I mean sure compulsory dragnet surveillance of 20% of Americans with basically no oversight, where the data is shared with exactly the people in their lives in a position to harm them with it, that’s fine. But now we don’t automatically tell you who the gay kids are, you have to look for yourselves. What a joke.
But if school districts can't mandate children bring home webcams to remotely view and browsers to spy on, how can they possibly keep them safe from breaking pointless rules in the privacy of their own home? Or having any private conversations whatsoever? Won't anyone think of the children?
The entitlement that school officials feel to spy on students in their care is sickening. I go a fair bit further than the median person on this, but I suspect that if people realized just how pervasively their children were tracked we would see far wider outcry. This is far worse than anything Google could do on their own- as much as I don't want tech companies to have too much of my personal info, I really don't want my boss to have it! With the moral pedestal society places school administrators and faculty on, the problem is even worse there.
Eh, they're in a tough spot, at least at the middle school level.
My kids' school gave every student a Chromebook upon return to in-person school, and the result thus far has been massive amounts of distraction as half the class winds up on YouTube or something instead of getting work done. I wish they'd ditch them entirely, but the school went all-in on Teams.
Ours have had school ipads or macbooks since Kindergarten(!) and agreed, it's awful. They should drop the tech until high school. It's not helping anything and is a huge distraction. All the online homework shit's so very much worse than when they just had workbooks full of tear-out sheets, for the lower grades. You can probably buy a hundred or more of those books for a reasonable subject-curriculum for a year, bulk, for the cost of one low-end iPad. Just go back to that stuff. It was fine. This isn't better.
Worse, I can't put my own parental controls on it. Any devices of ours our kids use have strict ScreenTime limitations on hours of use, total amount of use in a day, which programs can be used at all, which sites can be reached—meanwhile, the school devices have few restrictions and they can reach all kind of garbage sites on them, and I can't tighten that down.
You can with a smart router like the Synology RT2600: it can do mac-adress level site firewalls so say ban youtube between such and such for all your kids' devices (it can assign a persona to a bunch of mac addresses).
Yeah, I know I can get more hardware to fix it (or set up a BSD router again like I did way back in '04 or whenever) but it sucks that I already have a good system that works perfectly for my needs and required no tech horse-shit on my part (I'm just... so over doing that stuff when someone's not paying me to) and the schools are punching holes in it. Got this great smoothly-running machine here, and they're tossing a wrench in the works.
I did try that already with Google's router (we have Fiber) but of course it doesn't have mac-level blocking. I could swear it used to, but if it did, it doesn't now.
This could possibly end up problematic as I've seen videos embedded in kids homework. Not sure if that was just something that particular teacher did or what.
I'm pretty sure that Apple, Google and Microsoft all have education programs where they offer school districts free or discounted hardware and services.
Not that it makes it any better, it actually makes it worse because it illustrates the lengths they're going to invade kids' privacy and mine their data.
So funny, at work in my company we do have computers, since we re an investment bank doing electronic trading, but no youtube, nor even mobile phone allowed.
If they catch us with a mobile phone on the trading floor, it's reported to compliance.
Why are school allowing kids to have youtube during class, they could at least firewall it like companies do.
Blocking certain sites can make having the Internet at all far less useful to teachers. Youtube's one of those. Unfortunately, Youtube doesn't have allow-list capabilities that'd allow blocking YouTube proper but allowing some subdomain that required login and displayed only permitted videos (parents have only been begging for it since, IDK, forever—YouTube Kids is a cesspool, all we want is allow-lists, but nooooo). Youtube was especially vital during remote learning (what's a better way for a teacher to distribute a video lesson?) and some schools are still trying to use similar schemes for snow days and such. Plus there's just a ton of useful material on Youtube and teachers don't always think of some video they might want to show when they're at home and can snag it on their own connection, or maybe they want the kids to watch them individually at their own pace (being able to pause or rewind is so nice!)
(for the record, I'd rather they just ditch the tech entirely until at least high school, but if they're gonna have it, they probably ought to have YouTube access or else it's far less useful. I'm also not sure why schools started letting kids carry phones to class, what a fucking terrible idea)
You can't really block URLs at a network level though, you'd need access to the device.
If you own the device you could of course install the required root certificates to interfere with HTTPS traffic, but arguably that's more intrusive, and a massive security hole if you make a mistake (like Lenovo did, for example).
I remember them trying that when I was in school. It didn't work. For one the school's IT staff was helplessly incompetent. But also the task is far more difficult than it sounds. There are a ridiculous number of ways to circumvent blocks. Another issue is being overly zealous in blocking. I had a lot of difficulty for certain research projects due to blanket filter bans on large swathes of information
The idea of giving kids laptops with unsupervised internet access to use for in-person school sounds really weird to me. At the very least you'd think the teacher would be able to see and control their screen to stop them from misusing the computers during class. I remember that functionality was available in a computer lab when I was in high school and the teachers would absolutely use it if you were off task (but if you finished your work early they generally didn't care if you browsed Wikipedia).
That does explain who the target audience for Chromebooks is though. Most tech illiterate adults seem to prefer Windows or Mac for their own machine, in my experience.
They have the ability to view the students' screens, but they're probably 80% of the time instructing or walking from desk to desk. Very little time sitting on their computer during a class period, so little opportunity to monitor.
We say this, but then we also bring the hammer down if admin's not watching and something bad happens—say, if bullying were happening in the school-provided chat this was monitoring, or a kid wrote something about shooting up the school, or drug deals are being made in the chat, or whatever, and then a kid commits suicide, or a fight happens and it comes out that it was because of bullying in chat, or a kid does in fact shoot someone at school, or a kid ODs.
Administrators lose their jobs and may get personally sued. Teachers may get sued. The district may get sued.
Neither approach will make everyone happy, but erring on the side of too much surveillance carries a much lower likelihood of ending administrators' careers or bankrupting a school district, than too little. Of course they do the thing that we, collectively, strongly encourage them to do. It's not "entitlement", it's a rational response to insane expectations.
> With the moral pedestal society places school administrators and faculty on, the problem is even worse there.
I assure you, teachers, at least, perceive no such pedestal. Quite the opposite.
Yeah, I wish I could agree with the grandparent, but "child safety" is a very effective cheat code for bypassing reasoning because the harms (dead kid!) are immediate, concrete and visceral, while the benefits of not are way more abstract. How do you even begin to quantify the psychological impact of total surveillance? In such a liability-centric culture, it's easy to see why the cards fall as they do.
I was listening to a 90s era George Carlin show on a long car ride recently and during a bit about the nation's budding obsession with child safety, he said something I found kinda poignant in the context of the ongoing youth mental health crisis (n.b. predates the pandemic by a lot): "we've sucked all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives." Amid all the discussions of the apparent relationship between helicopter parents and neurotic, depressed kids, I think it's pretty reasonable to consider whether the sum total of "dangerous fun" deaths/ruined lives - lawn darts, pellet guns, fireworks, pedo van, tall swingsets, etc - exceeds the harm inflicted by that bubble-wrap outlook on life. I'd argue probably not.
While reading tfa, I had the same thought regarding the company's claim of suicides prevented. Even if you take it at face value (which I don't; like, come on, there's no way they've demonstrated that with any degree of rigor), is the tradeoff worthwhile? I'd argue probably not, but don't know how to do that in a way that wouldn't get me called a monster at a school board meeting.
It's yet another example of locally rational and globally irrational. 100 years ago you would have 5-10 kids and if one or two died, such is life. Today most families are 1-2 kids - the level of investment and risk is much more concentrated. It may be bad for kids generally, but each parent is (in a way) making a rational choice for their individual kid.
People had that many children here in NL because of religious influence (= more souls for the church) and because they would lose one or two of them, almost guaranteed. It wasn't a matter of 'if'.
Reduced influence of the church + much better medical understanding and vaccination for a lot of the infant killers as well as increased affluence has caused people to start having children later which already cuts off a whole chunk of offspring and fewer.
100 years ago was also around the two World Wars, and losing all of your 5-10 kids would widely happen. It wasn’t just kids, people dying was just part of life.
This is a false dichotomy though. The two options aren’t “school never hears about bad things happening through school computer/software” and “school must monitor everything”.
Some simple changes just off the top of my head:
- the students have a way of reporting, e.g., bullying. And it is only the information (messages and names) related to the report that the school now gets accessed to.
- the school then acts on the information provided to them.
It’s not reasonable for parents or others to expect the school to stop anything hateful from ever happening. But it is reasonable to expect them to do something about it after it’s been brought to their attention.
Not all the bad things will get reported. Many won't involve any participants who'd care to report them. The school will suffer regardless, if it comes out that they missed something and a bad thing happened that was connected to it (not even necessarily if it was caused by it).
"But they'll just do this on other forms of chat that the school can't monitor!" Yes, they will, but the school won't face multimillion dollar lawsuits over that.
I don’t know what the laws are where you are, but I believe that they should include the right to privacy for the students. They have a right to not live in a panopticon for 12+ years of their life because they might do something bad.
I also imagine that one lawsuit like this will set a precedent, and then there will either be multi-million dollar settlements, or people will decide that children should not be placed in a panopticon.
But either way, this counter argument is based on the implicit assumption that the school should be providing an “official” system through which the students should talk to each other. Get rid of that, and problem solved. Have an official channel for parent-student, parent-teacher. And let the students talk amongst themselves the way they wish.
> - the students have a way of reporting, e.g., bullying. And it is only the information (messages and names) related to the report that the school now gets accessed to.
Does that ever work? What's the school going to do, launch an investigation and put kids into interrogations to figure out if it's true? Send in undercover students to confirm the bullying? And then what, expel the bullies and deal with lawsuits from the parents? Schools have every incentive to look the other way, and unsurprisingly, they usually do.
And for students there's zero incentive to even report it. It's like living next to a known criminal and the police saying "tell us if you ever see something strange". Nobody is going to, because they understand that it's just lip service and the police isn't going to do anything, but they'll still have to live next to the criminal when he finds out someone has spoken to the police.
Explaining to students that if they bully someone, they're increasing the likelihood of that person one day bringing a pump gun to school and murdering them is a much better deterrent than any "you can report it and we totally will take that seriously and do something" campaign.
I don't, we have (much fewer) shootings in Germany too. Not everyone who is bullied goes to shoot up the school, but in many school shootings, bullying was involved. Surprisingly, it's not the super popular kids and bullies that start shooting.
> Explaining to students that if they bully someone, they're increasing the likelihood of that person one day bringing a pump gun to school and murdering them is a much better deterrent than …
Please please tell me you don’t work with kids or ever open your mouth anywhere near kids. The unintended consequences of your “advice” are beyond horrific.
I'm not sure I follow. are you suggesting that by saying there's a connection between bullying and school shootings, that increases the risk of school shootings?
Yes. Just as talking about suicide or anorexia or multiple personality disorder leads to explosions in its prevalence so with school and other mass shootings.
No, as “A connection between bullying and school shootings” is not what the grand-parent comment “suggests” - and omits the purpose and the style in which they made their proposal.
The GP comment suggests that:
1. As an effective deterrent to bullying
We explain
2. To students
That
3. “if they bully someone, they're increasing the likelihood of that person one day bringing a pump gun to school and murdering them”
And they seem to have overlooked quite a few concepts in putting forward this proposal.
For example —
The alleged perpetrators of any such pump shotgun massacre would be amongst the audience of people receiving this message.
And
The audience are students, not professors of logic or Bayesian mathematicians or any other category of audience.
I don’t really understand where you’ve coming from. Either the school is supposed to act on information it receives to stop anti-social behaviour, or it’s not.
I certainly don’t believe that the school should do nothing, and I believe that most people agree with me.
If they are supposed to do something, then I don’t have a specific course of action since it’ll be situational. But I do know, that the correct response is not “do nothing”.
> there’s zero incentive for students to even report it.
That’s only because the school isn’t doing anything to address what complains they do get.
> I certainly don’t believe that the school should do nothing, and I believe that most people agree with me.
It's not about what it should do, it's about what it's going to do. The way the system is set up, they won't do anything unless something drastic happens (extreme violence) or they get press coverage for it. And then they'll set up some program to teach kids not to bully. Naturally, kids bully because they haven't been told not to.
It didn’t matter if you reported anything a decade ago and doesn’t matter now. Everyone in authority does anything they can to avoid anything looking like responsibility. It’s standard policy to punish victims along with the people abusing them.
None of this surveillance does anything useful. They are just looking for offenses they can apply their zero-tolerance policies to.
That sounds good, in principle. But in practice bullying is rampant, as is drug dealing (even in 'good' schools). School shootings we have extremely rarely here, rounded down to zero. And the tracking is done just the same but it isn't used in a pre-emptive way at all, at best after the fact and even then the company that installed and maintains the systems probably has more access than the school administrators (which they can fairly easily abuse) and the people who built the software and/or host it likely have even more.
The high school two of my sons go to has all kinds of crap that they have install on their mandatory smartphone. If you don't do it then so sorry, no school for you. Which is pretty weird because the law here says that children should be given an education, it doesn't specify anything about the mandatory use of all kinds of tech for which perfectly good paper equivalents exist.
All I see as the end result of this is utter unaccountability, zero effect on the things it supposedly is for and finally if the tools are used at all it is to the schools advantage (and the pupils and parents' disadvantage), such as ad-hoc reschedulings. I'd love for my kids to have paper agendas and just their books for high school, this phone+laptop combo just adds to the weight they already have to lug around (which is insanse, if my travel bag were that heavy I'd never travel), is super fragile, expensive and best of all forcefully ties them into the Microsoft applications + eco system, something they really can do without.
They might instead demand more. You under estimate the divide between how you want to be tracked by your taxes and how you want to track your children using your own money (school tuition)
>>With the moral pedestal society places school administrators and faculty on, the problem is even worse there.
Where is that?
Surveillance aside, teachers where I'm at are overworked and powerless. When I was a kid in Europe, teachers were gods. Woe be to child whose teachers say is misbehaving or being lazy or not paying attention. 35 years later and in Canada, teachers are... Beat,really. Angry entitled parents and angry entitled public and rules and policies and complete lack of any freedom to make a difference.
I do not see North America placing teachers on moral pedestal.
We place them on a moral pedestal in the same way we placed "essential workers" during the pandemic. That is to say, with words and sentiment only, but in reality, disposable.
GP maybe could have phrased it a bit more clearly, but I think what they meant wasn't "moral pedestal" but "moral standard". One example that jumps to mind for me is when I heard about teachers in my school district as a kid being in trouble for having pictures of them posted on social media by friends at a party where they happened to be holding drinks in plastic cups. Never mind that they were well above the legal drinking age, were not on the clock, or the fact that there wasn't any actual proof that the cups even _contained_ alcohol; being in a situation where someone else could post a picture of them drinking something they can't _prove_ isn't alcohol was apparently considered a "bad example" for students and required discussion to determine if it was disqualifying.
Most college students are only legally children for 4-8 months at most before they are legally adults. Immature adults (god) yes, but doing this sort of surveillance on full citizens is egregious.
Sometimes I get the impression that college administers think they're running the world's fanciest high school.
Are we talking about College students here or K-12 students? It isn't clear to me from (admittedly skimming) the article, but it greatly changes how I feel about the situation.
Yes, college students are adults and are entitled to all of the privacy protection of adults. I don't consider children to have the same right to privacy—although here too it depends on the age, high school is very different from elementary school.
They use the word 'district' which in general is pointing at K-12, I'm pretty sure I've only heard of 'school districts' and not college districts in standard communications.
> especially among the K-12 student population that Gaggle serves.
yep. I'm used to these exposés being for college programs but most of the drama has shifted to highschool and middle school these days. I don't know if that's progress or companies finding softer targets to sell their software to.
One sizable group wants them to do X, until Y happens, then gets bent out of shape that they weren't doing Z.
One sizable group wants them to do Z, until Y happens, then gets bent out of shape that they weren't doing X.
And so on, and etc, because people are just emoting and parroting their script.
What is the problem that one wants to solve? What are the guiding principles determining that it is a problem, that it needs a solution, and which are used to evaluate the potential solutions?
That? That's too much work, and it's hard.
So we fall into primate screeching because we haven't, actually, bothered to think.
The flagging was probably because 90+% of occurrence of these words—certainly gay, maybe also lesbian—in a school setting were, until fairly recently(? maybe still? I dunno what The Youths are up to) intended as insults or hate speech. These tools appear to have been for monitoring assignments and chats (nb. that kids are plenty smart enough to use shared-editing assignments as chats, too, even if chats aren't available, or sometimes they think draft assignments will be less-surveilled)
[EDIT] And, presumably, teachers would ignore the flagging if you'd used the words in, say, a school assignment, for a good reason.
[EDIT2] I'm not complaining about the downvotes, but, could someone please explain WTF? I truly have no clue.
I don't think it's that bad of a comment, but "probably because 90+%" is a LOT of hedging to make a point. I could see it doing better if the comment tried to back up the claim with something a bit more substantive or even an anecdote (despite the obvious flaws with reasoning from anecdotes, they can still be fun to read in a way that adds to the conversation). Then again maybe I'm missing the same thing you are.
If it's anything like my high school was, there would be another 50 options for those words, all of them more offensive and none of them registered in some text matching database.
Another band aid tech solution to a social problem
>Though Gaggle’s software is generally limited to monitoring school-issued accounts, including those by Google and Microsoft, the company recently acknowledged it can scan through photos on students’ personal cell phones if they plug them into district laptops.
Is this not malware by any definition? Protect the children, prosecute these fuckwits.
Had a zoomer tell me that they use homophobe as a slur.
As a bisexual man, my immediate reaction was,"that's really gay."
We need a new freaky Friday where a millennial goes to school with zoomies.
Parent of a queer 17yr old here who's admittedly special interest is gender and sexuality(his not necessarily mine). One of the differences I've observed is the appropriation of therapeutic terminology - gaslighting, toxic, etc. Maybe This is an over-generalization from specifics, but this terminology seems to have made its way into young people's lexicon with a fluency not present in people my age (and completely absent from most people my parent's age). Along the way they've taken on a bit more, um, flexible definitions. Whereas I might be more exacting in their use, young people seem to have more expansive definitions.
I wouldn't necessarily call it shocking or foreign, but more like a highly specific subculture, which in some ways it is, but it has, because of its very nature, the potential to become the dominate culture or evolve into the dominate culture with time. I suppose this is where the "stranger in their own land" phrase lies, and with it "adapt or die."
My first boyfriend was in high school and what I miss most about those days was being gay wasnt a status symbol but just a relationship status. Neither him nor I were into "pride" which is annoying at best and insufferable open sexual degeneracy at the worst.
Seeing what's in our public schools today is a comedy of cringe and highly manufactured, on par with the 60s hippie culture.
This technology seems like something that should not exist in the first place. Why do schools feel the need to spy on the students? Who cares if a student swears in a chat message. Spying on all students should not be considered acceptable, when waiting for an aggrieved party to bring up the issue to staff is a possibility. Administrators have always been especially power hungry in my experience in schools, so this isn't surprising. But there should be legislation banning this. Breaking open student lockers to read their journals would be considered unacceptable, why is this? Lower Merion v Wolk where the school was taking photos through laptop cameras and had to pay a large sum of money, is something I hope happens to every school that uses this.
Interesting. This is the first time I hear about Student Surveillance Tool. The school my kids go to has never mentioned anything of that sort. Two questions: 1/ why and 2/ what other surveillance tools/programs I am, as a parent, not aware of?
They're decisions made at the state, municipal and district levels. If you want to find out what else is going on, FOIA might yield results, as might some prodding from school boards.
Though they're aimed at higher education I will not resist reposting
two articles of mine that seem to get more relevant every day [1,2].
The existence of tools and companies like this is pitiful, corrosive
to our democracy and clear evidence that education, governance and
society has generally lost its way.
Read the first article. Good (the second was blocked by an account-wall), which is somewhat ironic considering the subject. One thing that rang true was the idea that an access card disenfranchises. I went back to my old University but could not get in to look for a professor as an access card was required. I know why. Thefts of equipment. But it is a hard thing. How to balance access with combating insecurity.
Sorry you hit an access wall. Turning off JavaScript will fix that
btw.
The overuse and inappropriate use of physical access systems has
turned many public places like schools and hospitals into high
security prisons.
Sadly that's just one technology in a growing list aggressively pushed
onto institutions through a cocktail of fear-mongering, insane
regulation, cost-cutting efficiency (getting rid of actual guards and
supervisors) - all part of the ever expanding security-industrial
racket.
In my opinion, a very important talk is given by Eve Ensler on "the
right to be insecure" [1]. The only other hacker I've seen pick up on
her refreshing stance is Bruce Schneier.
I was in secondary education (only) ca. 15 years ago but this makes me feel 60 years old. What on earth is a student surveillance tool? Sure we had DNS filtered sites on school workstations but that was about it.
"Though Gaggle’s software is generally limited to monitoring school-issued accounts, including those by Google and Microsoft, the company recently acknowledged it can scan through photos on students’ personal cell phones if they plug them into district laptops."
This is straight up insane. If I had kids I wouldn't even send them to a school that acts like this. Maybe it's because I'm German or something but that sounds out of the Stasi era.
> school-issued accounts, including those by Google and Microsoft
This appears to be what happened. Google and microsoft figured out how to exploit children for money by forcing them to use their shitty products in place of actual classroom education. I agree with you, I wouldn't want my school in a computer centric education, let-alone a heavily monitored one. It sounds like what you'd expect in a juvenile prison
> This is straight up insane. If I had kids I wouldn't even send them to a school that acts like this
You might have to move if you want to escape this, and you'll never really know if/when a school or district implements these surveillance programs, either.
> Maybe it's because I'm German or something but that sounds out of the Stasi era.
That's because it is. The Stasi/KGB/etc couldn't have dreamed of the capabilities authorities have today to surveil everyone at a massive scale to find even the smallest of their infractions.
Our school board is working on a policy to make sure parents know if a kid wants to go by a different name (other than an approved nickname). I bet they'd love for this software to be able to figure that out and let the appropriate administration know.
I remember an old article, pre pandemic (2017?). The computers provided by the school were not only monitoring the students screens, but also taking photographs at random intervals, even when the computer was at the homes. The led of the camera blinked, but it was dismissed as a glitch by the school. I don't remember what was happening with the photos, IIRC they were send to a central server and it was not clear who could see them. I can't find the link now.
Yes, it is. It's the same incident than the sibling comment. (Upvote and thanks to both.)
In the fist article you linked, one of the comments that hit me the most was by m3dFlatLander about a documentary about a similar event:
> To be fair to the school shown in that particular documentary, they weren't looking at the students through a webcam. It looks like they're using a remote desktop program to look at the students desktop. He explained that many students use the webcam program as a mirror to look at themselves or just mess around.
Unpopular opinion: schools have a responsibility to moderate (yes, censor) the media students consume.
By default, the Internet is rated X. That's just a fact. Mainstream platforms pull any material that's explicitly pornographic, but there is a delay, and children will be exposerd to adult content.
LGBTQ stands for "Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, and Queer" - which are both legitimate sexual identities and genres of pornography. If the software is confident it can distinguish between the very different meanings of "lesbian" vis-a-vis content, then great. But I don't believe that for a second.
I have a child who is regularly exposed to terrible things online. It's like playing whack-a-mole. Schools are one of the big chinks in the armor. I can't control what she's exposed to there.
If I couldn't afford private school, I couldn't even chose what school she went to. I'd be stuck with whatever policies the local public school has.
We don't let any stranger just come on to the playground and chat with kids.
Parents have responsibility to teach children to self-moderate what content they consume. Yes, I mean even the youngest kids. Do they have access to the internet? If they want to see porn, they will see it - regardless of any content filters you put on. Kids are fully capable of using and understanding the need for and the high-level concepts behind VPNs by the time they are 7. They will get creative with their keywords and ways to see porn (e.g. erotic games that might not be caught by your filter). I've seen 10 year old kids use portable Tor browser to bypass school content filters.
Anything else will lead to problems in later life (overconsumption of porn for example).
At home, I block the internet at the router level - including VPNs. I also don’t give my daughter admin access. So even if she knew what a VPN was, she wouldn’t be able to use it.
I'm pretty sure a motivated kid would just need some time to bypass your filter. Don't underestimate children. If they can access the web, they can access porn. You'd have to block all - including HTTP(S) - traffic and even that covers just what happens at home.
It might be as simple as connecting to the neighbor's open WiFi, the local McDonalds public WiFi, or their best friend's mobile data plan or their unrestricted home WiFi.
There are HTTP proxies operating via port 80/443, full with an app just like a VPN. I've seen a 10 year old kid use a free SSH shell account (via port 80) to proxy their traffic. There was another kid who just used a public cloud provider's free tier and had a full desktop environment running there, accessed via some web VNC interface - that one was 12 y/o though.
Regardless, you're just putting off the inevitable - and then it will be like a whole new overwhelmingly fascinating world has just opened, which is not great for a young mind not yet fully capable of moderation because you didn't allow them to practice it.
Yeah I grew up in Iran. There’s really not much you can do to completely ban everything. All you’re doing is creating mistrust between you and your kids. Your kid is far far more susceptible to being groomed etc if you have draconian parenting policies.
It's unlikely that a single paragraph covers OPs entire parenting method. At best we're seeing one small part. For all we know, they have regular conversations about why some content is blocked, thus making it more of a collaboration.
Thanks for the reminder to remain curious. Perhaps OP would be interested in sharing more. This is a discussion site, after all. I'm honestly a little surprised that things have remained mostly civil in this discussion page. Credit to HN's culture and the moderation team.
My philosophy to keep rules simple. She gets a certain amount of internet time.
I also place restrictions on types of media. For example, she loves listening to techno-pop music, but that’s not allowed a less than an hour before bedtime. So there’s a de facto “no music an hour before bed rule.”
Kids YouTube is treated like a very low quality tv service. She gets a certain amount of “video time” but I allow more time if she uses an established steaming service (Netflix, etc).
She’s allowed to see content creates adults pretty freely. She can also talk to her friends pretty freely.
I am very restrictive when it comes to communicating with unknown “children” online. Kids social media platforms attract predators. Some predators are grownups, some are toxic other kids.
Ik actually much more worried about “child” content than “adult” content.
Filtering only works on domains. But most content these days in on a handful of forums (FB, etc).
I require her to preserve her browsing history. I review it if I feel there’s a reason to (she’s not good at being sneaky),
We don’t talk about the content, because she mostly just listens to techo-pop and plays browser games.
If it seems she’s hanging out in a toxic forum, I’ll discuss it with her, but also be firm about blocking it.
Understand, I’m most worried about making sure my daughter gets her homework done, does some reading, and gets a good night sleep. The internets main threat is as a distraction from that.
Oh, the things I learned in school about covert computing and "managing your manager" (i.e. teachers). Reverse proxies, guessing passwords, mapping networks, bypassing routers, etc. I wasn't even wanting to do anything bad, I just didn't like the complete lack of autonomy and self-determination. They never had a clue. Don't underestimate children. They have time and a very different set of priorities.
Of course, I never needed any of those techniques at home. My parents made it clear they trusted me and that I'd have their help if I found myself in a bad situation online. I learned self-policing early. Very handy skill.
If that poster blocks vpns, they probably know how to install a root CA and block any non-intercepted traffic (and then apply content filtering), as well as disable USB boot and set a BIOS password. Sure a sufficiently technical kid could defeat that (do motherboards still have BIOS reset jumpers?), but most kids aren't going to be that technical, and even if they were, any kind of video would be (immediately, at a visual glance) obvious in traffic monitoring software.
So at least at home, it's pretty easy to win the cat and mouse game as a technical person if you wanted to. At places like schools, the IT guy probably doesn't really care so is easy to "defeat" (mine knew we played cracked copies of counterstrike and starcraft off the network drive and never did anything about it).
I am genuinely interrested in what makes you have this draconian policy? are all doors and windows locked aswell? are you with her 24/7? is there no way she would be able to leave the premises even if she wanted to?
I accept that you have a right to parent any way you want, but I cannot possibly see how this benefits anyone, least of all your kids
Parents don’t and shouldn’t have the right to parent anyway they want. Most parents are okay, but there’s a non zero number of really fucked up parents.
Parents should have classes, and resources to help them be good parents. And bad parents should be at best made aware, and at worst ridiculed for their bad parenting decisions.
There are still a sizable number of American parents that think spanking their kids is okay. This is something that most of the modern world has completely moved away from and criminalized. So yeah, not everything should be ok.
It's comcerning that you believe you have the authority to tell a parent how to parent *their* child. The parent can weigh the risks to their child. Let's just leave it at that.
If a parent says I spank my kid, are you still gonna side with the parent?
How about if the parent says “in my culture the dad is the first sexual partner of the daughter”? How about then? (And yes. This is a real thing)
So no if a parent says oh my kid can’t be lesbian or gay or whatever, they’re just wrong and should be called out. The same way we call out for physical violence, we should call out for mental violence.
> The same way we call out for physical violence, we should call out for mental violence.
The problem with this is there is even less agreement on mental violence then on physical. There are a lot of people who believe a reasonably explicit sex-ed curriculum is mental violence against children.
I'm going to say confidently that a parent trying to use technology to block their child from knowing what being gay is or talking about it is doing wrong. A child isn't property and has human rights that I demand be respected, one of them is awareness and freedom to discuss such things.
And that child is not a ward of the state. Parenting has scope. Socially and legally. If you don't want anyone over-extending in to your life, beliefs, etc. then that - like it or not - is a two way street.
So you'll respect the child while disrespecting the parent? But don't recognize the hypocrisy. You're on the slippery slope. Be careful. Be very very careful. The fall can be painful.
I didn’t mention anything about the state. There is no hypocrisy. It has nothing to do with respecting one or the other. There are certain human rights which are wrong to violate no matter who does it or to whom. Basic knowledge of and discussion of human sexuality is one of those rights.
The state should be involved in regulating very powerful tools that allow someone to dig in and shape the communication and information available to others. “Big brother” needs to be stopped whether it is a nation or an overbearing parent.
Links to those rights pleases. Links to the laws (in the USA) that say parents forfeit their rights to those. Either way, that child is not entitled to an unfiltered internet, especially when the parents might suffer legal jeopardy if that became public knowledge.
You're taking these children out of context, putting them on an island, and then too strongly suggesting you know better than their parents. Links to that precedent please.
Parents have no right. Kids do. And you're the arbitrator? Yes, sorry, there's plenty of hypocrisy in that scenario.
Parents are not owners of their children and as such have no right to deprive them of basic knowledge about their bodies and identities.
Sure, there's a slippery slope -- in the direction of authoritarian parental control, which results in parents imprisoning their children within a controlling and insular community to keep them indoctrinated and obedient -- all for the sake of "protecting" them from viewpoints that might one day cause them to think for themselves.
No they're not. Theories aside. Parents *do* have legal rights and responsiblities. Unless, the parent(s) drop that ball, their decisions have priority.
That's how the society works.
All this backseat patenting is not a good look. Unless a legal line is crossed, you do not and cannot know what is best for someone else's child. If you believe otherwise, you ironically probably aren't fit to parent.
This is how liberty and freedom works currently, at least in the USA.
While parents have legal obligations to their children, they have no moral right to control them independently of ensuring basic safety and order. Laws can't define right and wrong, and it is most definitely wrong for a parent to purposefully deprive their children of education and exposure to the world solely for the benefit and protection of that parent's own ego.
Children are, and have always been, raised in a society. They are not your personal slaves to lock in a closet and isolate from the world.
Our social contract protects the rights of individuals. You can't claim to be in favor of liberty while denying it to someone else.
Parents absolutely have a right to withhold information from a child until it's appropriate. Would you teach a 3 year old about the safest methods of heroin injection and not to share needles? It's about their body.
You're approaching a very nuanced subject with a very black and white view. Parenting is hard, and marred by our own experiences. In addition, every kid is different in maturity, emotional intelligence, ways of processing information, etc. The person who knows them best and who is trying to do the best they can for them probably has a better idea than you do here.
Do you think kids should learn about Asians from strangers online and not their own parents?
There are certainly parents right now who feel like strangers shouldn't be teaching kids about Black history and are trying to remove such education from curricula.
How much needs to be censored because some identities were politicized by people who don't like them?
If my daughter is a lesbian, the last thing I want is her searching “what is it like to be a lesbian” and learning that being a lesbian means appearing in pornographic movies to appease men’s sexual appetites.
Every result for "what is it like to be a lesbian"[1] is educational and the first results are geared towards youth from professional educators[2][3][4], and none of them are pornographic or relating to men's sexual appetites.
Yea! But the stupid school requires GSuite, which means I have to allow the whole Google ecosystem. It’s possible to view images and web pages from the Google domain.
Also really bad stuff appears in Kids YouTube. It gets taken down fast, but that doesn’t seem to stop it.
> By default, the Internet is rated X. That's just a fact. Mainstream platforms pull any material that's explicitly pornographic, but there is a delay, and children will be exposerd to adult content.
This is a gross exaggeration.
> LGBTQ stands for "Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, and Queer" - which are both legitimate sexual identities and genres of pornography.
The "LGBTQ = sexualized content" dog whistle is so tiresome.
> We don't let any stranger just come on to the playground and chat with kids.
The vast majority of children are in danger from family members and friends of the family. "Stranger danger" by and large isn't a thing.
I’m not worried about nudity. Nudity gets flagged fast.
I’m worried about toxic content: there’s really, really toxic stuff on children’s social media.
Stuff telling kids they’re stupid if they don’t get straight As, they’re ugly if they don’t look like super models, and will die of starvation if they don’t get into a FAANG.
Every type of toxicity you find on adult social media exists on children’s social media.
> Your kid can see whatever they want at most public libraries. Most libraries don’t censor internet connections.
Don't worry, the "think of the children" line of rhetoric has already invaded library systems, and books are getting banned and libraries are shutting down[1][2][3][4][5].
If (by your example) "transgender" is a genre of pornography and is therefore worthy of censure, do you similarly claim that other identities often featured in adult entertainment (i.e. Italians, lumberjacks, nurses, etc) need to be filtered out unless some software can confidently determine context?
Don’t forget the infamous family genres. Can’t google “mom” anymore. That’s a porn category. In fact, we might want to start spying on their texts to make sure they aren’t using words like that there either. Your kid might be into incest porn.
Or, going by some of the top categories on PH: Asian, babysitter, blonde, Brazilian, cartoon, celebrity, cosplay, feet, German, Japanese, vintage, webcam, etc.
So what is up with our culture that regularly being exposed to violence, fucked up police, men trying to make decisions for the bodies of women is okay - but knowing that sex is a thing that exists and people have sex is bad?
Literally have these parents been teens before? Did y’all have a puritan upbringing where you didn’t learn about sex or watch porn until 18? If you did, do you consider yourself a healthy adult with a reasonable relationship with sex?
> If the software is confident it can distinguish between the very different meanings of "lesbian" vis-a-vis content, then great. But I don't believe that for a second.
157 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadThe nonsense that comes out of kids mouths on these discord chats when they are gaming - both written and spoken - is just... childish.
They use words and phrases they don't understand, they push the boundaries and get carried away. Like kids are supposed to.
But out of context these things could easily be used to 'cancel' them when these kids are older.
I don’t quite see why dragnet surveillance and exposing queer kids to additional risk and abuse can’t be bad at the same time.
My kids' school gave every student a Chromebook upon return to in-person school, and the result thus far has been massive amounts of distraction as half the class winds up on YouTube or something instead of getting work done. I wish they'd ditch them entirely, but the school went all-in on Teams.
Worse, I can't put my own parental controls on it. Any devices of ours our kids use have strict ScreenTime limitations on hours of use, total amount of use in a day, which programs can be used at all, which sites can be reached—meanwhile, the school devices have few restrictions and they can reach all kind of garbage sites on them, and I can't tighten that down.
I did try that already with Google's router (we have Fiber) but of course it doesn't have mac-level blocking. I could swear it used to, but if it did, it doesn't now.
Not that it makes it any better, it actually makes it worse because it illustrates the lengths they're going to invade kids' privacy and mine their data.
If they catch us with a mobile phone on the trading floor, it's reported to compliance.
Why are school allowing kids to have youtube during class, they could at least firewall it like companies do.
(for the record, I'd rather they just ditch the tech entirely until at least high school, but if they're gonna have it, they probably ought to have YouTube access or else it's far less useful. I'm also not sure why schools started letting kids carry phones to class, what a fucking terrible idea)
If you own the device you could of course install the required root certificates to interfere with HTTPS traffic, but arguably that's more intrusive, and a massive security hole if you make a mistake (like Lenovo did, for example).
That does explain who the target audience for Chromebooks is though. Most tech illiterate adults seem to prefer Windows or Mac for their own machine, in my experience.
Administrators lose their jobs and may get personally sued. Teachers may get sued. The district may get sued.
Neither approach will make everyone happy, but erring on the side of too much surveillance carries a much lower likelihood of ending administrators' careers or bankrupting a school district, than too little. Of course they do the thing that we, collectively, strongly encourage them to do. It's not "entitlement", it's a rational response to insane expectations.
> With the moral pedestal society places school administrators and faculty on, the problem is even worse there.
I assure you, teachers, at least, perceive no such pedestal. Quite the opposite.
I was listening to a 90s era George Carlin show on a long car ride recently and during a bit about the nation's budding obsession with child safety, he said something I found kinda poignant in the context of the ongoing youth mental health crisis (n.b. predates the pandemic by a lot): "we've sucked all the fun out of being a kid just to save a few thousand lives." Amid all the discussions of the apparent relationship between helicopter parents and neurotic, depressed kids, I think it's pretty reasonable to consider whether the sum total of "dangerous fun" deaths/ruined lives - lawn darts, pellet guns, fireworks, pedo van, tall swingsets, etc - exceeds the harm inflicted by that bubble-wrap outlook on life. I'd argue probably not.
While reading tfa, I had the same thought regarding the company's claim of suicides prevented. Even if you take it at face value (which I don't; like, come on, there's no way they've demonstrated that with any degree of rigor), is the tradeoff worthwhile? I'd argue probably not, but don't know how to do that in a way that wouldn't get me called a monster at a school board meeting.
Reduced influence of the church + much better medical understanding and vaccination for a lot of the infant killers as well as increased affluence has caused people to start having children later which already cuts off a whole chunk of offspring and fewer.
Some simple changes just off the top of my head:
- the students have a way of reporting, e.g., bullying. And it is only the information (messages and names) related to the report that the school now gets accessed to.
- the school then acts on the information provided to them.
It’s not reasonable for parents or others to expect the school to stop anything hateful from ever happening. But it is reasonable to expect them to do something about it after it’s been brought to their attention.
"But they'll just do this on other forms of chat that the school can't monitor!" Yes, they will, but the school won't face multimillion dollar lawsuits over that.
I also imagine that one lawsuit like this will set a precedent, and then there will either be multi-million dollar settlements, or people will decide that children should not be placed in a panopticon.
But either way, this counter argument is based on the implicit assumption that the school should be providing an “official” system through which the students should talk to each other. Get rid of that, and problem solved. Have an official channel for parent-student, parent-teacher. And let the students talk amongst themselves the way they wish.
Does that ever work? What's the school going to do, launch an investigation and put kids into interrogations to figure out if it's true? Send in undercover students to confirm the bullying? And then what, expel the bullies and deal with lawsuits from the parents? Schools have every incentive to look the other way, and unsurprisingly, they usually do.
And for students there's zero incentive to even report it. It's like living next to a known criminal and the police saying "tell us if you ever see something strange". Nobody is going to, because they understand that it's just lip service and the police isn't going to do anything, but they'll still have to live next to the criminal when he finds out someone has spoken to the police.
Explaining to students that if they bully someone, they're increasing the likelihood of that person one day bringing a pump gun to school and murdering them is a much better deterrent than any "you can report it and we totally will take that seriously and do something" campaign.
Please please tell me you don’t work with kids or ever open your mouth anywhere near kids. The unintended consequences of your “advice” are beyond horrific.
The GP comment suggests that:
1. As an effective deterrent to bullying
We explain
2. To students
That
3. “if they bully someone, they're increasing the likelihood of that person one day bringing a pump gun to school and murdering them”
And they seem to have overlooked quite a few concepts in putting forward this proposal.
For example —
The alleged perpetrators of any such pump shotgun massacre would be amongst the audience of people receiving this message.
And
The audience are students, not professors of logic or Bayesian mathematicians or any other category of audience.
And more. Good night.
I don’t really understand where you’ve coming from. Either the school is supposed to act on information it receives to stop anti-social behaviour, or it’s not.
I certainly don’t believe that the school should do nothing, and I believe that most people agree with me.
If they are supposed to do something, then I don’t have a specific course of action since it’ll be situational. But I do know, that the correct response is not “do nothing”.
> there’s zero incentive for students to even report it.
That’s only because the school isn’t doing anything to address what complains they do get.
It's not about what it should do, it's about what it's going to do. The way the system is set up, they won't do anything unless something drastic happens (extreme violence) or they get press coverage for it. And then they'll set up some program to teach kids not to bully. Naturally, kids bully because they haven't been told not to.
None of this surveillance does anything useful. They are just looking for offenses they can apply their zero-tolerance policies to.
Hence my second point which I’ll restate as “actually do something about what the incidence that you already know about”.
The high school two of my sons go to has all kinds of crap that they have install on their mandatory smartphone. If you don't do it then so sorry, no school for you. Which is pretty weird because the law here says that children should be given an education, it doesn't specify anything about the mandatory use of all kinds of tech for which perfectly good paper equivalents exist.
All I see as the end result of this is utter unaccountability, zero effect on the things it supposedly is for and finally if the tools are used at all it is to the schools advantage (and the pupils and parents' disadvantage), such as ad-hoc reschedulings. I'd love for my kids to have paper agendas and just their books for high school, this phone+laptop combo just adds to the weight they already have to lug around (which is insanse, if my travel bag were that heavy I'd never travel), is super fragile, expensive and best of all forcefully ties them into the Microsoft applications + eco system, something they really can do without.
Eg they were bullying or bullied and complaints about the bullying were raised but were not dealt with. Preemptive monitoring not required.
Or we find “concerns were raised” about behaviour, often many times, over many years, and the concerns were ignored.
Anyone translating such things into a need for more pervasive monitoring is just pushing their own agenda.
Where is that?
Surveillance aside, teachers where I'm at are overworked and powerless. When I was a kid in Europe, teachers were gods. Woe be to child whose teachers say is misbehaving or being lazy or not paying attention. 35 years later and in Canada, teachers are... Beat,really. Angry entitled parents and angry entitled public and rules and policies and complete lack of any freedom to make a difference.
I do not see North America placing teachers on moral pedestal.
Sometimes I get the impression that college administers think they're running the world's fanciest high school.
Yes, college students are adults and are entitled to all of the privacy protection of adults. I don't consider children to have the same right to privacy—although here too it depends on the age, high school is very different from elementary school.
yep. I'm used to these exposés being for college programs but most of the drama has shifted to highschool and middle school these days. I don't know if that's progress or companies finding softer targets to sell their software to.
One sizable group wants them to do Z, until Y happens, then gets bent out of shape that they weren't doing X.
And so on, and etc, because people are just emoting and parroting their script.
What is the problem that one wants to solve? What are the guiding principles determining that it is a problem, that it needs a solution, and which are used to evaluate the potential solutions?
That? That's too much work, and it's hard.
So we fall into primate screeching because we haven't, actually, bothered to think.
Yes, and LMS such as Canvas
Which words were you previously supposed to use for these cases?
[EDIT] And, presumably, teachers would ignore the flagging if you'd used the words in, say, a school assignment, for a good reason.
[EDIT2] I'm not complaining about the downvotes, but, could someone please explain WTF? I truly have no clue.
You made a post in a culture war thread. You could post the most benign thing ever and people will find a way to be upset by it.
Another band aid tech solution to a social problem
Is this not malware by any definition? Protect the children, prosecute these fuckwits.
Scrap that.
The real question is why those surveillance tools are acceptable in our society and in addition: why aren't the makers aren't in jail yet.
I presume in the age of smartphones, the average teenager probably knows more than I do about minority sexual identities and practices.
If I became a 14 year old tomorrow I'd probably find it so shocking and foreign.
I wouldn't necessarily call it shocking or foreign, but more like a highly specific subculture, which in some ways it is, but it has, because of its very nature, the potential to become the dominate culture or evolve into the dominate culture with time. I suppose this is where the "stranger in their own land" phrase lies, and with it "adapt or die."
Seeing what's in our public schools today is a comedy of cringe and highly manufactured, on par with the 60s hippie culture.
It's truly a shame.
The existence of tools and companies like this is pitiful, corrosive to our democracy and clear evidence that education, governance and society has generally lost its way.
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/eliminating-harm...
[2] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/we-cant-teach-...
The overuse and inappropriate use of physical access systems has turned many public places like schools and hospitals into high security prisons.
Sadly that's just one technology in a growing list aggressively pushed onto institutions through a cocktail of fear-mongering, insane regulation, cost-cutting efficiency (getting rid of actual guards and supervisors) - all part of the ever expanding security-industrial racket.
In my opinion, a very important talk is given by Eve Ensler on "the right to be insecure" [1]. The only other hacker I've seen pick up on her refreshing stance is Bruce Schneier.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/eve_ensler_what_security_means_to_...
"Though Gaggle’s software is generally limited to monitoring school-issued accounts, including those by Google and Microsoft, the company recently acknowledged it can scan through photos on students’ personal cell phones if they plug them into district laptops."
This is straight up insane. If I had kids I wouldn't even send them to a school that acts like this. Maybe it's because I'm German or something but that sounds out of the Stasi era.
This appears to be what happened. Google and microsoft figured out how to exploit children for money by forcing them to use their shitty products in place of actual classroom education. I agree with you, I wouldn't want my school in a computer centric education, let-alone a heavily monitored one. It sounds like what you'd expect in a juvenile prison
You might have to move if you want to escape this, and you'll never really know if/when a school or district implements these surveillance programs, either.
> Maybe it's because I'm German or something but that sounds out of the Stasi era.
That's because it is. The Stasi/KGB/etc couldn't have dreamed of the capabilities authorities have today to surveil everyone at a massive scale to find even the smallest of their infractions.
Although there are a lot of cases where things like this, or exactly this, have happened, many of them are recent.
follow up https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1807843 School District Agrees to Pay $600K For Using School Laptops to Spy on Students
In the fist article you linked, one of the comments that hit me the most was by m3dFlatLander about a documentary about a similar event:
> To be fair to the school shown in that particular documentary, they weren't looking at the students through a webcam. It looks like they're using a remote desktop program to look at the students desktop. He explained that many students use the webcam program as a mirror to look at themselves or just mess around.
Link to the parent comment for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1134224
By default, the Internet is rated X. That's just a fact. Mainstream platforms pull any material that's explicitly pornographic, but there is a delay, and children will be exposerd to adult content.
LGBTQ stands for "Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, and Queer" - which are both legitimate sexual identities and genres of pornography. If the software is confident it can distinguish between the very different meanings of "lesbian" vis-a-vis content, then great. But I don't believe that for a second.
I have a child who is regularly exposed to terrible things online. It's like playing whack-a-mole. Schools are one of the big chinks in the armor. I can't control what she's exposed to there.
If I couldn't afford private school, I couldn't even chose what school she went to. I'd be stuck with whatever policies the local public school has.
We don't let any stranger just come on to the playground and chat with kids.
Anything else will lead to problems in later life (overconsumption of porn for example).
It might be as simple as connecting to the neighbor's open WiFi, the local McDonalds public WiFi, or their best friend's mobile data plan or their unrestricted home WiFi.
There are HTTP proxies operating via port 80/443, full with an app just like a VPN. I've seen a 10 year old kid use a free SSH shell account (via port 80) to proxy their traffic. There was another kid who just used a public cloud provider's free tier and had a full desktop environment running there, accessed via some web VNC interface - that one was 12 y/o though.
Regardless, you're just putting off the inevitable - and then it will be like a whole new overwhelmingly fascinating world has just opened, which is not great for a young mind not yet fully capable of moderation because you didn't allow them to practice it.
> I also don’t give my daughter admin access
Kids can boot Linux from USB too.
I also place restrictions on types of media. For example, she loves listening to techno-pop music, but that’s not allowed a less than an hour before bedtime. So there’s a de facto “no music an hour before bed rule.”
Kids YouTube is treated like a very low quality tv service. She gets a certain amount of “video time” but I allow more time if she uses an established steaming service (Netflix, etc).
She’s allowed to see content creates adults pretty freely. She can also talk to her friends pretty freely.
I am very restrictive when it comes to communicating with unknown “children” online. Kids social media platforms attract predators. Some predators are grownups, some are toxic other kids.
Ik actually much more worried about “child” content than “adult” content.
Filtering only works on domains. But most content these days in on a handful of forums (FB, etc).
I require her to preserve her browsing history. I review it if I feel there’s a reason to (she’s not good at being sneaky),
We don’t talk about the content, because she mostly just listens to techo-pop and plays browser games.
If it seems she’s hanging out in a toxic forum, I’ll discuss it with her, but also be firm about blocking it.
Understand, I’m most worried about making sure my daughter gets her homework done, does some reading, and gets a good night sleep. The internets main threat is as a distraction from that.
But she just wants to watch anime and listen to techno pop.
She understand iPhone, iPads, and streaming.
We’ve talked about this, and doesn’t like listening to music unless there’s an AI choosing the next track.
It’s actually kind of terrifying.
Of course, I never needed any of those techniques at home. My parents made it clear they trusted me and that I'd have their help if I found myself in a bad situation online. I learned self-policing early. Very handy skill.
So at least at home, it's pretty easy to win the cat and mouse game as a technical person if you wanted to. At places like schools, the IT guy probably doesn't really care so is easy to "defeat" (mine knew we played cracked copies of counterstrike and starcraft off the network drive and never did anything about it).
She just doesn’t care enough :(
Kids have their own interests.
She’d rather draw and paint than figure out a way for to reset BIOS.
Edit: All she’d have to do is spoof the MAC address.
I accept that you have a right to parent any way you want, but I cannot possibly see how this benefits anyone, least of all your kids
Parents should have classes, and resources to help them be good parents. And bad parents should be at best made aware, and at worst ridiculed for their bad parenting decisions.
There are still a sizable number of American parents that think spanking their kids is okay. This is something that most of the modern world has completely moved away from and criminalized. So yeah, not everything should be ok.
I filter at the router level because that’s the most effective way to filter. I think that’s a best practice.
I deny her root access because she has and would install anything the Internet asks her to install. She’s a kid!
Where do you think I’m crossing a line?
It's concerning that you only think "what if my child sees lesbian porn" and not "what if my child is blocked from learning about their own identity".
How about if the parent says “in my culture the dad is the first sexual partner of the daughter”? How about then? (And yes. This is a real thing)
So no if a parent says oh my kid can’t be lesbian or gay or whatever, they’re just wrong and should be called out. The same way we call out for physical violence, we should call out for mental violence.
Either way I'm not interested in your pro-authoritarian beliefs.
The problem with this is there is even less agreement on mental violence then on physical. There are a lot of people who believe a reasonably explicit sex-ed curriculum is mental violence against children.
So you'll respect the child while disrespecting the parent? But don't recognize the hypocrisy. You're on the slippery slope. Be careful. Be very very careful. The fall can be painful.
The state should be involved in regulating very powerful tools that allow someone to dig in and shape the communication and information available to others. “Big brother” needs to be stopped whether it is a nation or an overbearing parent.
You're taking these children out of context, putting them on an island, and then too strongly suggesting you know better than their parents. Links to that precedent please.
Parents have no right. Kids do. And you're the arbitrator? Yes, sorry, there's plenty of hypocrisy in that scenario.
Sure, there's a slippery slope -- in the direction of authoritarian parental control, which results in parents imprisoning their children within a controlling and insular community to keep them indoctrinated and obedient -- all for the sake of "protecting" them from viewpoints that might one day cause them to think for themselves.
That's how the society works.
All this backseat patenting is not a good look. Unless a legal line is crossed, you do not and cannot know what is best for someone else's child. If you believe otherwise, you ironically probably aren't fit to parent.
This is how liberty and freedom works currently, at least in the USA.
Children are, and have always been, raised in a society. They are not your personal slaves to lock in a closet and isolate from the world.
Our social contract protects the rights of individuals. You can't claim to be in favor of liberty while denying it to someone else.
You're approaching a very nuanced subject with a very black and white view. Parenting is hard, and marred by our own experiences. In addition, every kid is different in maturity, emotional intelligence, ways of processing information, etc. The person who knows them best and who is trying to do the best they can for them probably has a better idea than you do here.
There are certainly parents right now who feel like strangers shouldn't be teaching kids about Black history and are trying to remove such education from curricula.
How much needs to be censored because some identities were politicized by people who don't like them?
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+it+like+to+be+a+lesb...
[2] https://advocatesforyouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/ITI...
[3] https://portal.ct.gov/-/media/dcf/SHP/Brochures/I_THINK_I_MI...
[4] https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/les...
But relying a search engine to filter inappropriate content isn’t very wise.
Also really bad stuff appears in Kids YouTube. It gets taken down fast, but that doesn’t seem to stop it.
Google takes it down, but it pops back up.
This is a gross exaggeration.
> LGBTQ stands for "Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, and Queer" - which are both legitimate sexual identities and genres of pornography.
The "LGBTQ = sexualized content" dog whistle is so tiresome.
> We don't let any stranger just come on to the playground and chat with kids.
The vast majority of children are in danger from family members and friends of the family. "Stranger danger" by and large isn't a thing.
Your kid can see whatever they want at most public libraries. Most libraries don’t censor internet connections.
Constant surveillance and a lack of trust by authority figures is something far more concerning and damaging than seeing a naked person.
I’m worried about toxic content: there’s really, really toxic stuff on children’s social media.
Stuff telling kids they’re stupid if they don’t get straight As, they’re ugly if they don’t look like super models, and will die of starvation if they don’t get into a FAANG.
Every type of toxicity you find on adult social media exists on children’s social media.
That’s what worried me.
Don't worry, the "think of the children" line of rhetoric has already invaded library systems, and books are getting banned and libraries are shutting down[1][2][3][4][5].
[1] https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2023-01-27/school-lib...
[2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/11/10/lgbtq-...
[3] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/north-dakota-considering-ba...
[4] https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor...
[5] https://time.com/6211350/public-libraries-book-bans/
I feel like there is way, way worse stuff on the internet than at any public library I've been in. Is this not the case?
Literally have these parents been teens before? Did y’all have a puritan upbringing where you didn’t learn about sex or watch porn until 18? If you did, do you consider yourself a healthy adult with a reasonable relationship with sex?
Othering of LGBTQIA+ people does real harm, to which you seem to be either ignorant or indifferent.
Are you dogfooding the software?
If not this is all just rank speculation.
One of my kids' first exposure to hardcore pornography was in second grade on the personal iPhone of an older kid.