Stop spying on your kid… Jesus.
Kids need access to the internet at a super young age these days for school. If you don’t have some sort of filter in place when they are in single digits or tweens you are just negligent. The internet has some dark corners.
I don’t mind just filters, but reporting it to the parent doesn’t sit right with me. It probably depends on the parent though
Harder the surveillance, harder the kid works to bypass them
Kids are smart, good on OOP to teach their kids to use a VPN, about dual booting, and more
If the kid is old enough to purposely bypass the security, they’re probably around the right age to find some of the stuff on the other side. But you don’t want them accidentally stumbling into it because they searched something seemingly innocent.
If the kids old enough to figure out VPNs, dual booting, and all the other pretty simple workarounds then it is what it is. You can’t control everything. I am talking about the little guys. And this dudes kid is googling how to teach crabs to talk. If someone is searching that they probably aren’t ready to get completely unrestricted access because they are probably pretty young. Like I said, single digits or tweens.
And the proper way is to teach your kids about it and stop treating kids like super fragile glass beings.
Your city probably has some dark corners too, but you don’t set up geofenced tracking beacons to be alarmed if they stumble slightly off the path you intended them to go.
Children should feel comfortable enough to talk to you about bad stuff they encounter, not feel frightened, that they broke a rule.
By the time I was 17, at least on my windows PC, every search I made was reported. Every setting I touched was reported. Every app I use, and how long, reported. Every startup and shutdown reported. Games with chat features were banned. Online games were banned. Every week on Sunday, an email with all this went to my parents, and my dad would forward it to me as a kind of intimidation that “we know all”…
And yes, they used geofenced tracking too.
But I’m a geek, so my Linux laptop and phone were no longer bugged (my only access to other people at the time) by the time I figured it out (around age 16).
Still had to turn the tracker on so they wouldn’t ask why the location pings stopped though.
This kind of obsessive control ought to be illegal. I propose privacy rights at age 16, enforceable by fines, with a safe hotline for those with obsessive parents. They were emotionally abusive, control by external restrictions is often only part of the story in cases like mine.
I’m all for safety filters, but parental controls that can be classified as spyware have no place in a parent-child relationship after the age of 16…
If you use these trackers and barge in “hey I saw what you did on the internet, you’re in trouble.” then you’re doing it wrong. Kids need guidance. If you were negligent enough to let your kid roam the city without supervision, you SHOULD have a tracker on them. We’re talking about little kids not 16+. Many young kids get themselves killed or groomed or into some kind of cult online. When that happens to young kids, parents are negligent. When 12 year olds get addicted to porn, negligence. You can guide your children without being an asshole. I know a lot of us grew up either completely neglected or completely terrified to make a mistake, but there is an in-between.
Teach them the old ways of flash games (or html5 nowadays) and they will have no time for drugs.
Not giving your kids access to the internet at all is insane. You’re setting them up for failure by not actively teaching them how to navigate the Internet and what bs to look out for. Anyone that does this is just trying to indoctrinate their kid and prevent them from being exposed to any other ideas. The ego on parents that think they know enough to entirely prepare their kids for the world is ridiculous. Especially these days. You’re just setting them up to be behind when they’re older and they’ll resent you while they struggle to catch up.
Better yet, don’t let them use the internet.
Good luck with that. And also spying is the best way to lose your kid’s trust.
My parents used this as part of their obsessive-control emotional / psychological abuse. Mostly to try to indoctrinate me into their cult, and their extremist right-wing ideology. There is a place for filters, and even search reports - but search reports ought to end around 14 years, and by 16 there needs to be some form of legal recognition of privacy rights as a human being for cases of isolating abuse as a part of indoctrination. P*rn blockers etc on the router are fine though, the network legally belongs to the parents. But human being, at least after puberty, requires privacy for proper psychological development. Complete surveillance after that time is psychologically and emotionally harmful to both the child and the relationship.
I’m reminiscing the days in school where we’d use proxy sites to get around the school blocklist/monitoring to play dolphin olympics
Reduce it gradually to 0 until 16.
Spare them the embarassement with their peers.
If there’s a reliable way to only be alerted to specific activity, then the parents aren’t really actively spying, in the sense that the kids still have privacy when they aren’t transgressing into prohibited space. As long as that prohibited space is reasonable (huge debate possible there of course) and the kids know about the restrictions. imo
this post is about a child being blocked then reported to their parents for ‘teaching crabs to read’
I don’t think you can defend it as a reasonable prohibited space
