The problem there is that parent's won't know how to do it, or won't care. Many can hardly operate the most user-friendly phone, let alone manage accounts.
The online safety acts and its EU counterparts are somewhat risky, but nobody wants the mention the only proper alternative: a total ban on "social media." Not just for kids, but for everyone. Or a ban on smart phones, that would work too, at least short term. But: money.
> The problem there is that parent's won't know how to do it, or won't care.
This is unfortunately the reality.
The other day a friend asked me to help her make her phone safer for her kids to use. I started by asking if she set permissions on the apps she downloaded. She looked at me blankly, "What permissions?". I proceeded to show her how you can granularly control what you allow each app to do on your phone and what access it is allowed. Her head blew up, she had no idea any of this existed and after gong through a few menus, she didn't care any more. It was all too complicated and too much to think about for a busy mum.
This is why governments unfortunately are having to try to protect people from themselves. As tech competent people it all seems so simple to us, but we need to remember the majority of the population just click 'Allow All' and blow past all permission and security questions as they have no idea what any of it means.
"is this device for you, or a child" is one of the first options when setting up an iphone.
I haven't set up an Android in a while, but, I doubt it's massively different.
Yeah but most parents devices are for them, they just let their kid use it too.
Ah, I guess it's impossible to have a quick enable kids mode then.
We should just give up and give random individuals access to everyone's camera roll.. no other way.
It is probably technically possible, but as almost twenty years hasn't been enough to implement this feature in either of the big mobile systems, it's obviously a huge practical challenge for Apple and Google.
Yeah, obviously.
Greatest minds of our generation couldn’t possibly invent fast profile switching.
Lost technology.
Is there a term for agreeing with someone's stance but disagreeing with the person because they're so insufferable and sarcastic in the way they present the argument?
“I don’t want to be seen agreeing with someone who combats obvious bad faith arguments with sarcasm - please think of me as being better than that, even though we would end up in a pissing contest about nuance or a digression away from the main point”.
Bit of a mouthful though.
it's very simpler, i recently got an android tablet for my child and it would take a lot of effort to miss all the stuff about setting it up for a child
Make the default "allow none" or "child-safe" and then if the parent does nothing that's what they get.
When we buy a new phone, the configuration process should ask if the device will be used by a kid. Easy and simple.
When restoring factory defaults, the same question, just in case the phone is sold, gifted, stolen or whatever.
If you are going to give a phone to a minor you should set that option right from the start.
UK mobile operators already defaulted to blocking adult sites before OSA, and lets the subscriber turn it off, which seems like a reasonable option.
It'd be even better if there was a way for people to selectively turn it off for specific devices without MITM the connections. It wouldn't be that hard to come up with a mechanism for that.
It's ok if parents won't care. It's a choice too.
Yes, you can't make parents care, but make it easy for the ones who do, and you'll also pick up some number of those who care but only if it's not too difficult. There's no reason a parent should have to set permissions separately in 10 differents apps on a child's device.
That's why the setting should be on the device, not the browser or individual apps. One setting that you could even get pre-configured when you buy the phone.
It still doesnt solve the problem of the millions of parents that just dont care.
Why should I care that they don't?
Right, this is the big picture nobody acknowledges. I'm not paying the price for your kid because I don't know them. I couldn't care about them even if I wanted, because their existence doesn't even intersect with my life.
Yes, as a parent, you are required to put in more effort into parenting your kid than random hypothetical people. That's obvious, and has been the case forever.
I understand the concept of community, but community is not me sacrificing my privacy for someone 1000 miles away.
If parents don't want to do X, Y, and Z to lock down their devices then that is their right. And I support their rights, so the conversation is over right then and there IMO.
Because we live in a society and trillion dollar companies exploiting children for the crime of having negligent parents is bad.
The aim here is to protect the children. "Just let parents protect them" doesn't work when there's millions of parents that won't care.
More parents will care if you make it easier.
That’s not true. Every TV app has a parent setting. That’s really easy to use browser support profiles just like TV apps do bad. UX doesn’t mean that it can’t be set up easily for parents. Windows itself could have profiles for kids that has all this set automatically. It’s not hard. There’s just no will to do it.
> There’s just no will to do it.
Exactly. The problem is its from the parents side.
Spoken like someone who has never used parental controls. They’re a shitshow.
I've build some moderately sophisticated server systems up on "bare metal" (as the kids say), know my way around a shell better than most programmers, understand networking better than most programmers, et c., and I still find restricting and monitoring kids' devices to be a huge pain in the ass. The only places it's not extremely shitty are the Switch (which still isn't great) and Apple devices.
Options between "we don't have tech in the house" and "wide-open tech, we have it all" are all some amount of painful, usually for no good reason.
(I remember once investigating how to do some pretty basic stuff for this in Linux, hoping to find something nicer than manually setting some executable permissions and firewall rules and then having to go back and change them all the time, and the closest thing to a guide I found was an old article from Red Hat that basically lead with "LOL, good luck you poor sap, Linux sucks at this" before going on to explain the various bad ways available to sort-of, but not entirely, accomplish it with a lot of work, and significant ongoing time-burden)
if parents wont make the slightest bit of effort why should the rest of us pay to keep their children safe?
Because children shouldn't be the ones paying for the crime of having bad parents. Children should be safe regardless of what the parents do, because they're independent people and not property.
A bit of empathy goes a long way. That child may be your nurse one day, taking care either of you or candy crush.
A child can still access knives if the parents don't care.