alt Hacker NewsAre you a parent?
I have personally used the parental controls on Android, iOS and ChromeOS and to be honest they are terrible. Issues with syncing changes, the terrible UX for parental access control (iOS...), issues around audit/access logs, issues around prompting the parent for access.
I am honestly shocked that Apple known for its polished experience hasn't been forced by angry parents.
My daughter's school actually advised parents to not enable parental controls on her ChromeBook because it would interfere with the school's education websites but my daughter was caught playing web games in class so we decided to lock her down anyways.
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Probably parental control do not bring any profit (they actually add responsibilities, like restriction on ads, collection of data) so the large companies sabotage them by making them too complicated or broken?
Cross-platform support is very poor (iOS/Android/Windows/Mac)if ur trying to use family link. After trying to make FL work for weeks, i moved to another service that has morel granular features than FL and detailed activity reports with web filtering rules but its paid but it atleast works instead of those unusable knobs on FL.
I do feel that if there were actually decent parental controls on the most used systems out there then we might not have got to this point in the first place! It is either a nightmare or impossible to set any sort of sensible controls on internet and social media access for children and teenagers.
This is the improved iOS parental controls. When they shipped it (and for years afterward) it simply did not work https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/apples-parental-contr...
It really is surprising given Apple's reputation for UX and safety.
Why does your daughter have a Chromebook in the first place?
Parental controls on devices are not hard because they are intrinsically hard. The companies just do not care about them, because nobody has forced them to be implemented sensibly. There is absolutely zero reason an Android device could not have a shiny button saying "Kid's device" when you set it up and never need configuring again. So this is not a criticism of the approach, and only a criticism of the companies.
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> my daughter was caught playing web games in class
Hilarious to me. The biggest game of whack-a-mole ever. I would love to know if this lockdown was successful (and if so, how it worked).
In my city, there is a district that is so “locked down” that the images from Wikipedia don’t even load. But guess what? Kids still find ways to play games.