alt Hacker News> who were more restricted than millenials
I don't think this is true? Generations seem to be getting Internet access at younger and younger ages and the Internet takes up more and more time in our lives with every passing year, and Phones Bad / Social Media Bad seems to be a pretty commonly accepted concept.
- No site asked me for credit card numbers at 14 to prove I was 18+.
- The person who operated our house's tech infrastructure was me, since my parents were too technically illiterate to do it. And it took operating in these days, rather than the relatively one stop wifi boxes of today.
- Parental filters, where they existed, could be defeated with a simple alternate DNS server.
- I was also just allowed be unsupervised in general for way longer than gen Z or alpha kids are allowed. My country hasn't quite gone to the same "a child in the wild, call CPS" levels as some parts of the US has, but certainly the average child now is more limited than they were in the 90s
So yes, gen alpha kids have phones. But unlike when I first got a laptop and could do basically anything on it, the phones these days are much more locked down, and by the OS manufacturers who actually try to plug holes as they're discovered.