I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself

https://lof.flounder.online/gemlog/2022-04-11%20How%20I%20decided%20to%20move%20away%20for%20bigTech%20for%20my%20children%20and%20myself.gmi

by urlwolf • 4 years ago

179 295 4 years ago

lof.flounder.online

teekert2• 4 years ago

Although I agree with OP, mostly, I probably won't be so strict on my children, I will educate them though, as I do on healthy food. But I can't stop them from getting some candy every now and then as they get more self-sufficient, and I just hope that my guidance will make them eat more than candy past age ~18.

A point of note though, I never really trust these "I have no accounts and then I get a video of my son!" It's the same as that story "I talked about product X and the next time I go online I see an ad!". I hear them so little that I think they can probably be completely explained by coincidence.

littlecranky672• 4 years ago

The problem is that Smartphone/Attention economy is made to be addictive. In my opinion and observation, many adults, myself included, are overusing smartphones/social media, often mindlessly scrolling through stuff to "kill time", losing focus on more important tasks. I'm just saying this stuff is dangerous even to adults, and it takes quite some discipline to manage. That is why I am unsure that "education" in that field is enough. And I say this as an adult who often breaks his own set time limits for mobile usage.

teekert2• 4 years ago

I agree with you, I do more useless things with my phone than I'd want.

But is limiting the solution? When they become adults, they can do what they want, what would be the best way to teach them healthy habits? I'm not convinced keeping the kids away from phones as long as possible it THE solution (maybe part of it?) We keep them away from heroine, from alcohol to a degree (although for me that started at 14-15). Maybe the state should put out stronger advice and forbid them in schools perhaps...

But we are also addicts, and I got my first phone at 17 (it was this one [0], still, sms could be pretty addictive, not much compared to what can be done now). So that didn't really work. Maybe what we really see as problematic will become normal over time? I mean, looking at a small screen is not nice, but if it's in your glasses or VR? At least it is less bad for posture and eyes. It will perhaps be more addictive even, so immersive... Maybe overtime we'll get to evolutionary pressures even, you can get most things you want in VR except food and procreation... Or can we, man where are we going...

[0] https://www.gsmchoice.com/en/catalogue/ericsson/gf768/galler...

moritonal• 4 years ago

This blog is a rant with several accusations (tech is bad for kids, TikTok is watching me) but no research or evidence into anything.

worthless-trash• 4 years ago

What evidence could he give without doxing himself ?

that_guy_iain4• 4 years ago

He doesn't need to prove his anecdote but prove that big tech is bad. The whole "I got recommended something that was actually related to me so I'm avoid big tech for the safety of my children" implies that him being recommended something that was actually related to him was dangerous.

This is almost the same as "I was talking to someone about wanting to buy a gaming PC then I saw ads for gaming PC. They must be listening to my conversations". Nah, some people got told to figure out the patterns of people who go on to buy a gaming PC and someone figured it out. Just like how LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, figure out people you may know because you share a data point or two.

urlwolf8• 4 years ago

There are books on the topic. 'Digital vegan' by Andy Farnell is a good entry point. He cites lots of studies and other books.

Freak_NL4• 4 years ago

As a parent (of a kid fortunately nowhere near this age) I get this, but I also don't see a way out. You don't want your kid to be that kid who doesn't have a smartphone when all of their peers do. Being socially excluded was the bane of my life in school, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be a contributing factor to my child becoming a pariah.

I do wish that more parents (and society in general) would be more sensible about a minimum age for smartphones; it just keeps creeping down. 10/11/12 would be somewhat manageable and it gives parents a chance to help guide their use.

And of course all the popular must have apps already have age limits they absolutely refuse to enforce. TikTok has 13 as the minimum age. WhatsApp (used by every Dutch teenager from 10 onwards) has a minimum age of 16 in the EU…

jaspax2• 4 years ago

You don't want your kid to be that kid who doesn't have a smartphone

Why not? If you think that smartphone usage is harmful to your child, then you absolutely are justified in letting them be "that kid". Being moderately socially constrained is actually a perfectly fine thing if the alternative is worse.

Being socially excluded was the bane of my life in school, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be a contributing factor to my child becoming a pariah

I don't know anything about you in particular, so I can't say whether this is a good idea or not. But we have to recognize the tradeoffs: unfettered access to social media from a young age with all of its downsides OR being the only kid without a cellphone and those accompanying downsides. Which one harms your kid more? Think about it and make your decision, but once you've made that decision you have to bite the bullet and accept the costs.

yoz-y• 4 years ago

I guess it's too early to tell. But even when I was in uni, "not being on facebook" (back when facebook was relatively new) was heavily penalizing. And we were adults.

lelanthran6• 4 years ago

Why not? If you think that smartphone usage is harmful to your child, then you absolutely are justified in letting them be "that kid".

It's a trade-off - is peer ostracisation worth the benefits from lack of tech?

Most people, myself included, would say "No".

Being moderately socially constrained is actually a perfectly fine thing if the alternative is worse.

It is not a moderate social constraint, it's a complete and utter exclusion from the set of peers.

hans17294• 4 years ago

Why not?

Because it sets them on a track of social disconnect and isolation. No therapist in their right mind would support that path.

The adequate response is culture. Teach your children how to cultivate their own attention. Teach them about the way dopamine works. If you can't, you don't even know what you're talking about yourself. Creating social outlaws never, ever ever ever achieves the intended goal. The opposite is the case, you're creating damage in areas that you apparently don't even realize, probably because you project your personality model and own experiences onto a kid that simply doesn't grow up in the world that you became neuroplastic in.

Once you made your decision, bite the bullet and accept the costs

...Or be open to rethink your decision?! That's just bad intellectual culture. It's perfectly fine to change your mind about something that you can't fully understand. And you can't fully understand this, because you can't see the world through the eyes of a now-12-year-old. Everyone tries to do the best for their kids, but almost no one knows what is the best for their kids. Setting them on a path to isolation and lack of connect certainly isn't the way, they'll never, ever, fully recover from it.

raverbashing2• 4 years ago

"Smartphones are harmful" are the new "videogames cause violence" (a bit justifiable, but blown out of proportion)

And on average most people will use it, so a kid that can use better than it is already on top of the pack

zo13• 4 years ago

It's a fine line and you have to go with some of it safely. However, there are items that are 100% toxic and as parents we need to decide what those are. Things like rap/hip-hop music as an example, or TikTok. There are some things that just can't be consumed safely by impressionable minds. When they're older they can get into them if they so wish, but my hope is that their brains by that point would at least be mature enough to see how toxic these things are. My job as a parent is not to make the world appear peachy perfect for them, but to give them the tools to deal with the world when they're adults

hans17294• 4 years ago

This is sarcasm, right? A music genre is categorically toxic? What? They will see TikToks anyway, at latest on the devices of their peers. The only sane course of action is to teach them how to deal with it, not to ignore the consequences of every control-freak-parent we've seen in the last 40 years and cosplay a fantasy-world where those things simply don't exist.

filoleg2• 4 years ago

items that are 100% toxic [...] like rap/hip-hop music

Didn't expect to see this take on HN, especially in the age when the library of congress includes hip-hop records and a former president expressed his appreciation towards it openly. Ffs, it is just another form of art. It isn't some vice that they will unfortunately have to eventually be able to work around, like alcohol. There is genuine value in it.

Same with Tiktok. It can be used in a toxic way, but also in a way that can genuinely be great. I saw plenty of great DIY projects on tiktok that were fairly educational to me, as well as plenty of great examples of people teaching or creating amazing things. I am not "coping with toxicity" of tiktok when i use it, i am just using it in a way that is controlled and intentional.

The only thing I can add at this point is, you are just going through the good old "heavy metal/rock music/Dungeons and Dragons turn our children into devil-worshipping heathens" type of thinking.

If you dont have conversations about it and just blanket declare it as evil and ban it in your household, it won't stop your kid from listening to it. It will stop any discussion of it though, which means that they will have to work through it without your guidance on the matter (which has a potential for turning ugly), all while eroding the trust between you all.

Saying that as someone who grew up with very overprotective (at quite a few points) parents, (almost) nothing good came out of it at all. You probably don't want your kid to get a motorcycle license just out of spite for you the second they are fully financially independent and realize that you have zero control over them. And then promptly crash on that bike and break a couple of bones within the same year. I didn't even have an itch to ride a bike that badly, but it felt like some internal obligation to myself. No regrets about it whatsoever, I genuinely enjoy riding it now as intrinsically as possible. But it definitely didn't start off this way at all.

And that personal example was on a very mild side, from what I've personally observed in my peers. As a former RA in college dorms who had a chance to see a lot of those situations play out, you can pretty much always correctly guess what kind of parenting the freshmen kids who got into ER with alcohol poisoning within the first month of college or dropped out due to partying too hard (or playing videogames all day) had. It was almost always the kind of parenting that you are advocating for.

amelius• 4 years ago

Show them movies and TV-shows from the 80s and 90s, and show them that kids and grownups were quite happy despite having no smartphones.

verisimi• 4 years ago

Honestly, in this age where we all have the same culture, experiences, etc - is following along with the crowd a good thing? Is the crowd the best of us, or the worst of us? Are we are herd animal?

Its so easy to go along with whatever is making the headlines. Isn't it better to be that kid who is at least thinking independently, and having the childhood that humans were designed to have.

rglullis14• 4 years ago

As someone also with two young kids, my hope is to instill the idea that they can and should use the internet for their own expression and communication, but that they need to do it with tools which puts them in control, and not the other way around.

There are "indie web" alternatives to the big social networks which everyone can use. Social networks without the algorithms that make you doom scrolling, messaging apps that do not track you or read your messages for ads, photo apps that do not have likes and do not gamify karma-whoring, and so on.

To make it even better, these apps are not exclusive to smartphone platforms, so they won't need a smartphone just to participate.

At least here in Germany, even my non-techy friends that are totally addicted to Instagram and Facebook don't publish anything with their kids. I am hoping that by the time their kids have grown a bit, these tools will be more popularized and accessible so that their kids don't fall into the same trap as their parents, and perhaps even the parents take the opportunity to do the switch themselves.

samhw• 4 years ago

do not gamify karma-whoring

Christ, I'm not really on the 'complain about social media' train, but this resonates with me so much. The way people pose and mug for upvotes on Reddit - or mortifiedly delete their comments when they get some downdoots – is, well, it's self-abasing. I can't believe the effect it has on people. For kids I can only imagine how destructive it would be, in the already insecure and reputation-centric environment of school.

I don't know what the solution is. I believe it lies _broadly in the direction of_ better clients, rather than different networks. The latter is a fool's errand. The former is still hard, but at least practicable on one's own: to find or create [apps / web clients / browser extensions / etc] which don't surface the karma component as much.

HN is a good example of that: it still has upvotes and downvotes, but the design (especially not showing you others' downvotes, beyond binary indicators of positive/negative) centres them much less. It's an illustration of how you can substantially reduce this through frontend changes alone, without needing to change the core logic of the product.

KptMarchewa4• 4 years ago

Being socially excluded was the bane of my life in school, and I'll be damned if I'm going to be a contributing factor to my child becoming a pariah.

As someone who had similar experiences, thanks for letting your children be in control of at least some part of their lives. You're doing the good thing.

b1122• 4 years ago

While this may backfire, I would say installing tracking software on the phone, then doing many subtle things which gives this away, would be an awesome learning experience.

"Creepy?! What? Google, Facebook, etc do it. What's wrong?"

I feel like hacking the phones of parliamentarians, then setting up a website showing their daily activities, would be excellent.

Double effective if it just keeps happening, even when you say you'll stop, no matter how often they reset or reconfigure the phone.

"What?! Everyone else does it!"

JodieBenitez• 4 years ago

"must have apps"

There is no such thing. All these are dopamine manglers fueled by low-quality content that have no real benefit.

"my child becoming a pariah"

If having no smartphone is all it takes to be a pariah, I think it's a good thing to be a pariah ! Or more seriously: there are much better ways to socialize than socialize on the phone (like participating in real/non-virtual activities with other people). I guess as the generations goes, people will eventually forget that the notion of social network largely predates telecommunications.

rhn_mk1• 4 years ago

Good luck socializing in other ways when your group of peers doesn't.

jedberg3• 4 years ago

Seems like a bit of an overreaction. My kids are just a few years younger than OP's, but I'm not going to cut them off.

I will teach them the dangers of being online and will force the phones to use a VPN through our house with PiHole installed. I may or may not go as far as putting a custom cert on the phone so I can monitor all the traffic -- that will depend on if I catch them violating my trust. My default stance will be no custom cert.

But if I do add a custom cert it won't be a secret -- they will know that I'm monitoring them until they earn the trust back and we will review the logs together.

raxxorraxor• 4 years ago

I think the idea of monitoring the network traffic of your children is an overreaction itself. Sure, internet content is a bit more buzzing these days, but older generations who accessed unfiltered content survived as well.

Normalizing being under surveillance for them is a lesson hard to understand to be honest. I don't know your kids, but at some point their technical abilities to circumvent the paternalism is likely to make such mechanisms futile anyway and there just remains a breach of privacy.

I agree that keeping tech out of childrens hands is a bit futile, but the surveillance ambitions of some parents look more unhealthy than the harm any internet content could cause.

mechanical_bear2• 4 years ago

Monitoring children, not just in a technical sense, is part of being a parent.

Freak_NL4• 4 years ago

Keep in mind that invading their privacy means breaking their trust at an age where a large part of their emotional and social development all but requires it. It's a good way to ensure that they won't come to you with any delicate topics later on, like questions and concerns about drugs, sex, or shady behaviour of peers — you know, the part where you want to be that trustworthy parent that they can talk to, always. To them this is like requiring them to use the bathroom with the door open with you looking in — you don't do that after a certain age unless you have a severely mentally handicapped child.

Also, you won't really block them from anything unless you forbid them to meet up with friends with their own unmonitored devices.

jedberg3• 4 years ago

Keep in mind that invading their privacy means breaking their trust at an age where a large part of their emotional and social development all but requires it.

That's why I was careful to say that the default would be to trust them, but only after they show they can't handle it will they be monitored, but in a way they are fully aware of and we would review the logs together. But my point was I hope I never have to get that far -- that I can just teach them to be safe and leave it at that.

anilakar• 4 years ago

Seems like a bit of an overreaction.

Especially when most of the risks the author sees are technical security issues. The real issue is that kids and adults alike are unable to police their screen time.

I have made a conscious decision to limit my smartphone usage to communication, not entertainment, and it seems to work fine.

bjarneh4• 4 years ago

I may or may not go as far as putting a custom cert on the phone so I can monitor all the traffic -- that will depend on if I catch them violating my trust.

You are going to spy on you kids if they violate your trust, what does it take to violate your trust; visit a website that you don't like? How will your kids ever trust you again, if they find out you're spying on them for possible trust-violations?

jedberg3• 4 years ago

I made it clear that I would not be spying on them -- that they would have full access to the monitoring and we would review it together.

soco3• 4 years ago

You can land in shady internet places very well also unwillingly, so it's less about "trust" and more about plain "protection". And the OP made it clear it's not a covert operation, the kids know it's the rule of the game.

soco3• 4 years ago

Back then when kid was in that age I solved the dilemma by giving her a feature phone (yeah they were still around) and the computer traffic was monitored by the antivirus parental control. Yes she knew about all this and didn't mind. I never needed to step in.

lrvick20• 4 years ago

When I was about 12 I routed my parents dialup connection through -my- computer so I could monitor (and sometimes manipulate) -their- internet usage.

When they didn't like the content of my livejournal, I simply used my MITM to serve them a copy different from what the rest of the world saw.

The more you teach a kid about how tech works, they sooner they will use it to defy you.

It is not a big surprise I ended up in infosec.

ilovebiden• 4 years ago

yep join the r/NoFapMovement time for r/NoTechMovement!

tjpnz• 4 years ago

I've made it very clear to extended family that I don't want photos of my kids on Meta platforms. I'm not sure what I'll do when they're old enough to have a smartphone.

goshx• 4 years ago

Sounds paranoid and detrimental to the kids’ social lives.

PeterBarrett3• 4 years ago

I don't have kids yet but it is something that has been discussed about my nieces and nephews. As you say, you don't want your kids to become social pariahs but you also don't want to give them smart phones, in this day and age it looks like the two are intrinsically linked, which is disappointing.

I would like to say that we can teach kids to have a healthy relationship with the internet and social media but sites like TicTok are engineered to be as addictive as possible so that would be naïve of me to say.

In saying that, if you outright ban these sites in your house it just means that when it comes time for your kids to be more independent they could possibly have no knowledge of how to healthily use social media and then be worse off than if they had access early.

There is no easy answer here, at the end of the day it will be their decision, all you can do is teach them to navigate the digital world and then be there to help when they make mistakes.

hans17294• 4 years ago

I would like to say that we can teach kids to have a healthy relationship with the internet and social media but sites like TicTok are engineered to be as addictive as possible so that would be naïve of me to say.

I don't think so. Don't underestimate the intelligence of kids. If your kid actually understands the way dopamine works (on a sufficient level), they will cultivate their own way of attention-management. That's perfectly doable, kids just soak up knowledge. They have to learn it anyway, so the later you start, the worse the consequences of both social isolation and bad usage-culture will be.

/edit:

to add to my original point, when your kids decide for themselves that they want something, and they feel that you are unfairly restricting their access to it, the consequence will be that they demonize you. Where that leads, for them, for their relationship with you, for the other points you're trying to get across, is never a good place. Be very careful about it.

mathieuh• 4 years ago

Why do you think children will be more successful at outwitting nefarious companies' behavioural scientists than adults are? It is widely acknowledged that companies are successfully applying methods of grabbing and retaining our attention in order to sell us things, so I'm a bit cynical that children, already not renowned for impulse control, will be any better than adults in ignoring that.

giraffe_lady2• 4 years ago

I truly do not have a settled opinion on the correct course here.

But the idea that mere education can disarm these tools is incredibly naive. It's not powerless against it but not sufficient alone.

Intelligent people who are deeply knowledgeable about the physiology and psychology of addiction still get addicted to drugs, for example. Or. We all know how advertising works, and yet it still works. Do you think it doesn't work on you?

Intelligence and knowledge can be part of a defensive strategy but they're not a complete one. And even the best strategies executed flawlessly will fail sometimes or against some opponents.

This is not a matter of intelligence, and I find that framing chilling. It carries an implicit judgement that those who find themselves captive to these powers were merely too weak, undisciplined, or unintelligent to prevent that through their own agency. It's not the agency of individuals that is the problem here though.

basedgod• 4 years ago

ah yes the whole "Coca Cola corp. says you can't just ban your kids from drinking and eating sugar !!! then when they turn 18 they'll fall off the wagon and eat nothing but sugar ! better to have them eat it throughout their childhood so they KNOW how to avoid it"

do you people ever try to have an independent thought outside of the propaganda of big business ? what kind of nonsense of this, that children should be expected to compete for their attention span against literal city sized teams working to maximize the size of their algorithm

jasonladuke0311• 4 years ago

This comment is hilarious. I've known like a dozen people who have experienced the exact scenario you mentioned.

SpicyLemonZest3• 4 years ago

The key reason I'm okay with no-soda households is that there's few if any social contexts where you're expected to have a soda. You mention eating sugar, but I think banning that really would risk falling off the wagon - you're not gonna keep your kid from noticing that ice cream is tasty for 18 years.

PeterBarrett3• 4 years ago

Your argument is about as well formed as your sentences. I can only assume you're a troll account given how new your account is and that you clearly didn't read the comment you're replying to.

kradeelav• 4 years ago

It's interesting, of all the points being made in this thread, "making kids be more resilient with (and even enjoying) time alone" feels like an area of opportunity that hasn't been mentioned, not something to shut down and banish.

My circumstances were a little unusual (only child with physical disabilities) but not once did I feel like a social pariah what with books, games, books again, one or two loyal friends, pets, exploring the accessible parts of the backyard and digging up insects ...

There's a happy middle as far as giving into Big Tech vs not, basically.

thebean11• 4 years ago

I think the lack of real social interaction is the problem right now, not lack of alone time. These are kids who essentially spent a year and a half by themselves..

estaseuropano• 4 years ago

I used to lead policy on digital school education for an important organization advising governments on education policy. This was my driving concern: to fight against all the old grumpy people that don't understand and absolutely fear the digital world and think that all would be well if we ban 0s and 1s from school and force kids to go into the woods (not at all exaggerating on the latter part). There were also others that think all problems are solved when you just get everyone to learn coding, which is a starting point but nearly equally wrong and naive as you need societal context and other understanding to make sense of the digital.

It is a basic but at system level not obvious insight that you cannot ignore reality in how you educate your or anyone else's children. It is easy to be careful and conservative but for education to be useful you have to teach them about difficult topics early and thoroughly and both the substance and the methodology have to actually fit the reality these children can and do encounter every day and WILL eventually encounter once they leave the protected environment of school and parents.

You simply cannot teach a child to be a mature, employable, self-confident, independent, informed and sensible adult without the tools of the normal world. By all means, keep them away from tech completely and there are exactly two scenarios: 1) they sneak their way into getting access 2) they fall into an adult life they are not prepared for and will suffer for it.

You, as a parent or educator, mist face reality and discomfort yourself and engage with the world your children encounter. Teach them understanding and insight, not shame or fear.

PeterBarrett3• 4 years ago

Well put, I agree with you and I'm happy to hear someone with a more informed opinion was giving input at a level that mattered.

As with most things in life, too far to either extreme and you will have problems. How can we expect our kids to cope if we ourselves are totally addicted ourselves or totally isolated from it all.

barrkel• 4 years ago

Avoiding Google Search is already a sign of being at the more radical end of the spectrum IMO.

I don't think avoiding big tech is really possible without joining a separate offline society. You can reduce it but you're not going to keep your kids offline without their friends also being offline.

lrvick20• 4 years ago

I have hundreds of friends both IRL and online, hang out with lots of different people every week, have piles of hobbies (many involve tech), and run a b2b company serving major silicon valley tech firms.

I also don't have a smartphone and I almost exclusively use open standards and open source software, most of which I self-host in a rack in my closet. The only way I can be reached is e-mail and matrix.

You do -not- need a smartphone or FAANG to live a rich technical life in 2022 though many in the US sure seem to think you do. In the USA, you go to Defcon and see google/apple/discord nonsense everywhere. Even the privacy village (ugh). Go to CCC in Germany and you will see thousands of people gathering and exchanging ideas with only open software and protocols, because they don't trust US big tech.

The fact so most in the US, like you, think that app culture and surveillance capitalism is required to thrive in our online world is evidence of some very successful marketing.

urlwolf8• 4 years ago

I'm in Berlin, Germany. Can corroborate that people here distrust bigTech to the point of not using it.

It's a big question for our generation. I posted this using a gemlog in gemini: protocol but it has an html proxy so that 'the world' can see it (I'm glad I did, I don't think we are to the point where posting a gemini: link works, even in HN, to get some attention.

Can you live, and market your business/services if you don't use social media? I'm betting you can, but I don't have data.

I have 1000s of twitter followers on company and personal accounts, but I rarely tweet anymore. Is it costing me business? Perhaps.

someweirdperson• 4 years ago

"I was scrolling Tiktok on my phone. I don't think I registered as an user."

I'm not sure if "registered" refers to having created a user account or being logged in while browsing.

Either way, if it is only "think" and not know exactly, good luck evading more subtle tracking.

reader_x• 4 years ago

My 14yo daughter came home from binging 80s movies with friends and wistfully told me, “I wish I’d grown up in the 80s.” I said, “Why??” She said, “Because everything was a lot like it is now, but no smartphones.”

prox2• 4 years ago

What part doesn’t she like?

I am assuming it’s the “always on” culture it breeds, but that might be my projection.

Broken_Hippo3• 4 years ago

And I'm seriously hoping you corrected her romantic view of the past.

Sure, the movies make it seem simple, but... you know, AIDS. It sucked even more if you were queer. "Crack babies" that weren't (that was just poverty we were seeing). Regan starved people with the 'welfare queen' stuff. Misogyny was so much more open.

It wasn't the same. It wasn't better. It was different.

Freak_NL4• 4 years ago

Smoking. Smoke, everywhere.

grapeskin2• 4 years ago

I think young people today wish we could be back in the days of AIDS panic instead of covid panic.

Thorentis2• 4 years ago

It's possible to long for one aspect of the past, without actually wanting to live in the past. If my kid decides that society is better without smartphones, I'm going to be quite proud, and saying "yeah but AIDS" will be the last thing on my mind.

someguydave2• 4 years ago

AIDS could have been stopped with quarantines like in Cuba.

lrvick20• 4 years ago

I have encountered multiple Gen Z people recently fascinated with retro gaming, cassette tapes, records, and 80s/90s tv/movies who expressed similar. Some are able to see their phones as addictive and are starting to look for what life was like before them.

It gives me hope.

KptMarchewa4• 4 years ago

Le Wrong Generation meme is decades old.

Cthulhu_2• 4 years ago

It's the same shit, different generation though; 20 years ago it was the internet, video games and mobile phones, 20 years before that it was cable TV, 20 years before that it was free love and weed and rock & roll and shit.

I think 'we' should, at least to a degree, suck it up and let kids figure things out for themselves. Cable TV didn't give me square eyes, video games didn't turn me into a school shooter, and I don't believe mobile phones fried my brain. I don't like rock & roll though, and free love has never been a thing.

Which is the other thing; a previous generation was throwing a tantrum because the youth was having sex more and more, nowadays people are throwing a tantrum because the youth are having LESS sex. Which one is it? Neither?

hooby• 4 years ago

You might want to teach your kids about the dangers of social media, and how they can protect themselves - rather than completely forbidding them from gaining any experience and thus leaving them completely vulnerable for when they they are finally old enough to buy their own smart phone.

lynguist2• 4 years ago

During the Facebook hearing, they said that its internal data shows that Facebook is most harmful for 14 year old girls. I believe that if you can somehow shield your daughter of that age from social media, she will be fine.

I had a no display rule for our toddler but during my absence, her mother introduced her to the iPad, and now she watches YouTube on it whenever I’m not around. I know that the American Pediatric Association recommends limiting screen time to 1hr a day, which I also agree with. I don’t know yet how to proceed once she gets older. I think I want to teach her programming and I want to disallow social media. Already now I disallowed her watching Russian videos on YouTube and she doesn’t watch them any more because I said to her that I don’t like those videos.

zo13• 4 years ago

We took away Youtube Kids access after a few days. It's filled with so much very low quality "spam" content. E.g. random indians with thick accents singing to random recordings of them playing with toys and 5k iterations of that for every single kids song imaginable. And that's even excluding the potential of them finding content along the lines of "Elsa Gate".

Youtube-dl is your friend. Download (or pirate) quality content for them to consume offline. Disney streaming is also a no-go these days, not going to touch that with a 10-foot pole.

lynguist2• 4 years ago

I found that she likes watching Blippi and that there are specially produced Blippi episodes on Amazon Kids, but I couldn’t find those videos anywhere to download nor could I subscribe to Amazon Kids! (It’s not available in my country!)

There is a Blippi stage musical on YouTube she watched already more than five or six times. I also see that it actually helps her language acquisition.

nunodonato• 4 years ago

Glad I'm not alone on that. I tried youtube kids before showing it to my daughter and I was shocked at the kind of content it was selecting. I was hoping for interesting videos, more like a video version of a kids wikipedia or something, with an educational purpose. But everything is about dumb jokes, toys, songs, and consumerism in general. At least for english speaking kids there are a few other good resources available

codebolt2• 4 years ago

Agreed on YT Kids, it's a lot of garbage with very little educational value. But what's wrong with Disney streaming? My 3 yo is allowed to play with a tablet for a few hours per week, locked so he can only access Netflix, Disney and a few games.

bena• 4 years ago

Something like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8

BlueTemplar7• 4 years ago

The issue here is that teenagers are also the most likely to rebel and ignore your orders / circumvent your "shielding" attempts, and also be already capable enough that you're going to lose most of the time.

I'm not sure what the best solution is

- giving regular (but not too frequent) and detailed real life examples of things that went horribly wrong with other teenagers, combined with total freedom (in this domain)

- or reverse psychology combined with a heavy handed approach where they're going to quickly learn how to fool you and also how to hack your countermeasures, which would supercharge their learning ? (With the risk of a decade+ of bad relations...)

optymizer• 4 years ago

I eventually gave in and gave my toddler a tablet to watch cartoons on YouTube. I noticed a few things:

1. She keeps it way to close to her eyes (even after I move it further away)

2. She gets way too much blue light

3. She doesn't get tired of watching cartoons if given the chance (e.g. on long road trips)

4. She now wants cartoons to be playing in the background while she plays with toys

I didn't see any improvements after some time, so I decided that the tablet medium must go away. I now cast videos on the TV from my phone and that has solved most of these, since I have better control over what, when, and or how long she's watching cartoons.

chromanoid• 4 years ago

Shielding is never a good idea - there will always be a time when the shield drops. I guess we will follow Montessori's methods regarding knives and other dangerous things. Teaching responsible use while accepting minor injuries.

anaisbetts2• 4 years ago

This reads like prepper content - there are many legitimately scary reasons to control kids' access to the Internet, and "kids might be targeted by ads" is on like page 83. Think like a security dev and focus on threat modeling, kids falling into the right-wing / white supremacy pipeline and being exposed to predatory adults online are far more worrying.

lrvick20• 4 years ago

I had a private investigator for a father, was once a professional magician, and am currently a full time security engineer, so I am pretty sure I think like one. All of this exposure has convinced me it is generally easier to hack a human mind than a computer, and modern social media is designed to do exactly that. You spend a few extra seconds viewing a white supremacist rant by an uncle on Facebook, and next thing you know that is all you see... until your views start shifting in that direction before you even realize it.

Dopamine optimized algorithims designed to put you in a false reality full of only content you are willing to engage with the most, is one of the most toxic and addictive propaganda tool humans have ever created... and it is sold to the highest bidder. Behavior changes as a service.

It isn't on page 83 on my list. It is number one.

anaisbetts2• 4 years ago

Aren't we agreeing?

aa-jv• 4 years ago

The answer to any technology-oriented problem is better communication.

I had problems with my kids use of social media - until I involved myself in it with them, so that I could see the things they were learning and enjoying. And then, having established the reality of their world, I communicated with them about my concerns - the tracking, the groupthink, the dangers of online interactions with strangers.

Most important of all, I gained their trust and inspected their phones, and read their conversations. Yes, there were definitely things to be concerned about - and so we discussed it, rationally, and have established a 'review schedule' where I can get involved in their digital lives a little more.

Its not easy. Teenagers are obstinate and difficult at best of times. But parenting is important, and the basis of all good parenting is the ability to communicate with your kids.

WerBn2• 4 years ago

Yes. While it looks like there is no silver bullet for this, this looks like the better approach

prox2• 4 years ago

It’s great to hear you are involved in their lives without being overbearing. I guess all a kid wants to know/feel is that their parent will be there for them.

KptMarchewa4• 4 years ago

Thanks for being a good parent.

paskozdilar• 4 years ago

This is (IMHO) a very good approach.

Most parents don't realize how little control they actually have over their kids' lives. If a parent doesn't provide a consequence-free communication channel with a child, the child will quickly learn that communication leads to punishment and will refuse to communicate.

Certhas2• 4 years ago

The answer to any technology-oriented problem is better communication.

I agree with this for the question of what to do in the concrete situation of handling your kids. In a larger sense though the answer to technology can be also regulation and laws.

To keep kids safe today we have an infinitude of regulations specifying how kids toys, stairways, etc... are to be built. Some of this is over the top, but it would also be insane to expect parents to inspect the precise chemical composition of every toy their kid gets, and research how toxic it might be.

We need to build a societal agreement that data gathered in the name of targeting advertisment is toxic, and ban it. No "consent opt-in/opt-out" either, just a ban. This will obviously take time to get right. And it would make Google poorer so it will be hard to get this done. Think environmental regulations that started with social movements in the 60s/70s and are strong enough to do their job only decades later.

lrvick20• 4 years ago

My family operates virtually entirely on open source software, and we self host most of it. Surveillance capitalism is the new tobbacco and you really can live a rich (and even tech filled!) life without it, I promise. We also won't be giving any kids smartphones. Too many apps literally designed to profit by exploiting the emotions of children.

We will however give them access to all sorts of entertainment their friends won't have access to. They can play with my large collection of mechanical puzzles, or read from our large collection of books. I can teach them to build and fly FPV aircraft, how to solder and make their own electronics, how to pick locks, how to write their own software, compile their own desktop operating system, how to build their own computers, how to build their own electric skateboard, how to setup a digital music player, how to navigate with a map, how to yoyo, do magic tricks, play board and card games, or play with any of the 20+ retro game consoles I have hooked up at any time. Anything they want to learn we will make the time to help them learn.

Parents who say "I don't want my kid to be unpopular, so I will give them a smartphone" represent a mentality I feel is toxic to society IMO. Would you also give a child weed/tobacco/booze to share with their friends to make them cooler too?

If anything, helping a kid grow up with a more diverse and balanced introduction to technology will help them have a perspective few from their generation will have that in turn may offer them significant advantages. Will they eventually learn to make their own money and buy a phone anyway? Probably. They will however have learned to not be dependent on it.

I get by just fine without a phone and I have a rich social life, endless hobbies to keep my mind engaged, and I own and run a b2b company. "I could never give up my phone" is addiction speaking, and knowingly encouraging kids to share in your adult addictions is even worse.

em-bee14• 4 years ago

it depends where you are. i agree with your ideas, and i'd like to get there too, but here where i am it is literally impossible to keep in touch with people without a smartphone. giving up that smartphone would result in complete isolation.

but that doesn't mean i am addicted to social media stuff, just using messaging for the most part. but also, i grew up before smartphones and i learned to be somewhat disciplined about computer and tv use. my kids are unfortunately not getting the same experience.

lrvick20• 4 years ago

In Silicon Valley where I am, everyone tells me it is impossible to live without one here too but that is just not true.

I check matrix messages and emails and keep up with people and make plans to meet them when I am in my office, or in a stable location on a laptop.

When I am on in the car, taking a walk, at dinner with my family... I don't need to be reachable at that moment. Society teaches you you need to be reachable every moment of every day, but the people around you will adapt to your communication cadence. The few that won't are not worth your time anyway.

The world will get by without being able to reach you for a few hours at a time, and the mental health wins of not being constantly anxious checking messages 100x a day can't be understated.

WerBn2• 4 years ago

I have no children, but I find this an interesting topic, because I have small cousins and friends with children. I find it quite disturbing to see the kids online, with their eyes on screen all the time they are not sleeping. It is concerning and it doesn't look healthy, both for their bodies/minds but also for their future. Don't tell me children learn something useful in TikTok, albeit some creative ideas, but in long term, most of it is crap. I honestly look at these children, and can't quite fathom what their future will be. Hopefully they will pop out/unplug off their drug, but... yeah.

djuric42• 4 years ago

I think main issue is that http://www is commercial and it will not create authentic personalities out of it. It is driving dopamine in wrong direction. Today we have great personalities on internet because they are created when internet was not commercial. Mine perspective is build on music, innovative and authentic personality was never created with exposure to "top pop charts" music.

psiops• 4 years ago

My oldest just got her first smartphone at 11. But it comes with rules. Screentime is limited. The phone does not go up to her room, it stays downstairs. She's allowed to take it out with her only when that makes sense for keeping in touch. No mobile internet (yet). We have open and frank talks about the dangerous sides of the internet and social media. And at 11, she can understand those warnings.

Brybry• 4 years ago

This seems like the reasonable approach to me. And parents have been doing this for decades with regards to computer time or TV screen time.

My parents had to limit my access to books as a kid because I would stay up all night reading with a flashlight.

em5002• 4 years ago

If you disable data altogether (wifi, not just mobile), you don't really need any screentime limits or other rules such as where she is allowed to use it. She'll very quickly self-limit the amount of time she spends on it. Keeping in touch works fine with voice and sms.

As we all know., the internet is an infinite time sink.

em-bee14• 4 years ago

it depends on personality. i spend more time on the internet if access is limited because i want to make the most of it, whereas if i have unlimited access it is much easier to take a break, because i can get back any time.

self-discipline is easier to learn if i am in control, not when it is forced on me. the key is to find other more interesting things to do

rvz• 4 years ago

"Get them young and addicted to the next hit", The digital drugs companies said. Why do you think they call them 'users' all the time.

If the effects of the digital drug Facebook™ or Instagram™ has worn off this last billion addicts, then the new digital crack / cocaine, TikTok™ will onboard the next billion.

Now the twist has taken another turn for the worse, after what happened in this story about its glorified recommendation algorithm [0] that dictates what is seen and unseen and how it manipulates its users addicted to it.

After looking at that [0] and this post, I would prefer NOT to be in the crowd of addicts to suggest that: "TikTok is the best thing to have happened to the Internet" [1]. That goes for all of them.

Once this one wears off, on to the next hit.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28135484

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28135484

thegrto• 4 years ago

The issues you are mentioning are very important. I use tech in the same way you do. Trying to get rid of tracking, Google services etc. But this is our free choice.

Forcing that lifestyle upon other people like children will not succeed. They will see it as a personal crusade of you. As soon as they are old enough, they will get their smartphones and use social media heavily.

Better talk to them about the issues of smartphones and social media and let them decide. If they care about privacy, great! Help them to configure their devices. If not, let them go. You cannot control their lifes forever.

urlwolf8• 4 years ago

Very good point.

The problem is that these issues are hard to understand and properly value for adults... let alone children at 7 and 9.

Addiction. Privacy. Freedom of expression. Popularity contests and identity. Economies of Scale. Value of attention.

Damn hard to understand. And we really didn't cover the tech part. We have zero chances to convince adults away from the tech bubble. They don't get it, and don't want to get it. That includes the mom of my children unfortunately. So giving them the arguments and telling them 'it's your choice' won't work. They are too young to understand this.

harel• 4 years ago

I have two teens. If I give them the credit they deserve and try to trust them I find they make the right choices for themselves. Both my boys have smart phones (and both laugh at the whole tiktok thing). Granted the kids in this story are much younger, but when they are older, if they are denied a phone that allows them to communicate with their friends on an equal playing field, they will be left out. They may even resent you in the end. Educate kids about tech, teach them how to deal with tech smartly, but do not deny it from them because of some ideological fear. Kids today are sometimes smarter than kids in my day. Give them credit.

mcv• 4 years ago

7 and 9 sounds way too young for kids to have their own phone in my opinion. My son really wanted a smartphone at some point, and we figured he would need one for secondary school (starts at 11 or 12), add some time to get used to it, and he got the phone in his last year of primary school. That sounds early enough to me.

He never takes it to school, by the way. Despite his phone, we can still never reach him. He mostly uses it to watch YouTube at home, and for chatting with his friends, he relies almost entirely on Discord, which he's got on his laptop.

At least I'm glad he's not into TikTok/Facebook/Instachat and that sort of crap. To reach him, they'd have to launch an antisocial network.

CyberRabbi• 4 years ago

I appreciate the critical thinking in this post. Something every parent should do. We should talk about these issues more openly rather than accept what is being pushed into us.

em5002• 4 years ago

There is no problem giving phones to kids as soon as they can read: just disable all data (including wifi!). There are plenty of useful (translators, scientific calculators, maps/compass), informative (ebooks, kiwix) and entertainment apps (music/video), and even games that don't require permanent data access. Communication (ostensibly the main reason parents are giving them phones) works fine with just voice and SMS.

It also helps a lot that (1) AFAIK pretty much all primary schools (<12 years) in our country forbid phones in our country, and (2) we as parents don't spend much time on phones ourselves (we do spend a lot of time behind a laptop, but they usually just see screens full of boring text and number tables, so they don't associate them with something desirable), and (3) pretty much none of the other kids they know have a smartphone.

I expect things will be very different in middle school (>12 years), but we still have a few years to revise and refine our strategy.

lukeholder2• 4 years ago

I got my 13yo son an Apple Watch with an eSim that is set up under my iPhone. It allows us to call and text together as family, and for him to communicate with friends via imessage and other authorized chat apps. He doesn't miss the social inclusion (invites to a birthday party etc) but also it has minimal addictive apps like tiktok, snapchat, insta. I can set access controls for it with Apples' parental tools.

Oh and the eSim plan is super cheap $79/year for unlimited calls and text.

nickip• 4 years ago

Trying to figure out how this works for him. Does he just use voice text all the time? He navigates everything on the tiny screen?

lukeholder2• 4 years ago

Voice to text most often yes. Doesn't need to navigate much, send a message with voice, and tap on notifications.

Certhas2• 4 years ago

The attempt at an individual/technological solution to a problem that needs to be solved at a societal/regulatory/legal level.

It's a bit like talking about buying better gas masks and forcing your kids to wear them, when we should be advocating for stricter emission standards.

sillysaurusx• 4 years ago

I think we should embrace it. Take a step back and look at what happened here.

Remember that for 99% of people, seeing a video of their friends is a happy interaction. It's the kind of thing an ML model would notice, even if TikTok didn't.

As the author points out, of course TikTok uses wifi data to know. It's not even wifi -- it's "Both people connected to our service from the same IP. These people are related in some way."

If you think that's sinister, you must think Dan's pretty sinister too. Checking IPs is moderation 101, and dates back to the dawn of chat rooms.

I think everyone is nervous (and rightly so) that bigcos know so much about us. We've also seen how quickly the political situation can change -- it's easy to imagine a dictator using this knowledge to purge undesirables.

But other countries are already doing that. That is the reality in which we live. My wife and I are doing IVF in June, and with any luck, I'll have the opportunity to help guide a new soul into the world. I feel that my main responsibility is to prepare them to lead the happiest life they can -- all else being equal, optimizing your family tree for happiness seems like a reasonable approach.

Cutting out "the entire future" in the name of protecting one's children isn't something that I'm particularly interested in trying. To each their own; but someday my kiddo is going to realize that I can't protect her, the same way my father can't protect me from ruining my life by tweeting out certain combinations of words. I want her to be prepared to take advantage of the world, not hide her from it.

I'll be bookmarking this comment. In 14 years, I suspect I won't feel the same way when she's running around with the local boys. Parents don't share in the upside, only the downside, so it's hard to resist the urge to shut down their behavior and box them up for their own protection.

It's good we'll have data points on both approaches. I don't know that the author's approach would be bad, but it's hard to imagine myself being who I am today if I were their kid.

(One of the neat things about IVF is that you can choose the gender of your children. Deciding to have a daughter was a very "we live in the future" moment.)

urlwolf8• 4 years ago

Well, cutting out "the entire future" is a bit dramatic. We may be building a better future by using smolWeb tech like gemini:

My browser with 20 tabs open is a game of 'kill the tab that is burning the CPU'. I have to have task manager open at all times. I'm effectively dual-tasking between work and managing browser tabs eating CPU. And I have a beefy laptop. This is with browser addons that block tons of trackers.

While in gemspace, I can open the same amount of tabs and never worry about CPU usage. And that's by design. I'm not saying that gemspace solves the same problems as the web. Of course not, we are talking about fully functioning apps here! But it lets me interact with content (what websites used to be) without worrying about tracking by bigTech nor CPU usage. It's a big win.

kilotaras• 4 years ago

@dang can we get a change "away for" to "away from"

ltbarcly35• 4 years ago

This is less like being vegan and exactly like being Amish. The Amish, unlike what is usually believed, don't reject technology. They are very careful in adopting technology and seek to be deliberate about what technology to allow in their day to day life.

I think this deliberateness unavoidably leads to being a Luddite. The dominant force in human history is the continual development of new technology and it's integration into day to day human life, and human adaptation to that technology. We adapt to technology both quickly, via culture and training of children, and less quickly via genetic evolution.

Walking away from a technology that the vast majority of humanity embraces might be adaptive, both in terms of the individual and in terms of survival of the fittest, if that technology leads to the users becoming dramatically less fit. Rejecting the use of lead utensils is a great example of an adaptive rejection of a new technology.

Fine, you might rightly argue, this isn't about survival or evolution, it's about the quality of your life. It's hard to argue against that, and reasonable limits on the use of technology for children that can't regulate behavior to optimize their own health is certainly necessary. However, beyond that, abandoning technology in a more holistic way is no different than being Amish-lite. You are being deliberate about what technologies you accept into your day to day life, and this is admirable. However, it is also Amish-lite in that it is very likely to also be a form of freeloading.

The Amish are very much freeloading on their host society. They do not contribute to defense, nor do they utilize resources they control efficiently. Without the efficient utilization of resources of their host society, which allows for such things as large standing armies and fighter jets, they would have long ago been killed or displaced and their land taken. Rejection of Tik-Tok seems very unlikely to lead to any significant freeloading, but rejection of something like 'owning a cell phone' certainly does. As the rest of the world adapts it's culture and day to day life to what having a small pocket computer networked to every other computer unlocks, dramatic new ways of doing things will be unlocked, and new efficiencies will be found which will enrich everyone, including to some extent the Luddites, who are not participating in it. If there are enough of them, old ways of doing things will be maintained to profit from them, whereas if they participated the old ways of doing things (for example calling a phone number to order a pizza, and many more things, and things we haven't anticipated yet) could fall by the wayside.

Certainly you have a right to be a digital Luddite, but I don't believe there is any reason to think that this will give you a better outcome, by any measure, than just participating in the societal evolution would, and if done in a large scale way it is just being Amish with a different default threshold date for acceptable technologies.

em-bee14• 4 years ago

what kind of freeloading does rejecting a mobile phone lead to?

sure it restricts me from doing certain things at certain times, but it does not increase my dependence on others compared to having a mobile phone.

please elaborate.

ltbarcly35• 4 years ago

It is freeloading on any general improvements in wealth that society gains due to anything the almost ubiquitous usage of cell phones makes more efficient.

Lets make a specific example: lets say in 2028, 98% of pizzas are ordered via clicking on a phone app. Over at the pizza place, nobody is on the phone full time, just to punch phone orders into the computer system. As a result, pizza places run with 1 less full time person every shift. Pizzas are cheaper to make, competition leads to pizzas being slightly cheaper than they otherwise would have been. Even though you still phone in to the pizza place to make your order, you get the lower price. This is freeloading, since you didn't participate in any of activities that led to the lower price. (yes I realize you could have used a computer but this is just meant to show an example of how widespread phone use can lead to benefits for everyone, even non phone users)

Lets say that everyone is .1% more efficient at picking up their kids from places kids need to be picked up at because they can just navigate to their GPS coordinates every time. Less idling and less driving around looking for them means less energy consumption, and less wear and tear on vehicles. This reduces demand for energy in several ways, which means lower energy costs for you, even though you continue to drive around parking lots trying to figure out where your kids are and why they aren't where you agreed ahead of time, or idling for AC and waiting for them to walk to where you agreed from the far side of the mall.

There are a lot of ways that having a communication/data link to the world allows for new more efficient ways of doing things, and probably these will continue to compound, and taking the benefits (various efficiency improvements) without the costs (suffering downsides of having a smartphone) is the definition of freeloading.

BlueTemplar7• 4 years ago

cellphone != smartphone != smartphone with Android / iOS / whatever Huawei uses != ALSO using the worst apps like TikTok

I'm not completely convinced by your argument either : what happened to the hacker ethos ? Why do you assume that this time progress is going to come from big sclerotic companies rather than from the usual free (including free-loading) fringe groups ?

(Speaking of which, if we fuck up our civilization badly enough, the Amish look to be in a pretty good position to be the basis for the next one ! (Efficiency being antinomic with resilience.))

ltbarcly35• 4 years ago

The legal system and a stable non amish government keeps them safe. In a collapse they will sadly be overrun by desperate people who aren't pacifists and who use guns.

The history of the amish is being chased from place to place. I think they are admirable and very special, but they would not fair well in a period of serious instability.

kidgorgeous• 4 years ago

Why do parents do this? What a waste of time. Give your kids the phone, show them exactly where all the stuff is you don't want them to see, and then let them rock out.

When my parents tried to shield me from stuff, that never worked. I would just ask a friend, 'Hey, can I borrow your phone?"

vmurthy• 4 years ago

I decided to move away for big tech

Please correct the tile to "from" . Reading the original title made me think that a start-up guy moved to big tech for his children.

nonrandomstring2• 4 years ago

Well done. Your children will definitely thank you for reasons not even apparent today. Teaching children about technology, rather than letting them be taught by technology is the key here.

This is the new tobacco. As research accumulates on detrimental effects (individual cognitive impact and societal damage) it's going to get easier to do the right thing for your children. It's hard right now in 2022, as seen in the many hostile comments from those who've made other life choices and feel obliged to defend them.

urlwolf8• 4 years ago

The author of the book 'digital vegan', the most impactful thing I've read in at least a year, responded to my post. I'm fulfilled :)

nonrandomstring2• 4 years ago

For real? Stoked! I've kinda considered that one a "failure" and moved on to "Ethics for Hackers" for Routledge - which I promise will pull no punches. :)

t0bia_s• 4 years ago

I'm not sure if blocking kids to have smartphone while using it is good way to teach them something. Kids repeating things that their parents do. If we will be glued to screens, they will probably do the same.

However I agree with article.

stinos• 4 years ago

There's almost no hope of having privacy on the web

This is the feeling I, and many others I know, have as well. You try to do some things here and there (using FF with UBO and DDG and no Google account and browsing FB in separate container and whatnot) and hope it improves privacy, but in the end you just don't really know whether it works or not. The way modern websites/apps/tracking/... work is way out of my field and I cannot be bothered to figure out whether the measures I do take, actually do improve privacy, let alone to what extent. As a result, I kinda gave up and assume that whatever I do is probably tracked and possibly linked to my persona. I don't like the feeling of that assumption, nor being tracked, yet day in day out I'm on the internet again. Because after all it kicks too wonderful to not do it.

ectospheno• 4 years ago

UBO is a great idea from a malware risk reduction perspective alone. Any privacy protection is just a bonus.

BlueTemplar7• 4 years ago

If you're in the EU, taking a stance against the GAFAMs is getting ever easier.

Since you have pre-teens, being a role model is probably the best you can do - boycott them in all your life. Yes, it's hard to refuse to use both Android and iOS, Slack, Github, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Zoom, TikTok, LinkedIn and their ilk even in your work - but at some point one has to take some responsibilities !

Especially that there's an opportunity for someone in the infocom industry these days with the rebirth of ("real") Linux smartphones.

(Note that this doesn't remove all the issues with social media, just most of them.)

https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/

nivenkos• 4 years ago

But like here in Sweden Mobile BankID forces you to use Android or Apple.

And at least that's a great improvement over the old BankID that forced you to use Windows.

But even both of those are massive improvements over the old days of constant in-person appointments (and delays), paper forms, etc.

I think it's the lesser evil tbh. Go live in Germany to experience the hassle of a technologically backward society (cash-only, paper forms and no widespread online authentication, in-person bureaucracy, widespread use of faxes or letters for service changes, etc.)

I do wish the EU/European governments would invest in Linux and FOSS to develop competitors to the US though. Atm we're basically a US colony, and tech salaries and opportunities reflect that.

BlueTemplar7• 4 years ago

Change banks ? Clearly alternatives exist since I assume even in Sweden a not an insignificant minority of the population never had access to Windows or Android or Apple.

And at this point using cash, checks, and other paper alternatives is clearly a lesser evil than being forced (to stay) on Android or iOS.

Thorentis2• 4 years ago

The easiest way to achieve something like this, is to embed yourself within a community of like minded people. If you don't give your kid a smartphone, but you send them to a school where everybody has smartphones, you're just setting them up to be an outcast. You need to find a school with parents who are like minded. That way, they will make friends with people who do not have smartphones, etc. Most capital cities in Western countries have at least one such school, but they may be difficult to find.

bsenftner• 4 years ago

I don't have kids myself, but every child I've met from a Waldorf School has been a captivating budding intelligence https://www.waldorfeducation.org/ They teach from a creativity standpoint, without technology. I'm a bad advocate, but every interaction with a Waldorf student sticks in my mind as "that kid's going somewhere".

giraffe_lady2• 4 years ago

They are probably coming from, and going to, the same place as most students whose parents can afford $20k/year tuition for them.

someguydave2• 4 years ago

They probably inherited genes for above average IQs

vegai_• 4 years ago

One way would be to get a smart device that has extensive parental surveillance support, and use all of those features. At least Apple has fine support via its Screen Time and Family features.

Check what your kid does online and how much they do it. You would be naturally inclined to do the exactly same thing in real life if real life contained as much stuff and different kinds of people as the internet does.

97s9• 4 years ago

I have a son who is 11. All of his friends have smart phones. He will have friends over to the house and the friends will sit there and stare at their phones. My son who doesn't have a phone will be like, hey can you get off tiktok so we can play or go outside? It is rather sad to see this, they are hanging out sharing videos they find on their feeds through their phones. One time my son said, hey get off your phone and lets go scooter around the neighborhood, the kid replied, hey I think I am going to go home. He wanted to surf his phone more than actually hang out with his friend.

I think I made a very good decision not to give my son a phone until he is driving. Instead of surfing tiktok all day, he learns music, does origami, plays outside, helps me with the garden and many other things that bring him a lot of joy. I obviously help him with whatever interest he has, and I think him seeing the way his friends handle social media has made him not really want a phone anymore. He doesn't even mention it to me like he did when all his friends first started getting one. He sees how addicted they are and how he doesn't even have those friends over anymore.

I think people over estimate the "pariah" thing. I grew up in a family of alcoholism, so I chose never to drink. At first people would ask me to drink with them at parties and such. Eventually they realized I never gave in, so when they were out buying alcohol, they would always buy me a pack of soda so when I came I would have something to drink with them. So if the friends are good, I don't think our kids will be pariahs. I think/hope that instead our kids will just find people who appreciate and understand their choices or the choices of their parents. If they don't, are they that good of friends after all? I think it is okay to have less friends, if the quality is higher.

micromacrofoot5• 4 years ago

Exercise a little caution if you can though, I was the kid without tv in their house and in middle school it resulted in having no friends and I resented my parents for it.

97s9• 4 years ago

Do you mean because you didn't understand like common things with kids because you had no tv? Or because you were raised like completely different?

codebolt2• 4 years ago

It's possible to walk a middle road here. My 11-y.o. daughter has a smartphone, but I use parental controls so she can only use apps for a certain amount of time each day (I chose 1 hr on weekdays, 2 hrs on weekends). This makes it possible for her to engage with her peers online, but also protected from becoming totally addicted.

97s9• 4 years ago

Yea. This is something I have thought about, but the wife and I have decided to just wait and see how the middle school years go. I imagine it is going to probably become amplified.

It is interesting to think about how we understand social things for our kids.

When I grew up the only social time I had was when I actually hung out with my friends. We didn't have internet until I was around 16ish. The only social aspect we had outside of school was actually hanging with friends or talking on the land line. It's amazing how it is expected now for kids to be able to communicate with their friends 24/7.

I'm not sure if this is good or bad. As a parent I want to be the main influencer in my kids life for a bit longer still I think. I sound so controlling but in reality my son has a ton of freedom and is really a responsible kid for his age.

abledon5• 4 years ago

One time my son said, hey get off your phone and lets go scooter around the neighborhood, the kid replied, hey I think I am going to go home. He wanted to surf his phone more than actually hang out with his friend

That is so sad. Interesting to see that china has 'LOCKED' down screen time controls for their youth, but they 'strategically' let tiktok run unfettered in other countries

tstrimple2• 4 years ago

I have a son who is 11. All of his friends have smart phones. He will have friends over to the house and the friends will sit there and stare at their phones. My son who doesn't have a phone will be like, hey can you get off tiktok so we can play or go outside?

I have a daughter who is 10. She and most of her friends have a smart phone. She is friends with a neighbor girl who is home schooled. When they hang out, the home schooled girl who has extremely limited access to electronics just wants to sit inside and watch shows and play games while my daughter wants to go outside and play. In fact, when she's hanging out with any of her friends none of them are glued to their phones. Anecdotes are fun!

97s9• 4 years ago

My son has access to all the other great things like tv, streaming, video games etc. I think going all one way or all the other is of course no good also. It is about a nice mix, right?

ss108• 4 years ago

What about the useful aspects of being able to reach/keep tabs on your kid, have it available for them for emergencies, etc? Is it still possible to buy a flip-phone or something for such purposes?

I don't have a child, but I wouldn't mind buying them a Nokia brick once they are around 12 or 13 lol

97s9• 4 years ago

As a parent I usually know the general where about of my kid like 99% of the time (or at least where to start looking), and if I don't know exactly where he is I know how to contact whoever he is with to find out. Of course this will change as he gets into middle/highschool.

I mean we grew up without phones and our parents+ grew up without phones. I think it will be fine. He knows both of our phone numbers so if he ever needed something he would probably just ask a stranger to borrow their phone to call his parents or something.

I might be the edge case here, but I really like that he has to think about what he is going to do, or where he is going to go with his friends; that he might have to somehow contact me so he has to plan ahead. This is what we did when we were kids, we would have to let our parents know ahead of time where they could find us. It is sort of a responsibility that has kind of faded away with everyone having phones.

polishdude20• 4 years ago

It's interesting to think that right now, at your son's age, most people have friends that are dictated by their classrooms and just the people forced to be around them from 9-3 every day.

I noticed as I finished high school and post secondary school, my friends became people who I actually wanted to hang out with. I had complete freedom to find others to socialize with that were more similar to me.

I guess my question is, how much of an impact does not having a smartphone when you're a teenager have when you reach adulthood? Based on what you've described with your son, it seems like he's benefitting more from not having one.

97s9• 4 years ago

I don't know, and I won't know until later I guess if it is a major mistake or not. He knows that if he wants to go to hang out with friends he can just get their parents number and I will call them and be like hey can our boys hang out, I will come get your kid etc.

The one thing I do know is that there isn't much good left in social media besides a few edge cases where its a resourceful group that hasn't moved off the platforms. I don't use social media anymore. We had to lead by example, so my wife and I both removed it from our lives. We are better off for sure without it.

It is an infinite time suck, and while that might be fine for adults who are grounded in their work life and need an outlet to just relax. Children have so much room to learn, explore and develop that it isn't a healthy eco-system for them to be on for hours and hours a day.

yumraj• 4 years ago

I agree. I'm a little disappointed really to read so many people talk about kids becoming social pariah and how they're just going to teach kids how to use social networks responsibly.

My older did not get a cellphone till 9th grade, that too because the kid used to walk to school. I use pi-hole at home and the kid has never used FB, Instagram, Tiktok. Unfortunately kids use Discord for communicating, so had to allow that, but we had a discussion about the language to use on such platforms and so on. And, so far I believe the kid is fine since I didn't teach them to just use the social platforms responsibly, rather I taught them (I hope) to not use the social platforms at all except for messaging when absolutely necessary. Moreover I try to tell the kid to use browser as much as possible rather than get the apps.

And, for the record I don't use FB, IG, or any other platforms myself - so we lead by example.

So, far I have not heard much protest. What happens when the kid will be in college is anyone's guess. But I personally believe that teaching kids a mistrust of social networks is inherently better than trying to teach them how to use them responsibly, since I don't believe they can be used responsibly.

EDIT: to add, my kid uses DDG instead of Google for search. Does use Gmail, but also has own domain with custom emails. PS5 and Switch, but no network play. Changed password immediately when was forced to use Gmail on a public school computer once.. So, I guess we're just teaching kids different things.

97s9• 4 years ago

So we are pretty similar. We don't use social media, either. We feel that it is silly to be like, don't get on this, if we are also on it. Our kids still have tv, switch, etc etc, but I make sure that I don't allow anything into the house that is inherently made to trick them into spending infinite time on, which is becoming harder and harder to do. For example, when we were kids, games had a beginning and then an end. That isn't always the case now, lots of games have infinite updates and more and more to do, so I am careful to explain that hey, you are playing this game a lot because it always has more task for you to do, are you enjoying just completing these virtual tasks everyday? Are you gaining anything from it, I understand you are relaxing from your day at school, but how long are you going to spend on this mindless thing? Then he will usually look at me and agree that he probably has been on too long and will end what he is doing and go find enjoyment elsewhere with something that isn't designed to be addictive and the perfect challenge dopamine hit.

jjav• 4 years ago

I have a son who is 11. All of his friends have smart phones.

My child is also 11. Fortunately none of the friends or anyone in class has a smartphone yet.

I think this is somewhat easier here, in Silicon Valley. Most of the parents are either directly in tech or in very adjacent fields so we experience how the sausage is made and want no part of it. So parents are pretty aligned on no social media and minimal tech. I don't use a smartphone myself, so helps in leading by example. (I have one, but mostly it sits in my work backpack and I hardly ever take it out.)

Most of them have laptops, although only very recently. So they can research (DDG, never google) topics for school and personal interest but it's not something they have nearby most of the time.

So luckily they still get together and do the same things I was doing at 11, ride bikes everywhere and play in the park, forest and beach. Weekends we go camping in areas with minimal to no cell signals (also wonderful for parents, impossible to check jira tickets when there is no signal!). I'm sure it'll get more difficult in middle school and beyond, time will tell.

urlwolf8• 4 years ago

One effective thing I'm doing for myself (hard do to on mobile, or for kids in general) is to use the Firefox addon 'disengaged'. It hides upvotes, likes, and recommendations.

https://github.com/a13o/disengaged/blob/master/CODE_OF_ETHIC...

Tade0• 4 years ago

I realized that if I am to protect my child from smartphone addiction, I need to start with myself and that is the hardest part really.

So far I try not to use it in their presence and if it appears, we speak of it as "the monolith". The monolith is mysterious, but ultimately it's just a slab of glass. Less interesting than e.g. musical toys.

Also you can't take the monolith to the pool, which happens to be our weekly family activity.

As for internet access(in its modern incarnation), because that's what it's actually all about: I have a little quiz in mind, which should at least help my child familiarize themselves with the dangers of sharing data and pay-to-win schemes.

slackfan2• 4 years ago

Bingo. As parents we are the biggest influencers (hah) on our kids' lives.

kkfx• 4 years ago

I've made similar decision few years ago, from a big city to a mountain (but well served) area. My usage of crapphones (one of the more meaningful and politically correct name for smartphone, the other less politically correct and more real is macro-spy) drop drastically. I still have a smartphone (moderately new, one of the less crappy I found) but it's at home just in case of specific needs. Normally I go out without any phone, for car travel I tend to have a classic Nokia just in case.

To follow the post smartphones now are like party cards of the nazi-fascist era, in the past they are just a means for those regimes to discriminate citizens, now they are "active" instead of "passive" they are not just a discrimination tool, the original social score, they are active surveillance devices that can monitor much of any human life, but reasons for me to live the city have gone far beyond that tech aspect:

- IMVHO cities now and especially in the near future are not anymore human aggregate for productivity, service and sociability but open internment camps, where very few can materially control and rule many more humans, like an intensive farm, outside cities it's just not equally possible, a dictatorship can disrupt services and life outside but not much surveilling and oppress a spread population.

- seen the public aspects of the Green New Deal it was clear to me that cities will be just receptacle of poverty and pain: we can't evolve a dense city so an already made city is doomed, no well done insulation and appropriate energy saving design, no room for renewables etc while energy costs skyrocketing and that's not just a matter of cost, also a matter of physical availability of a service. Without electricity in a dense city there is no room for individual citizens to backup.

- density issues already surpass the advantages and foreseeable and (fore)seen unrest will naturally be much bigger in cities than outside.

- in any cases being in a served enough area the investment keep it's value reasonably well in almost all cases.

Smartphones and "virtual/surveilled" life vs a less constrained and less artificial one is an important but marginal aspect...

mensetmanusman2• 4 years ago

Our family follows a millennia+ tradition of fasting one day a week. On that day we aren’t supposed to use our digital devices.

It is fascinating seeing the morning transition from fidgety-ness to wanting to explore the real world.

I now feel bad for those trapped all week doom scrolling (no break!).

Life can be so much more, and I am thankful for my ancestors passing on this practical wisdom for leading a fuller life, even as the world has changed…

dayk995• 4 years ago

I think all we can do as parents is just educate our children on how to safely use these devices and teach them how to spot red flags: intrusive ads, bullying, scams, catfishing, everything else wrong with the internet.

If you block their exposure and/or don't trust them, they're going to rebel and it'll be counterproductive for everyone.

source: have a 7 year old daughter who does the exact opposite of what I ask her to do.

Loughla2• 4 years ago

If you block their exposure and/or don't trust them, they're going to rebel and it'll be counterproductive for everyone.

We're raising our kids to question everything. The literal standing rule in our house is - "if there isn't a reason for the rule, it's arbitrary and should be fought".

This has come with consequences (it's certainly annoying to have to explain that NO THE ROAD IS NOT FOR PLAYING IN) but it also has ensured these little kids critically think about everything.

Authoritarian parental behaviors only breed sneaky kids. Source: me and my childhood.

Open and honest communication, acknowledging your own shortcomings, and identifying where you can and cannot help. This is the only way.

devney• 4 years ago

The main point to remember is that the fones we carry aren't for us. They are data-gathering tools for various spy enterprises. Any utility we get out of our fones is largely incidental, or at best it's bait to get us into the trap.

It's interesting that most of the replies here focus on the children aspect, while the same spy-device paradigm applies as much or more to adults.

The bottom line is I just don't get enough utility out of my devices to justify spending all that privacy on them. Plus ads make the internet unusable on them. I'll just use my laptop because it's more convenient.

SpicyLemonZest3• 4 years ago

The replies focus on the children aspect because that strips away the most challenging counterargument: why shouldn't adults be able to decide, as many if not most do, that they do get lots of utility out of their phones and don't much care about being spied on incidentally? It's hard to tell a story where smartphones are more dangerous than smoking, and despite being completely illegal for kids we mostly let people do it once they're old enough.

Epiphany213• 4 years ago

why shouldn't adults be able to decide

The majority of consumers are not tech-savvy enough to make informed decisions when it comes to electronics and their own freedom because the tech stack is just too complex, and even if they wanted to learn about it, most of the hardware and software is closed source and nearly impossible to modify. Most smartphone users don't even know that they're being spied on. To compound the problem, the companies that make the phones put out deceptive advertising claiming that these devices are private, and your data stays in your pocket. They're lying, and even the ToS agreement you click through during a new device setup says as much.

I reject the notion that a majority or even a plurality consent to this garbage.

TomSwirly• 4 years ago

why shouldn't adults be able to decide

Because the average adult is completely uninformed on this matter. And this is no fault of theirs - life is far, far too complicated and busy to become experts on the thousands of things we participate in.

Luckily, we can rely on regulation. We plug in a new appliance and it doesn't blow up. Our cars rarely catch fire on the highway due to defects, and if they do, regulation and the legal system forces recalls.

gordaco• 4 years ago

I hate smartphones mostly because of this (although there are more reasons), and I wish I could stop using them altogether, but there are too many people out there who only communicate using text applications (WhatsApp and Telegram, mostly. Which are about the only things I've installed aside from Firefox, which I also use only rarely). So in the end it's basically a choice of eschewing your social life or eschewing your privacy, at least partially. I've managed to convince a grand total of 0 people to use other means of communication such as email. There are also some services that I use (and some that I'm forced to use as part of my job, although these go to the company phone) that just plain refuse to offer a web interface and I can only use them as a fucking app. Who knows which data might it gather.

Windows users are also suffering a similar problem because of the smartphonisation of the desktop (side note, I hate that people still use that meme about "one version of Windows is bad and the next one is good". W10 still has most of the problems of W8, and some of them are even worse. I don't think we're ever going to get a "good" Windows ever again). We need to choose between being able to run old, trusty software or being actually in control of our computer (in terms of privacy, updates and so on). Then again I suspect that I have only a few months left of personal Windows usage.

web007• 4 years ago

My phone is for me, whether or not FAANG et al gets some value out of it.

I get more utility out of my tech interactions on my phone than I give to "various spy enterprises". I use many services to their maximum, IMO negating most of the benefit they gain from loss-leader products that are their bait for me-as-a-product.

You _are_ being tracked and monetized. Your devices _are_ fingerprinted, and your demographics are tabulated and collated. The modern web doesn't have an effective opt-out (Ye Olde Web didn't either), so you may as well go all-in and extract as much value of your own as you can from the system.

throwaway787544• 4 years ago

It's sad that people are having this fearful response to technology. Yes, companies are tracking you, manipulating you subconsciously, and making money off you. But you don't have to take it as a threat. You still have agency over your life and you can decide how much you interact with tech and when. You don't have to run screaming.

In terms of being opted-in by somebody else: yeah, that sucks, and has been a danger ever since Facebook started auto tagging faces from pictures at parties. But we need to pressure them to add controls, not just pull ourselves away from society.

mobiuscog• 4 years ago

Yes, companies are tracking you, manipulating you subconsciously, and making money off you. But you don't have to take it as a threat.

This is the best summary of why more people should disconnect.

It is not a fearful response to technology - none of this is about technology - it's about large corporations making money from things that they never had the right to take.

freediver• 4 years ago

Making sure my kids are not tracked and exposed to ads from the early age is the main reason I've built Kagi Search and Orion Browser. It is a long shot, but they already use Kagi as default search engine on their school-provided Chromebooks, and Orion as default browser on their home iMac.

slackfan2• 4 years ago

When my kids are old enough to make their own money, and can buy their own cellphone and run upkeep on their plan, they can. In the meantime, they're getting a late 90s/early 2000s computer for them to learn how to computer on.

The biggest perk of living somewhere where cellphone service is spotty as hell is that you don't rely on having service.

Epiphany213• 4 years ago

I may go without a smartphone completely AND tell my children they cannot have a smartphone.

Now that's a sign of good parenting. Often times parents will lose sight of the fact that their kids are people too. Their brains and personalities aren't really developed enough yet to cope with certain things, so it's easy for adults to dismiss the potential for learning they do have. Children are like sponges that absorb any information you put in front of them. If you don't parent them, the internet will.

I strongly recommend sitting them down and calmly telling them all of the reasons, in detail, why they shouldn't want an electronic tracking device and why you're making this decision for them. Children are pretty smart and they'll probably understand most of it.

thenerdhead2• 4 years ago

I don't think there's a way out. I believe it's up to us to accept the reality that this problem is only going to get worse before it gets better.

I firmly believe your tools as a parent is to start understanding concepts taught in Stoicism, Taoism, Buddhism, and more.

The ideas around moderation, detachment, and effortless action should be praised. Technology is a tool if you consider these ideas. It can work for you, not against you.

I wouldn't be in the same position I am today without my early addiction to the internet & video games. My parents tried their best. Now being 30 with 2 young kids, I'm more prepared than ever to fight the good fight. It's going to be hard, but perhaps when they grow up they will also look back to these lessons I was trying to teach them.

abledon5• 4 years ago

can you go more indepth into 'effortless action' and how my kids can apply it to doing their homework?

thenerdhead2• 4 years ago

Think of it like procrastination. Why do you do it? Because you either have little motivation or little clarity on how to do it. The idea is one of "Wu Wei"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_wei

https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/wu-wei-doing-nothing

I believe this applies more to parents than children in the sense that the more you allow things to just be, the more likely they will just get done. The Tao of Pooh is a short read that covers this concept a bit more.

DavideNL• 4 years ago

I don't think there's a way out.

Well in the long run there is: laws. The EU is finally moving in the right direction at least.

So what we must do is vote for political parties that support this. And support/donate to people like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems

But yea, it will get worse and take time before it gets better indeed.

wwilim• 4 years ago

What is your uninstalling of all social media apps going to help? Your son is still going to end up on TikTok because somebody recorded him doing a scooter trick, you're just going to pretend it doesn't happen because you can't see it.

Markoff• 4 years ago

As a parent of 4 and 6yo, who NEVER used tablet and their lifetime usage of smartphone can be counted in minutes I'd like to point out different fact which seems to be completely forgotten besdises the social aspect/addiction - child eyesight is developing and while before you saw myopia at university students (caused by extensive reading of materials), you can see it often at small kids nowadays (I just read press release from Czech opticians days ago that 70% of pre-schoolers are using smartphone daily) caused by staring at screen (from short distance) for long periods of time.

FFS people, don't you value eyesight of your kids? I ruined my eyesight by staring at smartphone displays in last 12 years (it was also my work for few years), so I am very vary what can smartphone usage cause.

AMerePotato• 4 years ago

I'm one of the oldest of generation Z born to parents who are the youngest of the boomers. I had completely unregulated access to the internet since age 7 because my parents weren't sophisticated enough to restrict me.

I understand just how manipulative addictive and dangerous the internet can be now. I've grown to be really paranoid about my own internet privacy. I think I would still allow my kid to use the internet unrestricted. I got into some shit I shouldn't have as a kid but it was overwhelmingly a positive impact.

That said, I would try and be very engaged in what my kid is doing on the internet in a supportive way so I would know if I needed to step in. I would schedule offline activities for them to limit screen time. I'd also try and steer them more heavily towards gaming which have social aspects to it, but less likely to cause self-esteem issues or rage-bait you than the social media platforms

lowwave• 4 years ago

I've being in tech since Apple II. this is one of best articled I have read in a long time! Thank you, and would like start group that can support this effort.

unplugnow• 4 years ago

I am a 20+ year veteran of FAANGs. I studied compsci at the best schools and personally had a hand in shaping a lot of the tech that powers features used by billions of people. I’ve refused to work on projects that track people just to use them as the product. I refuse to work on products that are purposely designed to be addictive. I won’t let my kids near this stuff. Let that sink in for a moment.

rubinlinux• 4 years ago

You have to raise your kids for the world that will exist when THEY become adults, not the world that existed when YOU became an adult.

These things exist and they aren't going away. Kids need to be familiar with them in order to understand the world they will live in. They need to build up tolerances and cooping strategies for spam and online teasing and addiction to it. If you just ban them from it, they'll have no familiarity and no immunity to its temptations. As with everything, moderation is the key.

I decided to move away from big tech for my children and myself

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