls

Yeah, like Microsoft requesting that Firefox shall be (parentally) reviewed, while Edge happilly could connect to internet. Fixed by creating a local account.

[Jesus_piece]

It is sinister that this is overlooked by corporations by “accident”. What you are describing exactly what is sinister, that children’s safety controls and parents ability to decrease the risk comes last.

> If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.

[texuf]

I've seen this first hand and yes, it's not sinister, getting dozens of services coordinated and permissioned under a single, easy to use, system is too much cognitive load for the team that inevitably gets tasked to do these things. Think about Privileged Access Management or Active Directory, but an 8 year old has to get it to work with a stay at home mom's 5 year old android device, and the PM's working on it can't think through second order effects (or even first order effects sometimes). And of course anything that negatively affects metrics will get rolled back (that part might be sinister).

[johnecheck]

We're not sinister, we just have these metrics that we prioritize at all costs, up to and including child well-being!

[iamnothere]

Maybe companies could set up comprehensive granular APIs for managing device/store permissions and outsource the parental control software that actually manages the settings. This way a vendor is getting paid to make those settings comprehensible and effective, so they have an incentive to do it well. This would also allow conservative/overly cautious parents to buy different software than more permissive parents. So everyone gets the permission model they want.

[toss1]

Exactly

>>"Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know. "

When it happens only a few times, it might be neglect. This is absolutely by design.

And think again if you think any large corporation (beyond a few isolated individuals who will not be employed there for long) has any actual concern for your safety, or to get anything right beyond an appearance of safety and plausible deniability for the inevitable harm caused by their dark patterns.

The only winning move is not to play. Don't play and write about how awful it is. Send them the only message that they will hear. Stop giving them your money.

[baq]

> Send them the only message that they will hear. Stop giving them your money.

Second order effects of this solution are not great either - being outside of the smartphone world means you're... outside. Network effects quickly push you out of social groups without neither you nor the group doing anything mean, it's just group dynamics.

The real issue is the device and services come in a package which cannot be separated or compartmentalized. It's basically impossible to say 'this device cannot access youtube/pornhub/...' because there's a million ways to get around restrictions.

[unloader6118]

> When it happens only a few times, it might be neglect. This is absolutely by design.

Not sure if I want to call it by design.

It is not a dark pattern, it is just "what is the minimum we can do to sell this without doing the curation work?"

[toss1]

Building 29 separate settings with confusing and overlapping effects is less work than making a single setting of: [Local Only]?

Seems to be a much larger amount of work to design, implement, and support a more-or-less dozen-step customer journey that does NOT work than just implementing a few switches. And that goes even if the switch must be designed-in from the beginning by designing operation for local-only operation.

Surely, implementing a simple block-all-strangers to send-to-bitbucket all communications attempts by accounts not already on the whitelist is easier than all these overlapping settings described?

Unless it is explained how building a much more complex system is easier and lower-cost than a simpler system with fewer controls, the default conclusion is it is intentional.

>>It is not a dark pattern, it is just "what is the minimum we can do to sell this without doing the curation work?"

Even if for the sake of discussion we treat it as laziness, a dark pattern created by accident is still a dark pattern. The customer is no less screwed into doing something they do not want and the company does want.

[pwg]

> Building 29 separate settings with confusing and overlapping effects is less work than making a single setting of: [Local Only]?

The 29 separate confusing overlapping effects is by design. A single "local only" switch would (so long as that switch is enabled) lock out all manner of potential future revenue and recurring rents, which these companies very much want to see hit the balance sheet.

So the 29 separate confusing overlapping settings is designed to frustrate you to the point that you allow what they want from the start, the ability of the device to generate future revenue (via both of one time sales and recurring rents on rental sales).

[toss1]

YES, Thank you!

>>The 29 separate confusing overlapping effects is by design

>>designed to frustrate you to the point that you allow what they want from the start, the ability of the device to generate future revenue

And this explains why they are willing to do all the extra work to do it.

It is not even close to accidental or lazy — there is nothing accidental about the intention or going to the extra cost to build those dark patterns to screw the customers.

[pixl97]

At the end of the day if the MTX group says no, it doesn't happen. Sales is always the most powerful group in an organization, sometimes even overriding compliance if they can get away with it.

[quirkot]

>> Building 29 separate settings with confusing and overlapping effects is less work than making a single setting of: [Local Only]?

Yes, absolutely. 29 separate overlapping settings likely match up precisely to arguments in various APIs that are used. On the other hand, what does local only even mean? No wifi? No hardwired connection? LAN only? Connection to the internet for system updates but not marketplace? Something else? All with a specified outcome that requires different implementation depending on hardware version and needs to be tweaked everytime dependencies change.

[zzo38computer]

Having a separate setting for unconditionally disabling all wireless communication would be helpful. The other stuff you mention can be separate settings if it is useful to have them. (A setting to unconditionally all disable wired connections is less important since you can just avoid connecting it.)

[toss1]

>>what does local only even mean?

Let's start with this: Design the architecture so the core system works fine locally. Features requiring Internet connection are in separate modules, so they can be easily turned on/off, and designed so they are still primarily local.

E.g., store all current status locally and if requested another module sends it to the cloud, instead of cloud-first.

E.g.2, install updates by making a pull of all resources and then doing the update instead of requiring continuous communication.

Allow user control with options to completely shut off, whitelist, blacklist, etc.

Simple design decisions up front to make a software package meeting the user's local needs first, THEN allowing controlled access to the internet, under the USERS' control, instead of designing every feature to contact your servers first and compromising both usability and control at every step.

[gukov]

I’m not sure why some are struggling to understand this. A single "godmode" checkbox would only be possible if every element, the marketplace, the hardware, and the payment rails, were inside one ecosystem. The Switch is Nintendo, Minecraft is Microsoft, the credit card is Visa, and so on. There are simply too many moving parts, making a single killswitch nearly impossible to orchestrate.

[toss1]

Of course, making one single switch for everything in that complex system is absurd. Which is why this is something no one is talking about here.

We are only talking about the architecture, setup, and options for each particular game.

[senordevnyc]

Because raging online at evil corporations feels better than facing the complexity of the world

[Ajedi32]

That, or an open standard.

[x0x0]

Well, this is the company that builds Teams.

One axis is if they even want to make parental controls work, which they may well not want to but rather wish to just check some checkboxes.

But the company that builds Teams and Windows 11: I think it's entirely plausible they can't.

[tempodox]

In the absence of consumer protection laws, this kind of abuse is to be expected.

[immibis]

And yet whenever the idea of changing this stuff at a societal level comes up, HN is filled with thought-deleting cries of "parents just need to be more responsible"

[throwway120385]

Yeah -- alongside cries of "why isn't anyone having children anymore?"

[squigz]

Usually when those discussions come up, there are plenty of people recognizing both that 1) parents do need to be more responsible, but also that 2) we need sane parental control systems. What we don't need is more bandaids that make it appear as if something is being done.

[watwut]

Parents are already plenty responsible. Societal expectation on parents are sky high and ever increasing. Meanwhile, the same people refuse to accept anything that would make parental responsibility easier.

[istjohn]

A supporting citation:

> In 1965, mothers spent a daily average of 54 minutes on child care activities, while moms in 2012 averaged almost twice that at 104 minutes per day. Fathers’ time with children nearly quadrupled – 1965 dads spent a daily average of just 16 minutes with their kids, while today’s fathers spend about 59 minutes a day caring for them.

https://news.uci.edu/2016/09/28/todays-parents-spend-more-ti...

[squigz]

1-2 hours a day? That does seem sky-high...

[watwut]

It is double of what they spent in 1965 for moms. It is actually quite a huge chunk of a day, enough to make parents isolated and overworked.

And yes, expectations on parents are sky high compared to before. From small stuff to large stuff.

[mschuster91]

> Usually when those discussions come up, there are plenty of people recognizing both that 1) parents do need to be more responsible, but also that 2) we need sane parental control systems.

Dunno. My generation grew up to be generally fine people, without parental control software crap (and the poor sods who had parents insisting on it only became better hackers for it). Back then, there was things such as rottencom, 4chan or its various predecessors... there were countless instructions on how to make explosives or whatever readily available, hoards of porn (ever been to a LAN party and came home with less porn on your HDD than before?). And yes there were also alll the creeps.

The only thing that wasn't anywhere near as prevalent as today is all the gambling/mtx crap and AI slop. Hell even brainrot was a thing, half of the chan boards consisted of utterly weird memes that make "skibidi toilet" blush in comparison.

[pixl97]

>My generation grew up to be generally fine people,

[Look at current voters in the US]

Ya sure about that?

[mschuster91]

Yes. Even Harris, as unpopular as it gets with the youth (the whole being a cop thing), still got 13% more than Trump did [1].

If there is one group of voters to blame for the current situation in the US, it is Boomers and older. This age bucket not only skews heavily towards Trump, but also hoards by far the most wealth [2].

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte...

[2] https://www.empower.com/the-currency/life/average-net-worth-...

[alex-moon]

I should guess it is about liability more than anything else. They want to advertise and sell to children, but they don't want to be taken to court about it. Makes a tonne of sense from a profit perspective, especially as people under ~25 years of age are more susceptible to impulsivity and addiction due to the developing prefrontal cortex. From a sales perspective, the younger the better (as any parent can confirm).