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Florida’s next tech target in court: Discord
(www.politico.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Ya my kid is 16 now and the total lack of any real unified parental controls has been extremely disappointing through the years.
For the longest time my kid was on android phones (because I'm on Android phones) which had family link which did "ok" but not enough control, YouTube for example was too restrictive based on age and I couldn't adjust it.
Windows PC had family safety which also had various random controls but they really only worked for straight up Ms products (so edge was installed) and locked down installing other browsers
Neither of these are great and they require someone to dig through, setup, and ADMINISTER these things
I added pihole into the mix because I'm me and was able to. Trying to further filter my kids' access to things I didn't want them to stumble onto.
Now enter roblox which in reality I should have just said no and not them on it. But that did IMHO lead to discord which much like Roblox if you have "Discord" the door is now open to adult content.
Discord, unless I hover over and block servers (at domain) or through hovering, discord was another gateway to adult content.
No unified way to protect kids and these tech companies didn't help
"Adult content" just means anything not appropriate for an 8yo politics, war, porn whatever...
All these gateway applications companies should be responsible for those lack of containment restrictions for kids, or tying into something unified would have been even better.
A true nightmare managing all that!
There will never be unified controls. It is impossible from a technical perspective. Kids are using live comments in Office to chat. Kids use Chinese VPN apps. Unified controls and ID laws only serve to immediately identify children and make them targets. Also big tech knows advertising is more lucrative than any other group. Your just feeding your kids to the capitalism meat grinder and making them targets for wrong doers.
Ya, there's no easy fix and I'm not an expert but it seems most of my kids friends (parents) version of parental controls on their devices was "Good luck, we're all counting on you"
It needs to be easier for the average parent l. I bet if you put a hard roadblock in front of Google, Apple, Microsoft regarding not being able to release an app, an os unless it met some formalized level of parental controls and they'd figure it out pretty quick.