>children have quickly found workarounds for such measures, such as asking friends to message them links, which can bypass restrictions when opened
I was very surprised of this by my own kids find workarounds like l33t hackers. Apple's restrictions are a joke. The app store is full of things they can mess with. My daughter mentioned some way to get around screen time.
I've ended up just taking the iPads away.
When I was a kid my parents wouldn’t give me a cellphone. I wanted to call my girlfriend. Well, really, my girlfriend wanted me to call her. A lot.
They didn’t give me one.
I ended up finding a way to get my own through a more apathetic adult who I could pay cash to cover my bill (only an extra $10/month on a family plan).
I certainly am not telling you to just cave in, but perhaps this story can be a reminder that technology you control is potentially better than technology you don’t.
What age groups are we talking here, because if we're talking about a 7 year old, giving them unfettered screen time is probably bad parenting. However if we are talking about someone old enough to have gf/bf its probably also bad parenting to not let them develop their own self control around technology. They have to be an adult eventually.
I started my kid at 12 with an extremely locked down iPhone. She fights the restrictions at every turn and I have to make sure that she understands that finding loopholes is fun but also if I catch her violating the spirit of the restrictions there will be consequences. So she proudly tells me about clever workarounds she finds but still puts the phone away at the appropriate times. It’s kind of fun that she’s developing an instinct for subversion.
That’s how we handle it with ours as well. He found a way around a certain control and we opened a bug report with the vendor and it was acknowledged and fixed. He then realized he locked out other kids with that and laughed and tries to find more worth reporting.
Is that black hat or white hat?
Chaotic hat
I was a teenager, if that wasn’t clear. But I was more of the mindset of lending a story, I can’t say whether or not it’s relevant to the parent commenter’s scenario.
I don’t think “one can get around rules” is a very insightful thing to say, it’s just a truism.
Just because someone can get around rules doesn't neccesarily mean they will want to.
They’re talking about the relative ineffectiveness of prohibition when it comes to teenagers. Generally speaking, they’re right. And the implication is therefore “don’t just blanket ban your way through screen time restrictions.”
It’s a bit more nuanced than “one can get around the rules.
There are kids under 18 who drink and plenty under 21 who drink. Still a very good idea to ban under 18 drinking, and not a terrible idea to ban under 21 drinking. You can do this for lots of rules and laws.
So yeah, they're basically saying "one can get around the rules" and nothing more than that. Therefore, there is no argument here, just a truism.
I wasn’t trying to make an argument, I was trying to offer a story of a personal experience.
>relative ineffectiveness
>generally speaking
I felt like I couched and prefaced enough that somebody wouldn’t read this and go “this guy thinks you literally can’t ban teens from anything ever,” which is a ridiculous stance that no reasonable person would hold. I’ll be more explicit in the future.
Wholesale banning teens from screens is generally highly ineffective, like many but not all things people try to prohibit at that age. It leads to their seeking it elsewhere, perhaps in less safe environments and certainly with less guidance. It also means they won’t communicate about it with their parents, which has a lot of bad secondary effects.
Personally, if my kid experiences or witnesses something disturbing (or illegal/potentially dangerous) when they are young, I want to make sure the lines of communication stay open between us so I can help - or at least help them process it - when they need me.
TL;DR: banning smartphones when they can easily access them elsewhere is almost certainly going to end in a net negative. I am not saying we can’t ban anything. That is a ridiculous interpretation of my comment. I hope this clears that up for you.
Yup. I think American culture is broadly too permissive with under-14s and too restrictive with over-14s (but under-21s).
I told my elementary-age child that they can have a phone when they are old enough to sneakily buy one without me knowing.
We didn't give our kid her own phone until a few months past her 13th birthday. She was at a private elementary school since kindergarten and her class was small and mostly had the same kids from K-8, so the parents got to know each other early on and there was general agreement on 'no phones until 13'. This greatly reduced the "but so-and-so has one".
Who said it had to be unfettered?
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My comment got a lot of traction but for context my kids are early in elementary school, far from their teenage years.
The intention of the iPad was to watch some educational videos, check out books, magazines from the library.
They still have occasional access but only with direct active supervision (i.e we are next to them vs we are making dinner).
As they get older, we will revisit.
What's stopping them from getting a burner device anyway? Imposing too much control can push them away, but a lack of direction can also make them wander.
All you can do is nudge and try not to worry too much. It's certain there are other influences in their life you don't know about.
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Australia was one of the first countries to institute social media bans under a certain age. Reading the reports and commentary from parents there has been fascinating, but not really surprising if you remember what it's like to be a kid.
The most positive thing I read was that the kids are spending less time on social media in front of adults (like at the dinner table) because they're not supposed to be on social media.
But most of the parents in the article I read believed their kids had circumvented the ban somehow. Their problem now was that the kids' social media use was entirely hidden from them and they had no way to monitor it or even bring it up with their kids. The kids didn't want to admit to using social media at all.
None of this should be very surprising for any of us who remember back into childhood. Circumventing the restrictions was a game with its own reward. I had friends who were finding ways to get around the school's internet controls for the fun of doing it, not because it blocked any sites they wanted to use.
I was definitely that kid. I remember discovering that my district's web filter had a default password (something like "changethis123"), by watching one substitute with exceptionally poor typing skills. Problem was, substitutes' accounts were disabled frequently, and any one account only really had a lifetime of a week or two, before someone in the IT department realized that 300 devices were connecting to the network with the same credentials.
But the staff lists were public, and I had the default password. So I set up a script to turn the lists of names of teachers, librarians, janitors, etc. into usernames, and then tried to login with all of them. Turns out, most support staff, especially custodians, hadn't changed their passwords. (I'm guessing their jobs didn't involve much computer use). With a list of a couple dozen working accounts, I'd mete out 1 or 2 at a time to my friends, and we had teacher-level access for the rest of our time there. Don't remember using it for much, maybe showing my friends a youtube video during lunch or something.
This demonstrates why forcing people to use E-mail addresses as user IDs is a stupid, stupid policy.
Usernames are almost always quasi public knowledge, even when they're not email addresses. The problem here was the existence of a default password, not the fact that you could figure out usernames.
The upside of well-crafted social media bans for kids under a certain age is that you can use them to apply financial pain to social media companies for failing to prevent kids from signing up.
Applying stiff financial penalties for allowing kids to sign up for social media sites is another way of saying that you want to have to provide your ID to log in to social sites.
Reddit, YouTube, Discord, and even Hacker News qualify as social sites. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to start providing ID to log in to everything.
If you think these imaginary laws would only apply to Facebook and TikTok, you must have missed all of the discussion where they've been extended to many more sites with social features. Goodbye privacy!
> If you think these imaginary laws would only apply to Facebook and TikTok
We can literally write "these laws apply only apply to Facebook and TikTok" into the laws.
Or base it on sites that have advertising. Products/services that are targeted to minors shouldn't be permitted to have advertisements anyway.
I don't find "We've done a bad job with X so we should abandon X rather than attempting to do X better" to be a compelling argument on its own.
> We can literally write "these laws apply only apply to Facebook and TikTok" into the laws.
I don’t find it useful to imagine laws like this. This isn’t what happens in real law making.
I’m talking about real, actual laws that are getting passed.
It’s not going to be perfectly targeted at websites you don’t use while leaving everything you like free, open, and privacy preserving.
It’s really important that we’re being realistic and honest about this. Inviting bad laws into the internet with fantasies about how they’ll be carefully scoped and limited to other websites is not realistic.
The DMA designated gatekeepers seems to be pretty well-targeted as a real law that's currently on the books.
It applies solely to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft.
Going by that list, YouTube and GitHub would be impacted. They have social features and primarily host user-generated content.
Imagining that these laws will be precisely written to avoid any services you like is a dangerous fallacy. That's how people rationalize bad laws.
Remember when all of the surveillance laws were only going to target the terrorists? Look how far that drifted.
What would be the point? If the goal is to "protect the children", then banning only 2 companies from providing social media to kids will do nothing after at most a few years - kids will just move on to the new social media that is not yet banned.
Of course, this says nothing about the many kids who will be hurt by being denied access to social media, such as the many gay or trans kids living in conservative families that found some solace in online communities that would accept the real selves they otherwise have to hide.
> What would be the point?
Ideal scenario? Meta decides it's not worth operating in my country, geoblocks us, and pulls their apps from the app stores.
I'm sympathetic to the people who get real value from meta platforms, but on balance, I see meta as a massively negative force, and their business model and leadership make it effectively un-fixable.
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When my friend's kids were totally obsessed with League of Legends, I offered to set up a home firewall with increasingly difficult workarounds, so by the time they graduated high school they'd at least have a cybersecurity certificate and possibly a Ph.D in networking.
Adversarially train the children, rlai works on human brains too?
That’s how 80s kids learned computers and programming. Trying to install a game and having to lookup what the hell “fat32” was.
HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE you mean :-)
Dude. 80’s kids think of FAT32 as that new filesystem that supports more than 8.3.
You guys had filesystems??
They don't have them any more. There's just a "recents" and a search bar.
Nope, just fat. ;)
My childhood was filled with increasing escalations of restrictions to both the computer and the network, and my workarounds.
Excellent education
Our school's library computers (mind you I was early 20s by then) did not allow people to just sit down and go online, an admin had to log in first.
We did have Notepad though. Notepad -> open file -> explorer -> enter URL -> internet explorer -> internets.
Not long after we both got an operating system installed on our removable drive (which we had to pay like 200+ euros for across four years and we barely used it), and bootable Linux CDs became a thing too so the protections were completely moot.
I found it such a hassle to keep locked down I gave up. Like, he'd be so aware that he'd find ways to watch me enter the PIN code when adjusting the settings. I'd have to be ever-vigilant and I got tired of it.
I've concluded the only way to avoid workarounds it to reduce my own screen time. I stopped having a tablet myself. Got off the Iphone too.
I still need some smartphone for work. Got the smallest one possible so at least games aren't really fun.
Try discipline
Children don't have fully formed brains. There's a wildly varying ceiling on the efficacy of discipline.
curious kind of discipline you have in mind.
Time-honored punishment: revoke various privileges for periods of time until they get it.
In this case, seems pretty topical to just take the phone away entirely for a few days.
When kids break the rules about screen time, there are consequences.
Not Dad fiddling with the settings, but instead Dad teaching a lesson about respecting the rules, and doing what you said you would do (children agree to obey the time limits in order to have access to the device).
How Dad should teach the lesson varies by family and by child.
Is it okay if Mom teaches the lessons about respecting the rules?
It's okay, she's just less effective.
No one asked.
Back in elementary school, I used Applescript in Hypercard to get around the restrictions on our school computers. Kids always find ways.
We were once 1337 hackers too
A friend was woken up by his young kid trying to surreptitiously lever his finger onto the TouchID sensor to pay for a game dlc.
LMAO incredible
You can lock them out of the app store completely, and only allow a list of approved domains that can browse to. I also had it shut everything down at 10pm so they couldn't spend all night trying to find workarounds. Worked really well, but it did require some work on my part to manage the installed apps and allowed domains though
As a late Gen X I grew up when the "it's 10pm do you know where your kids are" ad's ran. When "just say no" was all I heard for a decade. When sex ed was marginally controversial. Honestly, I remain shocked that I never got arrested for some of my shenanigans. The rest of it was drinking, drugs and partying.
I was candid with my kids about what I did in my youth, I was also honest with them about how terrible the tech was. They also got unfettered access to it (tech), and there were lots of conversations and consequences around its (mis)use.
Given the history of "abstinence only" sex ed, and "just say no" drug campaigns, and their massive failures; just not letting them have it seemed like it was going to create the problems that many are looking to avoid.
As they have moved into adulthood they have taken those lessons to heart, and are now the ones who complain about their peers and their abuses of social media and inability to self moderate. These same conversations continue now, with the added topic of AI -
You are teaching your children to be even more secretive and hide things from you even better.
Great. They are learning good security culture. That will be useful later in life when every move they make will be surveilled.
It seems like Apple put a big focus on 'kids mode' things this WWDC. To the point they dedicated a major section of the keynote to it. Hopefully a part of that will be focussed on the workarounds.