this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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I know none of this is actually about protecting kids... But even if it was, their reasoning and methodology sucks.
So there may have been a problem at least 10 years ago. Does that problem still exist? (never mind the obvious "is the problem parents ignoring their kids on a tablet"...)
Okay, now let's address the parents being the problem. By default, Google's "Safe Search" is on, and the kid actively searched for porn. So no parental supervision of the 12 year old kid on the internet. Someone setup a google account, and changed the default settings to show those results. (oh, but that person is 25 now, so that was also 13 years ago...)
Almost all of the big websites have parental control settings that would alleviate the vast majority of these "problems" if parents actually used them. Parents being willfully ignorant isn't going to be resolved by legislation. They know that. This is all a smoke screen to put the entire population behind a firewall and control the narrative. It isn't even a very thick smoke screen.
Nope. Parental controls in general suck and are often bare bones just for a semblance of legal compliance. Parents don't have access to every device children have access to either
Either parents or the school... and if the school doesn't have a pretty significantly locked down network, that's a separate problem.
Also, you're right, I misspoke. While some of the bigger websites have decent-ish parental controls, I was more thinking of device specific parental controls. The amount you can lock-down (and monitor) a phone you give your 12 year old is pretty impressive. I'd rather parents did that than hand the monitoring, censoring, and access over to various government agencies all over the world.