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.

Spoiler, the British cared more about Indians than this administration cares about its citizens.

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?

I need someone talented to make a gif of doom, but with this cat face over the doomguy’s face.

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

Definitely don’t bring your own homebrew stingray device to scrape data from the personal phones of gravy-seals.

No, seriously, it’s probably a huge FCC violation.

Yes… Eat…