It's not Apple's job to parent your kids, and "smart phone addiction" is an over-hyped fad scare. If someone is super concerned about their teen watching minecraft videos at 2am on vacation, they should take their kid's phone away at night. But also, they're on vacation, and it's not like they're watching porn, so is it even that bad?
This is a bit of an inflammatory comparison, but I stayed up reading with a flashlight a lot as a kid. Was that terrible for me? Should my flashlight have had a setting to limit the times I can use it? Would anyone say I had an unhealthy book addiction, and that publishers should do something about it?
You glossed over the most legit complaint raised in the article:
> They search for bugs that make it easy to keep using their phones, unbeknown to parents, like changing the time to trick the system, or using iMessage to watch YouTube videos.
“These are not rocket science, backdoor, dark web sort of hacks,” says Chris McKenna, founder of the Internet safety group Protect Young Eyes. “It blows me away that Apple hasn’t thought through the fact that a persistent middle school boy or girl can bang around and find them.”
And yeah, it’s not that Apple hasn’t thought about this or that fixing these kinds of bugs would take more than a day or few to fix.
The issue is Apple only implemented this feature to head off shareholder criticism, not because it believes it. Apple is not incentivized to make its products less addictive.
Smart phone addiction is absolutely real. My neck is sore everyday that I don't consciously make an effort to use my phone less. I hit my 1 hour limit on my reddit app by 9 or 10 every morning.
I do agree that it is absolutely not Apple's responsibility to do anything about this. People want to outsource their responsibility as parents and it's pathetic.
The minute we can find a book that replicates a Skinner box, you may be onto something. I agree that yes, just being on your phone isn't a terrible thing, but it's not really comparable to books just because of its ability to provide more effective, immediate, and addictive feedback.
>but I stayed up reading with a flashlight a lot as a kid. Was that terrible for me? Should my flashlight have had a setting to limit the times I can use it? Would anyone say I had an unhealthy book addiction, and that publishers should do something about it?
Did it mess with your cognitive abilities? Your self-esteem? Your self-image? Your limbic system, in general? No? Your dopamine receptors, then? Did it fill every minute of your waking life with escapism? Would anyone read while driving? Or during class, meals, family gatherings, dates, meetings, at the movies? You get the point.
I think the unhealthy potential of smartphones differs tremendously from that of books, just because of their inherent physical qualities and limitations.
It’s not Apple’s job to parent my kids, but it is Apple’s job to provide access control features (screen time) to admins (parents) that work and can’t be circumvented.
Imagine how silly I would sound if I said “It’s not Apple’s job to sysadmin your users” in response to priceless not working properly on user accounts.
So while parenting support, or whatever, isn’t that important to me, functioning audit and access controls really is.
In 10 years, we'll read HN comments of how someone started to code after outsmarting Screen Time on their device. These are the type of experiences that give you that thrill of what else could be possible by understanding how technology works.
Totally agree. Additionally, I think that breaking some rule is an essential part of growing up and learning. So it's just much better if the rules that a kid aims to break are of this kind and make her/him learn in the process.
Back in 2006 I cofounded a company called IMSafer. My co-founders went on to be S09 class with Y!Combinator.
We grew up as hackers and thought we could end around the problem of kids removing safe guards to our software. What we quickly found was that (surprising no one at all, least of all us) kids have way more time on their hands and are willing to expend way more energy to remove blockers than parents do to enforce them.
It's a tricky issue - kids and online. We actively encouraged parents to have dialog with their kids about what they were doing online. The issue we were attempting to solve was keeping bad people out of the child's social networks. All of the other solutions were, and still do, focus on keeping porn off the computer. That's a doomed system. Parents need to be involved and have a on-going dialog. I believed it when we founded IMSafer 13 years ago, and I believe it now (as a parent with 3 kids, two of them teenagers).
Our service did a lot of very novel things for the time (machine based analysis of chat conversations looking for patterns of predation), but I continue to be amazed at how much energy we put into the "but my kids keep uninstalling it" problem. We came up with some pretty good solutions, which were P95 effective, but (again, surprising no one on the technical team) the kids who figured out how to circumvent came up with some pretty amazing solves.
The most impressive was this one kid who basically took over their parent's account, gave themselves admin access, set their parents to minimal access, but then changed specific .exe file pointers to give the parents the perception that they still had admin access to their machine when they were trying to run applications.
"What we quickly found was that (surprising no one at all, least of all us) kids have way more time on their hands and are willing to expend way more energy to remove blockers than parents do to enforce them."
this this this.
limiting screen time isn't a technical issue, it's an economic issue - kids and parents have different levels of effort they're willing to expend to deal with these limits. Ultimately the kid needs to incentivized to conform to the limit set by the parent.
When I was young my parents installed a system-wide child filter for OS X called Safe Eyes that had tons of false positives (and more importantly, blocked online games). I didn't know much about computers but it drove me to learn how to install and configure Linux so that I could do what I wanted. Kids find a way.
My dad installed a menu launcher with password-locked parental controls for MS DOS. Within a week, I discovered that the configuration file (which I could open with word perfect), while mostly binary contained the passwords in plain text.
As an example of how not-sneaky I was as a kid, I immediately ran to my dad and showed him how I got the password.
My parents tried a similar thing on my system i had built in high school. I immediately reinstalled the os and secured root on all the networking hardware. We remained poised for mutually assured destruction until they dropped it.
Never underestimate the genius-level ability of children to get around restrictions imposed by parents, teachers, or anyone else.
Come to think of it, I have even played a video game about it, called "Mom hid my game!"
I salute their ingenuity as a triumph of the human spirit in its unstoppable quest for freedom, justice, and Minecraft for all. Though I suppose drug addicts are similarly clever...
It's just the hacker spirit. All kids have it, many people who muck about with computers a lot have it. Many people with little respect for "the system" have it too; that includes drug addicts, but also rednecks (redneck engineering) and so on.
Brings back memories of getting around various iterations of useless parental control software on the family computer back in the day. And even before that, picking the lock on the TV cabinet to get to the Nintendo.
School has wifi with content blocking, and many students BYOD. Teachers can override the content blocker on a one-time basis by typing in an override password on a student's device.
So a student puts a keylogger on his own device, navigates to a page that he should be allowed to access, but which the content blocker flags, and he gets the teacher to enter the override password. Thanks to the keylogger, now he has it too. Kids are sneaky!
”Think of this as a nap for your screen time. When you schedule downtime in Settings, only phone calls and apps that you choose to allow are available. Downtime applies to all of your Screen Time-enabled devices, and you get a reminder five minutes before it starts.”
I don’t think you can restrict what numbers can be called.
This is ultimately a futile effort. The only value in implementing content blockers or usage restrictions would be to encourage computer proficiency in circumventing and defeating them. You can't outwit a bored thirteen year-old over any appreciable time scale.
Sometimes I feel like the process of growing up, and in particular of becoming a parent, is a process of learning my parents were mostly right all along.
What’s peculiar about this is that parental restrictions itself on iOS has always been flawed, Apple knew about it, and it’s still an issue to this day. The sole purpose of parental restrictions on iPhone was to block adult websites... and that worked as well as you can imagine: https://www.jonbottarini.com/2017/03/09/bypassing-apples-ios...
[+] [-] chadlavi|6 years ago|reply
This is a bit of an inflammatory comparison, but I stayed up reading with a flashlight a lot as a kid. Was that terrible for me? Should my flashlight have had a setting to limit the times I can use it? Would anyone say I had an unhealthy book addiction, and that publishers should do something about it?
[+] [-] mindgam3|6 years ago|reply
> They search for bugs that make it easy to keep using their phones, unbeknown to parents, like changing the time to trick the system, or using iMessage to watch YouTube videos. “These are not rocket science, backdoor, dark web sort of hacks,” says Chris McKenna, founder of the Internet safety group Protect Young Eyes. “It blows me away that Apple hasn’t thought through the fact that a persistent middle school boy or girl can bang around and find them.”
And yeah, it’s not that Apple hasn’t thought about this or that fixing these kinds of bugs would take more than a day or few to fix.
The issue is Apple only implemented this feature to head off shareholder criticism, not because it believes it. Apple is not incentivized to make its products less addictive.
[+] [-] jressey|6 years ago|reply
I do agree that it is absolutely not Apple's responsibility to do anything about this. People want to outsource their responsibility as parents and it's pathetic.
[+] [-] SketchySeaBeast|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Funes-|6 years ago|reply
Fair enough, you admitted it at least.
>but I stayed up reading with a flashlight a lot as a kid. Was that terrible for me? Should my flashlight have had a setting to limit the times I can use it? Would anyone say I had an unhealthy book addiction, and that publishers should do something about it?
Did it mess with your cognitive abilities? Your self-esteem? Your self-image? Your limbic system, in general? No? Your dopamine receptors, then? Did it fill every minute of your waking life with escapism? Would anyone read while driving? Or during class, meals, family gatherings, dates, meetings, at the movies? You get the point.
I think the unhealthy potential of smartphones differs tremendously from that of books, just because of their inherent physical qualities and limitations.
[+] [-] prepend|6 years ago|reply
Imagine how silly I would sound if I said “It’s not Apple’s job to sysadmin your users” in response to priceless not working properly on user accounts.
So while parenting support, or whatever, isn’t that important to me, functioning audit and access controls really is.
[+] [-] ghego1|6 years ago|reply
Unpopular opinion: I would be less preoccupied of a teen watching porn at 2am than on watching clips of videogames
[+] [-] lalos|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghego1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BrandonWatson|6 years ago|reply
We grew up as hackers and thought we could end around the problem of kids removing safe guards to our software. What we quickly found was that (surprising no one at all, least of all us) kids have way more time on their hands and are willing to expend way more energy to remove blockers than parents do to enforce them.
It's a tricky issue - kids and online. We actively encouraged parents to have dialog with their kids about what they were doing online. The issue we were attempting to solve was keeping bad people out of the child's social networks. All of the other solutions were, and still do, focus on keeping porn off the computer. That's a doomed system. Parents need to be involved and have a on-going dialog. I believed it when we founded IMSafer 13 years ago, and I believe it now (as a parent with 3 kids, two of them teenagers).
Our service did a lot of very novel things for the time (machine based analysis of chat conversations looking for patterns of predation), but I continue to be amazed at how much energy we put into the "but my kids keep uninstalling it" problem. We came up with some pretty good solutions, which were P95 effective, but (again, surprising no one on the technical team) the kids who figured out how to circumvent came up with some pretty amazing solves.
The most impressive was this one kid who basically took over their parent's account, gave themselves admin access, set their parents to minimal access, but then changed specific .exe file pointers to give the parents the perception that they still had admin access to their machine when they were trying to run applications.
[+] [-] guyzero|6 years ago|reply
this this this.
limiting screen time isn't a technical issue, it's an economic issue - kids and parents have different levels of effort they're willing to expend to deal with these limits. Ultimately the kid needs to incentivized to conform to the limit set by the parent.
[+] [-] stirner|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aidenn0|6 years ago|reply
As an example of how not-sneaky I was as a kid, I immediately ran to my dad and showed him how I got the password.
[+] [-] yummypaint|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] musicale|6 years ago|reply
Come to think of it, I have even played a video game about it, called "Mom hid my game!"
I salute their ingenuity as a triumph of the human spirit in its unstoppable quest for freedom, justice, and Minecraft for all. Though I suppose drug addicts are similarly clever...
[+] [-] Smithalicious|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|6 years ago|reply
Technology changes, kids don't.
[+] [-] hi5eyes|6 years ago|reply
rules are meant to be broken
- every kid with enough determination in the history of mankind
[+] [-] outworlder|6 years ago|reply
Interestingly, corporations have more ways to restrict device usage than parents, by adding a profile and changing the device to 'supervised'.
[+] [-] neonate|6 years ago|reply
http://archive.is/RlUdP
[+] [-] _-_T_-_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|6 years ago|reply
School has wifi with content blocking, and many students BYOD. Teachers can override the content blocker on a one-time basis by typing in an override password on a student's device.
So a student puts a keylogger on his own device, navigates to a page that he should be allowed to access, but which the content blocker flags, and he gets the teacher to enter the override password. Thanks to the keylogger, now he has it too. Kids are sneaky!
[+] [-] GhettoMaestro|6 years ago|reply
EG: At 11PM, the phone goes into basic mode. It can only call the list of pre-defined numbers (parents/family) and emergency services.
Maybe give a 30 15 and 5 minute count-down warning that way the user can gracefully finish their activities currently at hand.
[+] [-] Someone|6 years ago|reply
”Think of this as a nap for your screen time. When you schedule downtime in Settings, only phone calls and apps that you choose to allow are available. Downtime applies to all of your Screen Time-enabled devices, and you get a reminder five minutes before it starts.”
I don’t think you can restrict what numbers can be called.
[+] [-] thrower123|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarejunba|6 years ago|reply
Funny, I told myself I'd be more open when I was an adult and here we all are, doing the same thing.
[+] [-] ip26|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Magicstatic|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eigenloss|6 years ago|reply
Now there's an incentive for them to learn electrical engineering.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|6 years ago|reply