Comment on TIL: Parental controls aren't for parents – Beast Hacker

BroBot9000@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  It’s not even that.

  There’s enough complexity around just one component to prevent what should be obvious.

  What I know is this. My son just wants to play video games and talk to his friends. I just want to keep him safe. Somewhere between those two things, I’m supposed to become an expert in the convoluted parental control schemes of Gabb, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Xbox, while a stranger’s Christmas morning texts sit in my son’s phone history.

  He can do both, just not at the same time. Or, bring back the LAN party. Those are the choices. Otherwise, yeah skeezy predators and nazi porn await. As if it wasn’t super obvious.

  This guy, who is clearly more savvy than your average bear, is just discovering all the marketing hype about protecting children is bullshit. Wait til he finds out about protecting the earth.

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  • TORFdot0@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    It really shouldn’t be that hard to make a “block all” system. And then whitelist things you want to allow on a piece meal basis. The reason such a system doesn’t exist is because it would hurt engagement and monetization numbers and these corporations won’t stop until every man woman and child has been exploited

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    • AA5B@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      They do exist, and start with block all apps. I used one such on my kids iPhones. There were a few features of value but notably I cared more about preventing excessive use or staying up all night.

      I do start with blocking by default but opened things up on demand. You could argue that feature wasn’t useful but at least it made me think about things before I allowed them.

      Now that they’re young adults I obviously don’t have parental controls but it’s also worse in some ways. For both Amazon and apple I’m forced to have my credit card on file in order to use family sharing, but now that they’ve aged out of parental controls my reedit card is too easy to accidentally use

      You can’t protect them from the internet, the best you can hope for is to ease them in with guidance and hope they’ve learned enough to protect themselves

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    • homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      well, and this guy may do that, but I think he’s calling out all the millions of parents who don’t know how to do that. You’re talking about a vast swath of the population that has literally no idea what any of their passwords are. Or what to do when they don’t work.

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  • tormeh@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Yeah, the son wants to communicate with his friends and he wants his son to be offline? Does he read the stuff he writes??

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    • omcgo@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Because its contextual; he wants his son to communicate; theres nothing wrong with kids talking to adults online.

      There is however a big issue of bad actors abusing unvetted channels.

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    • homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I’m sure it’s crazy difficult to raise a son today anyway, but “if everybody jumped off a bridge” is always true.

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