[iamnothere]

When I was a kid, most families that had a computer kept it in a common area. Same with the TV, for that matter.

Some families did not. Mine did not! But that was a decision that was up to individual families.

I don’t see why these decisions should be up to anyone but individual families. Period. If your kids are mature enough for unsupervised computer use, or if you don’t see it as a problem, that’s up to you as a parent. Same as if you feel comfortable taking your kids skeet shooting or rock climbing.

[bubblewand]

Attempting to manage this as a parent is hellish.

I can't speak for other parents, but some standards for parental controls—the presence of which and adherence to might be enforced by law, if need be, and need probably would be since none of this is stuff vendors couldn't have figured out on their own long ago if they cared to—we could leverage would be goddamn nice and is all I'd really want.

Especially as devices get more locked-down and it becomes hard to control stuff at the network level if you don't have root on the devices themselves, like... man, it's such a time-suck, and I'm 100% sure I'd be having to choose between "I guess we just don't have the Internet in this house" and "fuck it, I give up, go stumble on gore videos I guess" if I weren't a lot better at this stuff than the median parent. I feel for them, this stuff is entirely hopeless for 'em.

Like, my kids have Chromebooks from school. They pretty much have to bring them home. So now I have this extra physical item I can't administrate that I must police at night if I don't want them to stay up all night on trash-tier web games or something. So I'll block the devices at the network level at night, right? Easy fix! Nope, the fucking things rotate MAC addresses as an anti-tracking measure I guess. We have zero need for that feature (the number of times they're gonna use the things outside school and home over their whole school careers is going to be very small) but I'm not admin on those devices, so, stuck with it. So there's an extra hurdle to making that happen.

Repeat some other incredible frustration for every single thing. Oh look, AppleTV has a simple rating interface so I can at least make sure nothing too bad can get through if I mess something up. Great. Oh except almost nothing on the device except Apple's own software respects the setting, at all, just ignores it. You have to go dick around with every single service on there to lock them down, then hope it sticks through updates and other nonsense. Awesome, great feature that's actually totally useless because nobody cares about the users. Sigh.

Your options are go full-luddite, give up and leave them to the Internet gods, or take on this load of work and stress that our parents did not have.

[iamnothere]

I agree that it should be easier. We’re on a frigging VC website. Shouldn’t there be a huge market opportunity here for parental control systems? Why is this not a problem that anyone is going after?

I’m also surprised that “family monitoring” stalkerware companies like Life360 haven’t expanded into this market.

[bubblewand]

You have to make everyone abide by them, for it to not-suck. At a minimum, software and service providers would have to respect settings client agents tell them they have (as in the AppleTV case, it's bordering on pointless for platforms to even have them if most vendors ignore them)

That'd probably be enough (plus something for school devices in particular to let parents set stricter settings during non-school hours, without having full admin rights on the devices) to do a ton of good, but it's not a startup, it's a protocol and maybe a law.

The startup version would probably try to capture that as some kind of one-stop-shop web portal.

[iamnothere]

I would think that as a platform like this grows, they would be able to build relationships with OS and service vendors to manage parental control settings via API. After all, this would take a lot of public pressure off of the individual vendors, especially for social/gaming/media platforms.

It doesn’t have to be perfect, just decent.

[TiredOfLife]

> Shouldn’t there be a huge market opportunity here for parental control systems?

It's so huge that it has been built into every operating system for years

[fennecbutt]

>Shouldn’t there be a huge market opportunity here for parental control systems

Requires parents to be invested and unlike the OP (appreciate you btw) many parents are not.

No money/use in it unless people actually care enough to invest personal effort into it (which they don't, hence forcing solutions that fuck everybody over, like UK requiring id for adult websites).

[bluescrn]

> Attempting to manage this as a parent is hellish.

Doesn't matter what you do as a parent so long as kids are allowed smartphones at school.

You can set up perfect filtering for your own kids, but that won't help when some other kid brings in a device loaded up with the most shocking content they could find on some unfiltered home connection.

[techblueberry]

When I was a kid 5 gigantic companies didn’t basically control the whole internet.

Skeet shooting isn’t in every pocket, school, library, Best Buy kiosk. Etc. Maybe if the phones were open source and I truly had the capability to control access this would make sense but the currently available tools are obviously toothless in a way meant to ensure that your u feel like your in control.

I’m not really scared about what my kids might do or see. If the internet was still countercultural and not everything was fucking force fed to you by gigantic billionaire mega corps it would be fine. But there should be some friction.

[fyredge]

Because they are harmful. The worry is not online use, but online addiction. We don't just allow parents to regulate what drugs their children consume (medicinal), we trust medical practitioners for the correct dosage. Similarly, social media regulation should be done to achieve the same effect.

The failings of individual families have far reaching consequences beyond their own homes, especially in non collectivist societies that mostly put themselves above all others.

[iamnothere]

Medical practitioners actually don’t typically administer drugs to kids. They prescribe a dose, but it’s up to the parents to administer the drugs.

You’re basically saying that non-collectivist societies should become collectivist. No thanks!