There’s been plenty of bad news regarding federal legislation in 2023. For starters, Congress has failed to pass meaningful comprehensive data privacy reforms. Instead, legislators have spent an enormous amount of energy pushing dangerous legislation that’s intended to limit young people’s use of...
I think too many parents are completely clueless in the online world, and if they’d treat the real world like the online world, they’d be dead within a week. With the simplification and appification of everything digital, this is only getting worse, and now we have personalised AI/generated scams to worry about.
That said, there’s also a terrible lack of tooling. The only decent parental control apps are the stalkerware apps that abuse victims get infected by. You can set parental controls on app and internet access on most devices, but the companies that let you set up those controls (Apple, Google, Microsoft) will also add WebViews to bypass any internet restriction to their software, and shrug when they’re notified about their flaws because the team that added the bypass isn’t responsible for the parental controls so it’s not their problem.
Back in the 2000s when Internet Explorer was everywhere and integrating with the system browser was just one DLL away (and all websites used HTTP rather than HTTPS), parental controls were a lot more effective than they are today. Locking down a modern device for parental controls takes a lot of effort and may just break compatibility with apps required for school (and yes, some schools demand kids use certain apps).
We need to teach parents the dangers of letting their eight year old kids roam free in the shady part of town, and we need to actually fix our software platforms, because if we don’t do both, the kids gen alpha is going to raise are going to be a whole new level of fucked up by the internet.
I think too many parents are completely clueless in the online world, and if they’d treat the real world like the online world, they’d be dead within a week. With the simplification and appification of everything digital, this is only getting worse, and now we have personalised AI/generated scams to worry about.
That said, there’s also a terrible lack of tooling. The only decent parental control apps are the stalkerware apps that abuse victims get infected by. You can set parental controls on app and internet access on most devices, but the companies that let you set up those controls (Apple, Google, Microsoft) will also add WebViews to bypass any internet restriction to their software, and shrug when they’re notified about their flaws because the team that added the bypass isn’t responsible for the parental controls so it’s not their problem.
Back in the 2000s when Internet Explorer was everywhere and integrating with the system browser was just one DLL away (and all websites used HTTP rather than HTTPS), parental controls were a lot more effective than they are today. Locking down a modern device for parental controls takes a lot of effort and may just break compatibility with apps required for school (and yes, some schools demand kids use certain apps).
We need to teach parents the dangers of letting their eight year old kids roam free in the shady part of town, and we need to actually fix our software platforms, because if we don’t do both, the kids gen alpha is going to raise are going to be a whole new level of fucked up by the internet.