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>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
by fma 2mo ago
>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.
- organsnyder 2mo agoBack in elementary school, I used Applescript in Hypercard to get around the restrictions on our school computers. Kids always find ways.
- cynicalsecurity 2mo agoYou are teaching your children to be even more secretive and hide things from you even better.
- platevoltage 2mo agoGreat. They are learning good security culture. That will be useful later in life when every move they make will be surveilled.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- flippyhead 2mo agoI 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.
- qup 2mo agoTry discipline
- mplewis 2mo agoNo one asked.
- nielsbot 2mo agocurious kind of discipline you have in mind.
- kelnos 2mo agoTime-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.
- qup 2mo agoWhen 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.
- roboror 2mo agoChildren don't have fully formed brains. There's a wildly varying ceiling on the efficacy of discipline.
- PrimalPower 2mo agoI'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.
- basisword 2mo agoIt 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.
- Grombobulous 2mo agoWhen 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.
- bawolff 2mo agoWhat 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.
- szundi 2mo ago[dead]
- Grombobulous 2mo agoI 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.
- kelipso 2mo agoI don’t think “one can get around rules” is a very insightful thing to say, it’s just a truism.
- Forgeties79 2mo agoThey’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.
- wrs 2mo agoWhen 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.
- jaggederest 2mo agoAdversarially train the children, rlai works on human brains too?
- boredatoms 2mo agoMy childhood was filled with increasing escalations of restrictions to both the computer and the network, and my workarounds. Excellent education
- NuclearPM 2mo agoThat’s how 80s kids learned computers and programming. Trying to install a game and having to lookup what the hell “fat32” was.
- hamburglar 2mo agoDude. 80’s kids think of FAT32 as that new filesystem that supports more than 8.3.
- adamwk 2mo agoWe were once 1337 hackers too
- robin_reala 2mo agoA friend was woken up by his young kid trying to surreptitiously lever his finger onto the TouchID sensor to pay for a game dlc.
- NetOpWibby 2mo agoLMAO incredible
- Aurornis 2mo agoAustralia 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.
- Marsymars 2mo agoThe 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.
- Aurornis 2mo agoApplying 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!
- Marsymars 2mo ago> 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.
- zer00eyz 2mo agoAs 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 -
- krupan 2mo agoYou 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
- Cthulhu_ 2mo agoOur 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.