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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

What is the ideal tool for managing children’s access to the internet?

I always wondered whether local logging is an option. Everything little Johnny does in his iPhone gets recorded and sent to dad’s MacBook Pro for processing every night. A local process looks for anomalous content while also producing a report of all sites visited and apps used. Taking a screenshot every 5s is going to be ~1GB per day but maybe Johnny doesn’t get to use his phone until yesterday’s log has been processed?

Perversely, to configure such a system you would have to actively prove you were doing so for a minor. You wouldn’t want to enable adults monitoring other adults.

If I worked at Apple this is something I would actively want to build, if it wasn’t there already. Anything to undercut these thin-end-of-the-wedge big brother bills and take the wind out of the “think of the children!” content authoritarians.

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> Everything little Johnny does in his iPhone gets recorded and sent to dad’s MacBook Pro for processing every night. A local process looks for anomalous content while also producing a report of all sites visited and apps used. Taking a screenshot every 5s is going to be ~1GB per day but maybe Johnny doesn’t get to use his phone until yesterday’s log has been processed?

I am no longer a minor but thinking back to the time that I was I would consider this to be a pretty big intrusion into my privacy. YMMV with your children.

"What is the ideal tool for managing children’s access to the internet?"

A parent.

Coincidentally also a good tool for managing the access to the meat space.

Not quite. If the parent manages a child’s access to the internet, then they are quite smart about their approach. That makes them no longer a tool.

Right, but this is what I’m asking. How do I, as a parent, use technology to better supervise my child when I can’t possibly monitor their screen constantly in person?

Tech can help us find a middle ground between in my day we let them run free in the yard and now my child am become zombie screen addict, destroyer of childhoods.

The solution to keeping your children away from harm, is the same as it ever was: communication, understanding, trust and respect.

Kids are resilient. You wouldn't know that if you sit them in the corner with a digital device to babysit. But you will definitely be a better parent if you engage with your kids in their online life, and spend the time to communicate with them about whats going on out there.

Also, keep the Internet out of focus until they get close to the double-digits. Books and real family activities are best.

There is no such tool that is a replacement for parenting. There’s nothing you can do but keep a watchful eye on what your children consume and discuss the dangers of the Internet with them proactively.

Long-term, I expect identity-tracking legislation ("big brother bills") are unavoidable.

It's cheaper to generate fake content than real content. Arguably it's already cheaper to generate fake content than to read real content. At which point, the information battle gets very asymmetric. It becomes very cheap for an authoritarian regime to flood an open regime's electorate with fake content, but the authoritarian regime doesn't face the same problem.

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