If your child steals a car, are you allowed to say “I can’t watch my kids all time time” and get off consequence free?

Of course not. Do I think it is realistic for parents to keep an eye on their kid 100% of the time, of course not… But, I do expect that parents raise their kids in a progressively less restrictive manner and provide access to more autonomy as the child mautures? Absolutely, and I don’t think it is unreasonable to extend that progressive loosening of the parental leash in the real world to children on the internet. You shouldn’t have to watch your kids all the time on the internet, if they are old enough and mature enough to be on there unsupervised. If they aren’t ready for unsupervised access to the internet, then you shouldn’t allow it.

Okay. Cool that’s what I said too. Just… the way you said it sounded like you were advocating for using bad parenting as a pretext for massive breaches of privacy and identity security.

Ah, so maybe shitty parents isn’t a good enough reason to let a company monetize and eventually lose your PII to the dark web?

I hear you. I guess shitty parents is a good enough reason to let a company monetize your PII for a bit before they (or one of their customers) gets hacked and dumps to the dark web.

It sounds like you are doing the right things.

Long ago, I had a co-worker ask me if fortnite was okay for their kid to play, and I said “I don’t know. Why don’t you go play fortnight with your kid this weekend and see for yourself” and it was like a switch flipped in their head. Playing games online with your kids is something you can do, both to see how people are interacting with them, and to see how they are interacting with other people. I think it is really important too, that kids (especially only-childs) see other people gaming online first hand, so they can see that the person on the other end could just as easily be their mom, or grandpa, or another human being, and not just a bot that they can antagonize without consequence.

My nephew plays lots of on online games. My sister checks in with me to make sure that he is both playing games that are appropriate for him, and with people who are appropriate to play with. We’ve setup a discord specifically for him and his friends, and the account he uses is actually my sister’s account, on her own device, so she has direct control over what communities he’s on in discord, who he talks to, and what content he is exposed to.

He is not allowed to play public lobby games with out her supervision, or a trusted “chaperone” (one of many IRL friend and family members) being in the lobby with him. This is as much about protecting him from harmful content, as it is about teaching him proper gaming etiquette. He was showing some toxic behaviors (greifing mainly) and I shut that down pretty quick.

And how do you , practically, do that?

By paying attention to your child.

Before the internet, parents could exert control by knowing where their children were physically going and who they were talking to over the phone.

Yes, by paying attention to their children.

Even in the '90s and 2000s, parents could control a child’s Internet use by limiting time on the family computer.

Yep, by paying attention to when the kid was on the computer and what they were doing on there.

Nowadays? Just about every child has a tablet or phone. Even the ones who don’t have devices at home, or have their device use monitored at home, have access to school devices.

If you give a child a tablet or phone, you should probably pay attention to what they are doing with it. You wouldn’t just give them a full tool box to play with unsupervised.

Exerting control over a child’s online activity now means monitoring everything they do on every device they have access to, including during the eight hours per day or so that they’re on devices for school work

Yep, by paying attention to the kid.

No parent has time for that.

Bullshit. You need to pay attention to your kids, that’s a basic fucking part of parenting.

And if the child is deliberately trying to hide some kind of illicit online activity, monitoring becomes an order of magnitude more difficult

Maybe you should pay attention to your kid and not let them have unsupervised access to the whole Internet until they are ready for it?

because, again, children have access to their own devices, school devices, their friends’ devices, library devices, and dozens of other devices a parent may not even know about and has no ability to monitor.

Actually, you do have an ability to monitor who your kid spends time with, and when. It’s called parenting.

I’m frankly horrified by the increasing requirements for real identity verification but let’s not pretend being a parent is the same as it was in the '70s.

Let’s not pretend that phones and the Internet only started existing in 2026 too. I was a child in the 90’s, during the real “Wild West” days of the internet. If anything, parents have more tools and controls over what their child can access in 2026 than they did in 2000. There weren’t “child” cellphone controls when I got my first phone. My dad didn’t give me one until I both needed it, and was mature enough to have it. The parental controls on my old Window 2000 machine were laughably easy to defeat. Do you know what kept me out of trouble though? My dad paid attention to when I used the computer, what I was doing on there, and how much I was doing it.

Either parent your kid, or don’t, but it is not my job to make sure your kid is coddled on the internet.

Should be pretty evident from the comment.

Hear me out. Maybe, if you are a parent, its your duty to keep an eye on your child, and exert some control over the spaces and people they interact with?

Wait, you don’t just hang like 6 of them out of your desktop by their cables and wipe them while you sleep?

Yes… Eat…

Let’s face it. If you want to be invisible to DHS right now, just find an old article from the daily stormer or something and start posting far left stuff in the comments. This admin is going to go faaaaaaaar out of their way to avoid pissing off the nationalist hate groups that give their stochastic terrorism some real teeth.

Unfortunately, without hard evidence, it is technically a conspiracy theory. I don’t think the statistics alone can prove that the election was manipulated. It’s entirely possible that those numbers happened organically. What the statistics do show is that there are patterns specifically in critical demographics that are identical to elections that are known to be manipulated.

My real conspiracy theory is that the Democrats know this, and they also know that no amount of evidence will get trump impeached and removed, so they are holding back court cases on this, hoping that congress is more favorable after the mid-terms. Depending on an election to counter a rigged election is fucking dumb, but we are taking about senior (in both senses of the word) Democrat leadership here.

Kinda reminds my of my 2010 Toshiba laptop touchpad. The pad was probably 2 inches wide and 1.6 inches tall, and it had special “quick zones” setup in each corner, and then scroll zones on the bottom and right side, and then “back” and “forward” zones at the top, and a window switch zone on the left. When you subtracted all the “reserved” space on the touchpad, the actual useable area was slightly larger than the top of my thumb… And gestures and tap to click was on by default. I don’t know who tested that and was like “yeah, that’s useable” but seriously, WTF dude.

Do people mostly use apps instead? I don’t really get that perception, but also everyone in my family basically hates tiktok, facebook, instagram, twitter and other social media sites on principle. My apps are basically 2FAs, email, chats, and tools, but the vast majority of my time on my phone is in Firefox.

I can’t think of a single reason why I would want or need a website to be able to send me notifications. Whomever invented that is on my time machine list, just after the guy who made webpage elements move around right before you click them.

Probably already happened TBH. There are statistical anomalies in voting data that absolutely should be investigated.

Trying not to conspiracy rabbit hole myself, but it looks like votes were being added specifically in swing-state counties that were reporting votes electronically via starlink on election day. Basically the ratio of votes for trump skyrockets in that demographic when the turnout rate reaches a certain point. It’s not hard evidence, but it is a lot of smoke coming out of a gun shaped object.

The other third couldn’t say anything beyond enthusiastic gagging sounds while swallowing a boot past the laces, a feat both impressive and concerning.

I’d say that individual companies need to make contingency plans for when the US puts up their own great firewall (assuming they haven’t already, since I’m in the US).

I think it would be prudent for nations that have Google/Amazon/Microsoft datacenters in them to create legislation that allows them to nationalize or detach those services from the US. I have no doubt that we will eventually have our own policy that gives us the privilege to snoop on foreign data in foreign datacenters that are running US owned hardware.

Haven’t you heard? It’s the Donroe doctrine now.

I’m not even joking.