alt Hacker NewsI agree with the other commenter who replied to you. I don’t think this comes from actual parents. And the article suggests this latest push is from right-leaning groups whose goals are surveillance and censorship.
That said, I’m a father of 3. I’m a millennial and tech worker. I have the digital literacy to teach my kids about the internet and its horrors in a safe way. Not every parent does, so passing this off as a “parent better” issue doesn’t solve anything either.
I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”, but I’m open to similar ideas so parents can get some support without compromising on privacy.
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> I don’t think this comes from actual parents.
Why would you think that? Most of my friends are parents now and all of them are quite concerned about the effect of social media, phones, and technology more broadly.
Basically all of them are planning to delay exposing their kids to phones and screens for as long as possible.
We know what good UX is already from history. Movies for example have an age rating system that clearly lists the ages the movie is suitable for. If you look underage, you get asked to provide ID.
Parents do not have the time or energy to configure modern parental controls which work more like tuning firewall rules.
The other part of the problem is you need collective action, if you ban your child from Facebook, they won’t get invited to parties anymore. If all children get banned, the parties will be arranged over sms or some other non social media. As it is today, banning your kids from social media is overly punishing since all the other kids are using it.
> I don’t think this comes from actual parents.
The polling I have seen from Germany and Australia of a social media ban for children was quite in favor of it. Sentiment here on HN and on Reddit was the polar opposite. We are in a bubble.
> I dunno if you can legislate “better parental control ux”,
If we must have something, I’m in favor of the OS-level flag where a parent can set the device as belonging to a minor and the apps and browser can receive the flag. Lock it behind the most basic parental controls that can be protected and remotely monitored. There are some loopholes with kids downloading apps that allow custom web requests without the flag being sent, so there probably needs to be an app allowlist or special App Store category to match.
Carve out some legal exemptions for Linux distributions that no kids are using and leave it to the iOS, Android, Windows, and Macs of the world. Any parent who doesn’t like the idea doesn’t have to enable it on their kids’ devices.