Maybe this will inspire a few kids to become a bit more tech savvy in order to bypass restrictions. That is quite literally why I am where I am today. Nine year old me wanted to play RuneScape, so I cracked open the computer user manual and found a backdoor. This started a lifelong trend of exploring systems and eventually lead to software engineering.
Hardly. Back then we had an atmosphere of freedom and parents didn't understand things properly. We had root access. Now children are put under surveillance and can't leave the walled gardens set up by corporations.
Yeah right, like computers are locked down that tight.
It still takes my 13 year old brother just a few hours to figure out he has to put the Mac in recovery mode to allow the changing of system files (forgot what that security theater was called). Most parents haven't suddenly learned to set BIOS passwords or to protect the admin passwords, and even then, it's not too hard to burn and boot a disk that removes password checks from an unencrypted system.
Parents don't need to know about root passwords if even they don't have root access in the first place... (At least that seems to be the strategy on mobile)
I never had root access, my parents always had locked down accounts and parental software. I'm not saying it might not be more of a slog to get around things on an Android phone, but it's not mission impossible. Never underestimate the resourcefulness of a kid who wants to play video games.
Yes. My 9 year old daughter just figured out a pretty impressive workaround for Kindle FreeTime. If there's a parent account that is logged out you can click to reset password - opens a browser window to a page on Amazon. No browser bar but has Amazon search. Search Amazon for a product related to where you want to go, follow links until you get to what you want. Or just find a google link and get anywhere.
I wonder why is it available in US only, and for parents only. It might be useful for giving Android devices to elderly people as well, who don't understand the technology well enough.
History shows that a very large portion of Google launches begin in the United States and then tend to scale outward.
And I agree on the use case for seniors, given this is Family Link but targeted mostly toward juniors. It's been joked about elsewhere that “Parental Controls” is to control one's parents.
Targeting the elderly can be seen by some as agist or condescending. See the reactions to the stereotype of one's parents (especially one's mom) having trouble with technology.
I really wanted this to be something letting my wife and I share digital assets like we do real assets. Alas. Just take the device away from a kid using it at night against orders.
The lack of access to online accounts is a time bomb waiting to happen. A user friendly version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir%27s_Secret_Sharing or some type of multi-sig to handle giving access to all of a persons accounts[1] will eventually be needed for the general population. Anyone that's had to deal with this after the passing of a loved one knows how much of an added pain it can be.
I'd be curious to see how they've implemented this. It'd be possible to do this with cross signing encryption keys so that by supplying their credentials, they could unlock the keys to unlock your stored passwords
Google already has the Google Play Family Library which allows the sharing of digital assets (music, movies, tv shows, apps, books and magazines) purchased through Google Play. https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7007852?hl=en
Google Photos for couples is what's sorely lacking, IMO. If you share your life together and you don't keep anything from each other, having two separate accounts for photos is annoying. There should be an option to "marry" two Google Photos accounts so both can access each others photos (I know you can share photos and albums but you are not going to be constantly sharing every photo one by one when you want to share everything by default with your significant other)
In Google Drive settings enable "Create a Google Photos folder". Once you have done so a Google Photos folder will appear in Drive. If you share this folder with your SO they will be able to access your current and future Google Photos.
Kids used to get a slap when they misbehaved. Now they face surveillance and psychological torture e.g. by taking away the devices with which they are in contact with their friends and play games. If I was a kid, I'd take the slap over the other things any time of the day. But both are wrong. Thank god I am grown up now and actually have human rights (that I can enforce). I wouldn't want to be a kid nowadays.
You don't understand. Imagine that some of your best friends are in another country and your contact to them is cut by means of removing your digital devices. Since children also cannot be allowed outside alone anymore, because the world is dangerous, this is truly like solitary confinement.
Also, to reduce your argument ad absurdum: Would you take away the shoes of your kid because well, our ancestors once walked around without shoes so it seems like an appropriate punishment.
Relative differences are the keywords here. Taking away something one is accustomed to causes pain.
Have you ever heard of "being grounded"? A punishment where parents restrict actions of the kid including toys and social interaction? This is a concept regardless of technology.
Yes. And it, too, is psychological torture. I know, people call it educating and raising a kid. Hackernews users don't understand my point because it is too progressive and subtle to understand. I stand firmly for children's rights not to be harmed, all the way through. All the way.
I am curious to know how you would prevent a child from running into the road given that said child isn't yet mentally developed enough to understand the risk. And they will do it over and over regardless of how well or in how many different ways you try to explain the risk to them.
> Hackernews users don't understand my point because it is too progressive and subtle to understand.
Or they just disagree with it. Your point is not that hard to understand, but without providing any alternative course of action it doesn't sound very practical.
As you can see many people reading your comments are evidently literally unable to imagine the kind of parenting you're talking about. It stirs up a lot of emotions that most adults have put to rest and forgotten. You start poking those old sore points and suddenly out comes the poop-flinging (downvotes in this case.)
I can remember my bewilderment: once when I was a little child my mom was scolding me for something and then the phone rang and when she answered it she wasn't mad. I understood that her being mad at me was a choice she was making, but I couldn't understand why she would do that. Why was she being mean when she could just turn it off?
Our society is very neurotic, the evidence being that people will justify physical and psychological torture of children and get very upset when you dare to point out that it's stupid, cruel, and unnecessary. It's a memetic disease, anchored with trans-generational trauma, and rationalized to normalcy.
I greatly appreciate your comment. I often feel alone with my opinions on hackernews. You are completely right, what you are describing is a case of emotional manipulation (using anger as a tool to increase compliance) and bad parenting can even go all the way to emotional terrorism (causing intense feelings of guilt if one does not do what the parents want). Whether it's physical or psychological harm - the usage of such methods displays lack of emotional maturity and patience in parents.
I think what the parent post is referring to is the perpetual "grounding" of children until they become adults that has come into fashion lately in the US (last few decades) and that is quite cruel and horrific. It's one thing to ground a child for a week or two. It's another to ground them for their whole childhood as has become commonplace in the US to the point where these idiotic parenting ideas are enforced by police and taken out of the parents' hands completely. In addition to the immense suffering imposed on children, society too suffers from creating neurotic adults that act like children, have no life skills, and complain about micro aggressions and other nonsense when they're living the most comfortable lives in the history of humanity.
This sounds like a bad excuse to collect data on children using Android.
"We need to feed your emails to our ad systems so we can give you better ads!"
"We need to know the engagement metrics for children specifically so we can better target them and do it in a way that is not displeasing to and counteracted by parents!"
Not sure what it changes, since this data is already available to them. What they change is making it also available to parents.
The second point is weird, because Google provides only the basic apps. It's the third parties that would be interested in engagement metrics. And again - they already have access to them.
Google owns YouTube and Gmail, both of which are oft used by children and adults alike.
This adds new data, because now a parent-child link is established, and the user's "child-status"/age is confirmed by the parent using this tool on them.
Are you trying to say YouTube can't identify children based on their video history? It's be surprised if they didn't already have an excellent estimation of child/parent split. We're taking about a company specialising in targeting user groups.
Sure, there's going to be that one adult guy who does enjoy listening to the same Frozen song 5 times a day, but that's an acceptable anomaly.
I agree. I have plans to create a site with animated gifs explaining from the most basic things in computer interface. Things i see my 70yo parents struggling to achieve/understand:
- how to close/minimize/maximize/open a window.
- right click, left click common outcomes
- enter a site URL
- Google use
- save files
- navegate through local files
Etc
Edit: I know "I have plans" is worth nothing, but I am unemployed right now and on a carreer change. Once I have better financial stability I plan to pursue this more effectively.
To get you to think a little more outside the box - do elderly need "computers" or "connected devices"? My dad tossed his laptop once he learned his iPad. Just something to think on. Specific "gestures" can change with tech - just like 20 years ago when my parents learned how to use a mouse was different. How do you get elderly people to intuitively use a device?
No money in tech for the elderly. They require more support, rarely upgrade and they die sooner. Kids require no support, constantly upgrade and become lifetime customers.
I'd argue the opposite. Since no one is catering to them and they're frustrated with all the new technologies they don't understand, the elderly would pay a premium for accessible solutions that bring them value (they're in the stage when they're spending money, not really trying to save).
It's an 'unsexy' problem, and the average young developer/product person can't quite grasp the challenges the elderly have, but it's a significant, severely undeserved market.
If you're (thinking of) working in this space, feel free to shoot me an email and bounce ideas; I've been thinking about this domain for a while.
Personally, I'd target older wealthy folks with the most intuitive UI yet created: people.
Give them a tablet with one big red button, no controls. They press the button, they connected to a real person. They tell the person what to do, it gets done. If the singularity hits before all your customers are dead: fire all your workers and replace them with AI.
If you don't feel like rolling out a custom piece of hardware, maybe you could piggyback on something most elderly people already own: a land-line telephone. Voice only, but probably good enough.
This seems like a good idea, but it would have high labour costs, I would think?
It's also going to cross over into health and social care, therapy and support for lonely seniors almost immediately. Your call center staff are not going to be adequately trained/prepared/certified for that.
Did you actually go into the link? This is tech for parents, not for kids.
Yes, "when we were young" we didn't have this. Long live freedom! But "when we were young" we also didn't have two-click-access to pedophiles and sleazy porn-ad websites on every corner.
There was another thread here where I went on a rant about the MS Office Ribbon. I had whatever number of years under my belt with the previous UI, and the Ribbon is awful. This change did illuminate something for me: UI change is a bitch as you get older. When you learn how to do something one way, then the common way changes and you are forced to deal with it, that change is bumpy.
I have two tricks for my parents:
- Gave them 1Password as a gift and I begged them to just try it for 2 weeks. Once Dad got the hang of the auto-fill and Mom realized she could share bank passwords, they are 100% on board with a password manager.
- When I teach my Mom how to do something on the computer, I often have her put her hand on the mouse / keyboard, then rest my hand on top of hers and click / type through her fingers. This way she can feel how to touch the device. Half the battle with touch screens or special operations is an unusual touch operation. Most times, I show her something this way ONCE and she gets it because she felt what I was doing.
The privacy implications of this are quite horrible. If you read the Google privacy notice, you'll see that Google tracks and records the activity of your child.
The reactions in this thread and across the tech community toward Google are just baffling to me. There is a strong double standard.
Microsoft and Facebook are, quite rightly, criticised and scrutinised over the amount and the degree of tracking they undertake. Meanwhile, Google, who capture unimaginably humongous amounts of data on users, escapes any scrutiny.
From ChromeOS (an entire OS that tracks everything you do, and one heavily used in schools) to GMail and Google Analytics and CDNs, Google's digital fingerprints can be found in every corner of the web.
It's no longer an exaggeration to say we live in a time when millions of people are tracked online from childhood to death. This isn't a dystopian episode of Black Mirror, but real life.
I don't blame ordinary users for not fully understanding the privacy implications and the myriad and insidious ways they are tracked. But what excuse does the tech community have for giving Google a free pass on matters of privacy and online tracking?
You may be confused due to the name of this site. "Hacker News" is not, nor has it been for a very long time, by and for hackers.
The success of YC has turned this site, and the community around it, into a money-centric zeitgeist. Marketers, "growth hackers", salespeople, recruiters, and other forms of greedy, parasitic professions, are now the dominant voice in the so-called "tech community".
Anything for a buck, even at the expense of privacy and real technological advancement. That is the mantra of HN.
I don't believe for a second that Google doesn't understand most of their markets. That they choose to ignore them (looking at you, myriad chat apps) is another issue, but they definitely understand e.g. France or Germany well enough to start roll-outs there.
Would be nice to see them switch it up a little now and then so everyone not in the US don't have to feel like 2nd class citizens.
We have much stricter privacy laws in Europe so perhaps they are piloting in the US before deciding whether to take the time to make the service compliant with local regulations.
Using and collecting childrens' data is very complicated. If they completely worked out all the issues for the US it's not that strange they are limiting it to that for now.
Given how fickle google has been with their new products, and how much worse their invasion of my privacy appears as time goes by, this just makes me shake my head.
there are lots of things google provides that are so valuable that I feel it's worth the pain of supporting an increasingly crappy company.
I tried this with iOS and regret it on a weekly basis, especially since I moved myself off iOS and my kid is still using an iPad. I have to keep an old iPhone around to manage the "Family" account because they don't have a web management option. Every single time I boot up the phone to approve purchases there's some issue I have to deal with that takes 20 minutes to resolve (logged out, cc expired, No SIM card). I wish I had just made him a normal account and lied about his age. He's already proven he can handle the internet responsibly and now everything is tied to that account and it can be made into an "adult" account until he's 13. Hopefully Google does it better.
I assumed that, I didn't think they'd replace anything on iOS. I've accepted my fate with that. I'm just saying if they're not doing it better, think about avoiding it.
Amazon's Kindle Free Time is sensational in controlling what is accessed by your children. They have a fantastic control of what can be offered and tt supports multiple age levels and allows you to control what is displayed on a granular level.
You can also set a time limit for usage throughout the day and even the media type being consumed.
There is a monthly charge for each child, but well worth it.
Great. I didn't know about it. My sons are around 10yo, I'm really worried of them watching Netflix full of 18yo rated movies. Maybe it is time to change to Amazon for streaming.
I wonder how Google plans to enforce Family Link, because kids are definitely smart and motivated enough to create their own Google account. Plus, kids are connected to a cultural network where they can easily find this information or ask someone else to do it for them.
To contrast all the bashing comments here, I'd love to have this feature.
I've broke my 20 years long love affair with Linux for Windows 10 just because their family features.
Technology is addictive, I want my kids to use technology, but not to be dominated by it. I'm tired of seeing a bunch of kids in a park all around a phone instead of being running.
Screen time limits is a fundamental feature of any modern Operating System.
96 comments
[ 103 ms ] story [ 397 ms ] threadIt still takes my 13 year old brother just a few hours to figure out he has to put the Mac in recovery mode to allow the changing of system files (forgot what that security theater was called). Most parents haven't suddenly learned to set BIOS passwords or to protect the admin passwords, and even then, it's not too hard to burn and boot a disk that removes password checks from an unencrypted system.
And I agree on the use case for seniors, given this is Family Link but targeted mostly toward juniors. It's been joked about elsewhere that “Parental Controls” is to control one's parents.
(Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud Platform)
[1]: At least the ones they want you to access...
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en
Email would cover a lot though as most of the rest allow for password resets if you control the email address on file.
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/3036546?hl=en
https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7007852?hl=en
Children have rights but they do not have liberty.
Also, to reduce your argument ad absurdum: Would you take away the shoes of your kid because well, our ancestors once walked around without shoes so it seems like an appropriate punishment.
Relative differences are the keywords here. Taking away something one is accustomed to causes pain.
> Kids used to get a slap when they misbehaved. [...] I'd take the slap over the other things any time of the day.
And when this specific instance (child runs into road) has come up before there are always people saying they'd hit the child.
So, I'm just checking if that's what jasonkolb meant or not.
Or they just disagree with it. Your point is not that hard to understand, but without providing any alternative course of action it doesn't sound very practical.
I can remember my bewilderment: once when I was a little child my mom was scolding me for something and then the phone rang and when she answered it she wasn't mad. I understood that her being mad at me was a choice she was making, but I couldn't understand why she would do that. Why was she being mean when she could just turn it off?
Our society is very neurotic, the evidence being that people will justify physical and psychological torture of children and get very upset when you dare to point out that it's stupid, cruel, and unnecessary. It's a memetic disease, anchored with trans-generational trauma, and rationalized to normalcy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting#In_indigenous_Americ...
Yeah, and my parents weren't even that bad (among my friends in high school, for instance, they were pretty well-regarded.)
For most children under the age of about 16 a ten minute time out is just as, probably more, effective as a week long time out.
10 minutes is discipline. One week is incompetence or cruelty.
"We need to feed your emails to our ad systems so we can give you better ads!"
"We need to know the engagement metrics for children specifically so we can better target them and do it in a way that is not displeasing to and counteracted by parents!"
The second point is weird, because Google provides only the basic apps. It's the third parties that would be interested in engagement metrics. And again - they already have access to them.
This adds new data, because now a parent-child link is established, and the user's "child-status"/age is confirmed by the parent using this tool on them.
Sure, there's going to be that one adult guy who does enjoy listening to the same Frozen song 5 times a day, but that's an acceptable anomaly.
- how to close/minimize/maximize/open a window.
- right click, left click common outcomes
- enter a site URL
- Google use
- save files
- navegate through local files
Etc
Edit: I know "I have plans" is worth nothing, but I am unemployed right now and on a carreer change. Once I have better financial stability I plan to pursue this more effectively.
I remember my family's first Mac (an SE) came with a bootable disk with some simple interface tutorials like these.
It's an 'unsexy' problem, and the average young developer/product person can't quite grasp the challenges the elderly have, but it's a significant, severely undeserved market.
If you're (thinking of) working in this space, feel free to shoot me an email and bounce ideas; I've been thinking about this domain for a while.
Give them a tablet with one big red button, no controls. They press the button, they connected to a real person. They tell the person what to do, it gets done. If the singularity hits before all your customers are dead: fire all your workers and replace them with AI.
If you don't feel like rolling out a custom piece of hardware, maybe you could piggyback on something most elderly people already own: a land-line telephone. Voice only, but probably good enough.
It's also going to cross over into health and social care, therapy and support for lonely seniors almost immediately. Your call center staff are not going to be adequately trained/prepared/certified for that.
Yes, "when we were young" we didn't have this. Long live freedom! But "when we were young" we also didn't have two-click-access to pedophiles and sleazy porn-ad websites on every corner.
There was another thread here where I went on a rant about the MS Office Ribbon. I had whatever number of years under my belt with the previous UI, and the Ribbon is awful. This change did illuminate something for me: UI change is a bitch as you get older. When you learn how to do something one way, then the common way changes and you are forced to deal with it, that change is bumpy.
I have two tricks for my parents:
- Gave them 1Password as a gift and I begged them to just try it for 2 weeks. Once Dad got the hang of the auto-fill and Mom realized she could share bank passwords, they are 100% on board with a password manager.
- When I teach my Mom how to do something on the computer, I often have her put her hand on the mouse / keyboard, then rest my hand on top of hers and click / type through her fingers. This way she can feel how to touch the device. Half the battle with touch screens or special operations is an unusual touch operation. Most times, I show her something this way ONCE and she gets it because she felt what I was doing.
Yet another feature we will never see again, it seems.
https://families.google.com/familylink/privacy/child-policy/
The reactions in this thread and across the tech community toward Google are just baffling to me. There is a strong double standard.
Microsoft and Facebook are, quite rightly, criticised and scrutinised over the amount and the degree of tracking they undertake. Meanwhile, Google, who capture unimaginably humongous amounts of data on users, escapes any scrutiny.
From ChromeOS (an entire OS that tracks everything you do, and one heavily used in schools) to GMail and Google Analytics and CDNs, Google's digital fingerprints can be found in every corner of the web.
It's no longer an exaggeration to say we live in a time when millions of people are tracked online from childhood to death. This isn't a dystopian episode of Black Mirror, but real life.
I don't blame ordinary users for not fully understanding the privacy implications and the myriad and insidious ways they are tracked. But what excuse does the tech community have for giving Google a free pass on matters of privacy and online tracking?
You may be confused due to the name of this site. "Hacker News" is not, nor has it been for a very long time, by and for hackers.
The success of YC has turned this site, and the community around it, into a money-centric zeitgeist. Marketers, "growth hackers", salespeople, recruiters, and other forms of greedy, parasitic professions, are now the dominant voice in the so-called "tech community".
Anything for a buck, even at the expense of privacy and real technological advancement. That is the mantra of HN.
Perhaps you might want to try Slashdot.
...
To be in the U.S
At this point I'm past being the surprised by this.
Lawyers recommended it I guess?
I'd think annoying customers was something to worry about too but then again.
Would be nice to see them switch it up a little now and then so everyone not in the US don't have to feel like 2nd class citizens.
Once they have ironed out the privacy issues here the rolling out to US should be a nobrainer : )
there are lots of things google provides that are so valuable that I feel it's worth the pain of supporting an increasingly crappy company.
but having them track my kids isn't one of them.
yuck.
You can also set a time limit for usage throughout the day and even the media type being consumed.
There is a monthly charge for each child, but well worth it.
I've broke my 20 years long love affair with Linux for Windows 10 just because their family features.
Technology is addictive, I want my kids to use technology, but not to be dominated by it. I'm tired of seeing a bunch of kids in a park all around a phone instead of being running.
Screen time limits is a fundamental feature of any modern Operating System.