Lack of something like SSO and centrally-managed permissions for families is a huge pain in the ass.

Minecraft is notably insane due to this. I don’t know how normies get their kids playing online with it (ours is locked down to just-with-friends, and we gatekeep the friend list), I thought it was hard as a techie. Cross-platform play (outside of X-Box, I suppose) requires creating and carefully-massaging permissions on two overlapping but unrelated systems, both the account on the console itself and a Microsoft account (and their UI for managing this is, in modern Microsoft fashion, entirely nutty). Then, if anything goes wrong, the error messages are careful never to tell you which account’s settings blocked an action, so you get to guess. Fun!

(Getting “classic” Java Minecraft working, just with a local server, was even harder)

Your options are to go all-in on one or two ecosystems; to take on just a fuckload of work getting it all set up nicely and maintaining that with a half-dozen accounts per kid or whatever; or to give up.

Then schools send chromebooks home with less-restrictive settings than I’d use if I were managing it and no way for me to tighten those, and a kid stays up all night playing shovelware free Web games before we realize we need to account for those devices before bed time. Thanks for the extra work, assholes.

sso for the family :mindblown:. Tie this in with a real ID validation tool, and then integrating systems only know "is/is not allowed" and the parents can mind all the kid's stuff.

Why not just take away their phone?

iPhones have excellent parental controls (by the abysmal standards of consumer software more broadly). You can just not allow insta and such, or set time limits on them per-day (30 minutes, say). I assume Android has something similar. You can set the Web to allowlist-only. Kids can send requests to bypass limits, sends the request right to your own Apple devices, easy to yay or nay it. It’s damn good.

Phones are among the easiest devices to manage.

Found out last year that simply deleting an app and reinstalling it will reset time limits.

App deletion and installation were among the first things I disabled :-)

> iPhones have excellent parental controls

If those work, sure, although kids tend to be pretty clever about getting around parental controls and are sometimes quite a bit more technically sophisticated than their parents.

It ain’t the ‘90s and this ain’t Windows 95 with bypassable-by-accident OS account logins and half-assed website blocking made by the lowest bidder. Getting past app installation restrictions and time limits on iOS would be… challenging.

It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.

(And on some platforms it is, for practical purposes, impossible—looking at you, Linux, not just because it’s a powerful open platform but because its permissions and capabilities system is decades behind the state-of-the-art and tools for sensibly managing any of that on a scale smaller than “fleet of servers” and in the context of user-session applications are nonexistent)

> To that extent can't kids just pop in a live USB and get a totally ephemeral and open os?

That's a lot more difficult if you leave secureboot enabled on the computer. Plus, most devices, especially newer ones, allow you to pin your own certificates and sometimes even disable the OEM certs.

That, in addition with locking the BIOS with a password (and if the device does not have known OEM override passwords like on bios-pw.org), should be more than enough to keep a kid out.

> It sucks as a parent because you get this from both ends: “parent better! (Putting in tons of work that our parents didn’t have to)” and also “lol what are you doing restricting kids on computers is impossible, give up you idiot”.

I didn't claim that it's impossible, merely that it's difficult sometimes, as you also implied ("putting in tons of work"). The advantage of physically consfiscating phones is that it's a low tech, brute force method available even to the least technically sophisticated parents.

heh...see my comment above about bypassing screen time limits on ios by simply deleting and reinstalling the app.

I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives.

My son's cross country team communicates via GroupMe and it's very difficult for him to stay up-to-date with the web version from a laptop. My daughter's friend group communicates via snapchat.

This doesn't mean parents have to allow everything. My daughter doesn't have Snapchat, for example. But there are definite tradeoffs like her being left out of many conversations and slowly getting excluded from friend groups as a result.

It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.

> I'm not sure if you're asking as a parent or an observer of parents. But it's not such a clear option given how entrenched we've made devices into children's lives.

It doesn't have to be a 24 hour a day ban. A kid could be limited to an hour a day or phone use or something like that.

> It's too much unnecessary complexity added to parenting and the motivation being profit by mega corps is why I suggest regulation is a valid place to start looking.

The inevitable result would seem to be that all adults, parents or not, would be forced to present their identification online to use the internet. I think that's too much personal freedom to sacrifice, regardless of how noble the goal.