Then I would say that communities and administrators need to do a better job of restricting the internet access of those devices they provide kids, rather than punishing the outside world for the bad decisions of a handful of adults in neglecting their obligations. My schools implemented restricted ISPs with curated content as I was growing up, and eventually just a basic DNS filter by the time I reached HS. My current employer implements similar DNS checks on the firewall to block social media sites and, presumably, adult content (I’m not dumb enough to test the latter). My schools also had no problem providing local storage and collaboration tooling without internet access, so perhaps the argument should be made that schools shouldn’t be getting kids hooked on Big Tech cloud services a la iPads and Chromebooks, especially when children and parents become captive markets via school equipment mandates. Maybe we should be loaning out Linux laptops without WiFi or Ethernet ports with “Internet in a Box” preloaded on them for reference material, rather than shoving kids out into the wild internet absent guidance and context.
I also flatly refuse the whole “we ID people in real life all the time” argument. The physical world is a default shared space, with finite boundaries and clear obligations. The digital world is the exact opposite: vague, nebulous, ever-shifting and changing, with no clear demarcation between states, or countries, or people. That argument reveals a complete misunderstanding of why physical ID checks work and digital ones never, ever will at scale, and I refuse to entertain anything predicated upon it.
And here’s the dirty, nasty, disgusting little secret that parents don’t seem to realize or care about: bad actors in education are leveraging the fact kids have internet devices to spy on them. I’ve had CIO-equivalents in public and private education ask me to build surveillance tools to scan messages and photos on students’ private devices when connected to school networks under the guise of “safety”, which I refused to do because hell naw does anyone other than parents need full access to a child’s device. I have worked in the education sector, I have seen first hand the mismatch between the goals of parents, the needs of children, and the ambitions of grotesquely underpaid technical talent and the resultant quality of candidates that often seems to attract (or lack thereof - no disrespect to the good ones out there, but ya’ll are the fringe minority based on my experiences).
Website age checks aren’t protecting kids, they’re harming adults. And bad adults are exploiting this knowledge gap to harm kids, too.
I also flatly refuse the whole “we ID people in real life all the time” argument. The physical world is a default shared space, with finite boundaries and clear obligations. The digital world is the exact opposite: vague, nebulous, ever-shifting and changing, with no clear demarcation between states, or countries, or people. That argument reveals a complete misunderstanding of why physical ID checks work and digital ones never, ever will at scale, and I refuse to entertain anything predicated upon it.
And here’s the dirty, nasty, disgusting little secret that parents don’t seem to realize or care about: bad actors in education are leveraging the fact kids have internet devices to spy on them. I’ve had CIO-equivalents in public and private education ask me to build surveillance tools to scan messages and photos on students’ private devices when connected to school networks under the guise of “safety”, which I refused to do because hell naw does anyone other than parents need full access to a child’s device. I have worked in the education sector, I have seen first hand the mismatch between the goals of parents, the needs of children, and the ambitions of grotesquely underpaid technical talent and the resultant quality of candidates that often seems to attract (or lack thereof - no disrespect to the good ones out there, but ya’ll are the fringe minority based on my experiences).
Website age checks aren’t protecting kids, they’re harming adults. And bad adults are exploiting this knowledge gap to harm kids, too.