Comment on What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation | US education | The Guardian
SmashingSquid@notyour.rodeo 5 months agoWe got an iPhone for my niece who is 8. It’s locked down so all she can do is text, call, and take pictures/video and she can’t contact anyone not in her contacts list. She has some games but can’t use them for more than an hour per day and they won’t open during school hours.
A big issue is parents not bothering to learn how to use and set up parental controls.
Randomgal@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Controls like these don’t work if the kid is smart, determined or the parents are too tired or uninvolved. There’s more to the cellphone issue than the actual cellphone.
erwan@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
It doesn’t matter if the kid is smart and determined, parental controls can’t be circumvented.
Unless the parent is stupid enough to leave their phones unlocked or lax enough to unblock the phone every time the kid asks for it.
ozymandias117@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I think you’re being a little naive…
Circumventing parental controls that “couldn’t be circumvented” is what I did as a child that led to me being a computer programmer
SmashingSquid@notyour.rodeo 5 months ago
No, they literally can’t be bypassed unless they figure out the passcode. Parental controls on iOS are part of the OS, not like the easily bypassed software you would install on a computer.
Delta_V@lemmy.world 5 months ago
oh no…anyway…
erwan@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
We’re not talking about the dumb parental controls from the 90’s or 2000’s and run on Windows, we’re talking about smartphone OSes (iOS and Android) that are locked down to start with.
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 5 months ago
It depends on how heavy handed the approach is. A kid could learn about using a vpn or proxy service to bypass dns or dpi based content filtering but if you properly configure the parental controls on iOS or android there is pretty much nothing they are going to be able to do. If they are that determined, I think you need to have a conversation about making good choices themselves and trusting them not to consume harmful content.
I was able to bypass the content filters on the PCs when I was in high school because it was a shitty content filter that could be bypassed by killing the process in an unelevated task manager. My kids are going to have to be more resourceful than that