EvaDec 20, 2022

When I tell parents that secretly spying on their kids' internet activities is not a great look, they ask me "Well, what SHOULD I do?"

There is no all-purpose parenting answer, but this report from Malwarebytes outlines many of the key considerations: https://www.malwarebytes.com/resources/attachments/parenting-and-growing-up-online-10-2022.pdf

Show threadStephen CrimDec 20, 2022
@evacide when my kid was 12 or so, she was home from school working on a pass/fail assignment on her Chromebook. I told her I was installing a focus extension that’s requires you to type in a paragraph to disable it. I then monitored her chrome browsing history remotely while at work. What followed was a cat and mouse game of me updating the regex blocklist remotely, culminating in the entry “.*\sfun\s.*” and an infuriated text message from her “YOU BLOCKED FUN?????”
Show threadStephen Crim
@evacide she asked if I always kept track of what she did on the internet, and I told her only when I was worried, and only in ways she knew that I could. She never bothered hiding (that I know of), and I basically never bothered looking.
Dec 20, 2022 at 10:31pmWeb
Show threadStephen CrimDec 20, 2022
@evacide my takeaway from that incident was that me knowing what she was doing didn’t help, and me trying to put controls in place wasn’t a solution. She didn’t need fewer distractions or guardrails: she just wasn’t going to do the fucking assignment, and a contest of wills was just more of a distraction.