
How Apple's Screen Time is outsmarted by kids, frustrating parents - tysone
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/15/teens-find-circumventing-apples-parental-controls-is-childs-play/
======
chadlavi
It's not Apple's job to parent your kids, and "smart phone addiction" is an
over-hyped fad scare. If someone is super concerned about their teen watching
minecraft videos at 2am on vacation, they should take their kid's phone away
at night. But also, they're on vacation, and it's not like they're watching
porn, so is it even that bad?

This is a bit of an inflammatory comparison, but I stayed up reading with a
flashlight a lot as a kid. Was that terrible for me? Should my flashlight have
had a setting to limit the times I can use it? Would anyone say I had an
unhealthy book addiction, and that publishers should do something about it?

~~~
mindgam3
You glossed over the most legit complaint raised in the article:

> They search for bugs that make it easy to keep using their phones, unbeknown
> to parents, like changing the time to trick the system, or using iMessage to
> watch YouTube videos. “These are not rocket science, backdoor, dark web sort
> of hacks,” says Chris McKenna, founder of the Internet safety group Protect
> Young Eyes. “It blows me away that Apple hasn’t thought through the fact
> that a persistent middle school boy or girl can bang around and find them.”

And yeah, it’s not that Apple hasn’t thought about this or that fixing these
kinds of bugs would take more than a day or few to fix.

The issue is Apple only implemented this feature to head off shareholder
criticism, not because it believes it. Apple is not incentivized to make its
products less addictive.

~~~
matwood
All those problems are solved by taking the phone away. We got a cordless
phone when I was a kid (yeah I'm old), and it didn't take long before every
night my mom or dad came around and made sure the phone was on the base.

I also played a lot of video games, and if I played more than a couple of
hours in a row my dad would come and just unplug the Nintendo. Drove me nuts
(saved games on those old cartridges were very finicky), but it made me go
outside.

~~~
mindgam3
See, I agree with this mentality. I would actually respect Apple a lot if they
had just come out and told parents to "just take the phone away" rather than
launching a half implemented feature and then forgetting about it.

Unfortunately there's no way that would ever happen. Even if Apple PR would
ever allow such a statement to be made, which it wouldn't, requiring parents
to do some actual parenting might provoke major unrest.

------
lalos
In 10 years, we'll read HN comments of how someone started to code after
outsmarting Screen Time on their device. These are the type of experiences
that give you that thrill of what else could be possible by understanding how
technology works.

~~~
ghego1
Totally agree. Additionally, I think that breaking some rule is an essential
part of growing up and learning. So it's just much better if the rules that a
kid aims to break are of this kind and make her/him learn in the process.

------
BrandonWatson
Back in 2006 I cofounded a company called IMSafer. My co-founders went on to
be S09 class with Y!Combinator.

We grew up as hackers and thought we could end around the problem of kids
removing safe guards to our software. What we quickly found was that
(surprising no one at all, least of all us) kids have way more time on their
hands and are willing to expend way more energy to remove blockers than
parents do to enforce them.

It's a tricky issue - kids and online. We actively encouraged parents to have
dialog with their kids about what they were doing online. The issue we were
attempting to solve was keeping bad people out of the child's social networks.
All of the other solutions were, and still do, focus on keeping porn off the
computer. That's a doomed system. Parents need to be involved and have a on-
going dialog. I believed it when we founded IMSafer 13 years ago, and I
believe it now (as a parent with 3 kids, two of them teenagers).

Our service did a lot of very novel things for the time (machine based
analysis of chat conversations looking for patterns of predation), but I
continue to be amazed at how much energy we put into the "but my kids keep
uninstalling it" problem. We came up with some pretty good solutions, which
were P95 effective, but (again, surprising no one on the technical team) the
kids who figured out how to circumvent came up with some pretty amazing
solves.

The most impressive was this one kid who basically took over their parent's
account, gave themselves admin access, set their parents to minimal access,
but then changed specific .exe file pointers to give the parents the
perception that they still had admin access to their machine when they were
trying to run applications.

~~~
guyzero
"What we quickly found was that (surprising no one at all, least of all us)
kids have way more time on their hands and are willing to expend way more
energy to remove blockers than parents do to enforce them."

this this this.

limiting screen time isn't a technical issue, it's an economic issue - kids
and parents have different levels of effort they're willing to expend to deal
with these limits. Ultimately the kid needs to incentivized to conform to the
limit set by the parent.

~~~
krustyburger
An essential truth of parenting is that much of the dynamic between parent and
child actually involves the child incentivizing the parent, or at least trying
to.

------
stirner
When I was young my parents installed a system-wide child filter for OS X
called Safe Eyes that had tons of false positives (and more importantly,
blocked online games). I didn't know much about computers but it drove me to
learn how to install and configure Linux so that I could do what I wanted.
Kids find a way.

~~~
yummypaint
My parents tried a similar thing on my system i had built in high school. I
immediately reinstalled the os and secured root on all the networking
hardware. We remained poised for mutually assured destruction until they
dropped it.

~~~
aidenn0
Was this for content or time? As my kids approach HS age, I can't imagine
trying to regulate what media they consume (though the quantity could indeed
be a concern).

------
musicale
Never underestimate the genius-level ability of children to get around
restrictions imposed by parents, teachers, or anyone else.

Come to think of it, I have even played a video game about it, called "Mom hid
my game!"

I salute their ingenuity as a triumph of the human spirit in its unstoppable
quest for freedom, justice, and Minecraft for all. Though I suppose drug
addicts are similarly clever...

~~~
Smithalicious
It's just the hacker spirit. All kids have it, many people who muck about with
computers a lot have it. Many people with little respect for "the system" have
it too; that includes drug addicts, but also rednecks (redneck engineering)
and so on.

------
paxys
Brings back memories of getting around various iterations of useless parental
control software on the family computer back in the day. And even before that,
picking the lock on the TV cabinet to get to the Nintendo.

Technology changes, kids don't.

------
hi5eyes
breaking news on 'hacker news'

rules are meant to be broken

\- every kid with enough determination in the history of mankind

------
outworlder
Oh look. A general purpose computer is being used to do general purpose
computer things.

Interestingly, corporations have more ways to restrict device usage than
parents, by adding a profile and changing the device to 'supervised'.

------
neonate
[https://outline.com/hVy68n](https://outline.com/hVy68n)

[http://archive.is/RlUdP](http://archive.is/RlUdP)

~~~
_-_T_-_
HN users find circumventing WaPo paywall is child's play

~~~
neonate
How? The usual tricks don't work for me.

------
gnicholas
A story from a high-tech HS in SoCal:

School has wifi with content blocking, and many students BYOD. Teachers can
override the content blocker on a one-time basis by typing in an override
password on a student's device.

So a student puts a keylogger on his own device, navigates to a page that he
should be allowed to access, but which the content blocker flags, and he gets
the teacher to enter the override password. Thanks to the keylogger, now he
has it too. Kids are sneaky!

------
GhettoMaestro
Thought: Is there a way a parent can turn the phone into a "basic" mode
between times of X and Y?

EG: At 11PM, the phone goes into basic mode. It can only call the list of pre-
defined numbers (parents/family) and emergency services.

Maybe give a 30 15 and 5 minute count-down warning that way the user can
gracefully finish their activities currently at hand.

~~~
Someone
“Downtime” comes close. [https://support.apple.com/en-
us/HT208982](https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208982):

 _”Think of this as a nap for your screen time. When you schedule downtime in
Settings, only phone calls and apps that you choose to allow are available.
Downtime applies to all of your Screen Time-enabled devices, and you get a
reminder five minutes before it starts.”_

I don’t think you can restrict what numbers can be called.

------
thrower123
This is ultimately a futile effort. The only value in implementing content
blockers or usage restrictions would be to encourage computer proficiency in
circumventing and defeating them. You can't outwit a bored thirteen year-old
over any appreciable time scale.

------
scarejunba
Haha, man, parents have had all these limitations imposed since ages and so
many of us learned to be what we are by dodging those limitations.

Funny, I told myself I'd be more open when I was an adult and here we all are,
doing the same thing.

~~~
ip26
Sometimes I feel like the process of growing up, and in particular of becoming
a parent, is a process of learning my parents were mostly right all along.

~~~
hi5eyes
time is a flat circle

------
Magicstatic
What’s peculiar about this is that parental restrictions itself on iOS has
always been flawed, Apple knew about it, and it’s still an issue to this day.
The sole purpose of parental restrictions on iPhone was to block adult
websites... and that worked as well as you can imagine:
[https://www.jonbottarini.com/2017/03/09/bypassing-apples-
ios...](https://www.jonbottarini.com/2017/03/09/bypassing-apples-
ios-10-restrictions-settings-twice/)

------
eigenloss
There's a really easy solution here: just use a device with a super shitty
battery and only charge it once a day. Then, hide the cable.

Now there's an incentive for them to learn electrical engineering.

------
mixmastamyk
When our kid's ipod reaches its time limit, up comes an "ignore" button. Yes,
thanks Apple. /s

