[numbsafari]

Except companies provide wholly inadequate safeguards and tools. They are buggy, inconsistent, easily circumvented, and even at time malicious. Consumers should be better able to hold providers accountable, before we start going after parents.

The only real solution is to keep children off of the internet and any internet connected device until they are older. The problem there is that everything is done on-line now and it is practically impossible to avoid it without penalizing your child.

If social media and its astroturfers want to avoid outright age bans, they need to stop actively exploiting children and accept other forms of regulation, and it needs to come with teeth.

[raw_anon_1111]

How easy is it for kids to bypass Parental Controls on iOS devices?

[rootusrootus]

Social engineering is the most effective strategy, because iOS screen time controls are so buggy that eventually parents throw up their hands in exasperation and enable broader access than they would otherwise choose.

[raw_anon_1111]

It’s one setting to only allow a whitelist and not allow apps to be downloaded. Yes parents might actually need to learn technology

[rootusrootus]

I use it, I am quite familiar with the bugs. The app controls randomly duplicate themselves and change in scope. It would almost be comical if it had not been happening for so many years to so many people. Apple knows, does not care.

[adolph]

When everything is turned off by default, iOS Screentime is very effective. It also has effective tools for to grant certain exceptions, facilitated by Messages. It also distinguishes between "daytime" and "downtime" for the purpose of certain apps and app attributes, like the contact list. For example, we have ourselves, grandparents and the neighbors as "all the time" contacts but their friends as daytime only. They don't retain their devices at night but it is possible for them to pull them from the charging cabinet.

[jmholla]

> Except companies provide wholly inadequate safeguards and tools. They are buggy, inconsistent, easily circumvented, and even at time malicious. Consumers should be better able to hold providers accountable, before we start going after parents.

We could mandate that companies that market the products actually have to deliver effective solutions.

[numbsafari]

Cue blog posts about section 230 and how it’s impossible to do hard things and parents should be held accountable not companies, meager fines, captured bureaucrats, libertarians, and on and on…

[Avamander]

Yes, but how on earth is their malicious compliance at providing parental controls a good reason to go for the surveillance state that hurts absolutely everyone?

Social media operators love the surveillance state idea. That's why they aren't pushing against this.

I even cancelled YT Premium because their "made for kids" system interfered with being able to use my paid adult account. I urge other people to do the same when the solutions offered are insufficient.

[duped]

Step 0 is physical device access. Kids shouldn't have tablets or smartphones or personal laptops before age 16.

[mghackerlady]

16 is a bit steep but I do generally agree with your sentiment. I wish there were more educational home computers like there were back in the day like the BBC micro. I have a startup idea to make something like that (mostly as a dumping ground for my plethora of OS-software and computer education ideas) but don't currently have the resources and have doubts on how successful something like that would even be in this day and age. I'm only 18ish (Not giving my actual age for privacy reasons but it's within a 5 year margin) and feel like my peers would rather be locked to platforms and consume than learn to create and actually use computers despite there being a very obvious need (I once had a 20 year old look at me like I had 2 heads for asking them to move something into a folder)

[aleph_minus_one]

> Kids shouldn't have tablets or smartphones or personal laptops before age 16.

If you make such a restriction, they'll secretly buy some cheap "unrestricted" device like some Raspberry Pi (just like earlier generations bought their secret "boob magazines").

[hellojesus]

Parents should have an allowlist of devices to be able to join their network. And then they can require root certs or something for access outside of a narrow allow list. There's a host of ways to solve both problems. Just remember to check for hardware keyloggers on your (the parents') devices, as kids could use them or try evil maid attacks, etc. if they feel totally encaged.

[aleph_minus_one]

This will only work in practice if one of the parents is a network technician. :-)

[duped]

I've said it before but prohibition works, if the goal is to reduce usage. I don't see this as a realistic problem.

[raw_anon_1111]

This is the craziest thing I’ve heard in a while. They shouldn’t have connected game systems either?

[numbsafari]

No, because those devices have little or no controls and those controls are easily bypassed and/or not honored by the platform.

[mghackerlady]

I think they should. Theres a fine line between beneficial and detrimental. I had a 3DS growing up and could browse the web with its very gimped browser, and I think something like that is actually very good for a child (able to access the internet and view simple and informative sites while being too limited to access social media and the like)

[duped]

The problem is unrestricted access to mobile devices. A game console or desktop PC isn't as big of a deal.

[raw_anon_1111]

What’s the difference? They all reach the same internet

[trashb]

Have you ever visited any game store and turned off nsfw protection?

I love gaming, but I hate all the smutt games. It discredits the medium, essentially what has also happened to anime.

[rkomorn]

I'm kinda baffled about the Switch store's quantity of dating/whatever adult-ish games.

I don't really want to turn on age-based filters (to the point that I've never investigated if they even exist) but at this rate, there's hardly anything worth looking at in the recent feed.

[WorldPeas]

The target demographics for Nintendo products have shifted from kids to.. kidults? Most kids nowadays play on phones or in rarer cases PC/Xbox, Nintendo's lost much of their cache (in my visible experience) save for children parented by the "mindful milennial" types

[rkomorn]

Makes sense but there's just... so much of it. That and all the shovelware.

It's just hard to imagine that's anything close to what Nintendo wants users to experience, but I guess they need the money.

[logicchains]

I hope they do pass a law like that, because it'd give my kids a gigantic advantage over the kids who had no access modern technology and the free flow of information until the age of 16. If you want to leave your kids completely unable to find any kind of gainful employment in the AI era, be my guest.

[butterbomb]

> If you want to leave your kids completely unable to find any kind of gainful employment in the AI era, be my guest.

Your kid is screwed either way. Unless he moves to India.

[sanitycheck]

I bet not many of us would be here now if we hadn't had our own computers before age 16.

[GaryBluto]

Today's young people are already technologically retarded (in the literal sense) and barely know how to use Microsoft Word or navigate with a file explorer, this would make the problem significantly worse.