alt Hacker News- 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.
Hm, you're right, I'd agree that access can be more controlled and filtered today than before. But how many websites/parents/devices actually enforce it?
And also, what I was trying to get at is that the total amount of (addictive) content on the Internet and the amount of time people, including kids, spend on the Internet has exploded. Sure, millennials could do whatever online, but there just wasn't that much to do and you would still spend the bulk of your day offline. Now we can (and do) spend basically all day on the Internet. Seeing something bad once is whatever, but seeing it constantly... IDK