The vice president called the texts "edgy, offensive jokes."

bitsondatadev: > The parent population is a tired and busy class of folks who have limited time and learn a lot through other parents. Despite my own hesitation with this software, the marketing absolutely appeals to me on weaker days and with the right wellmeaning friend singing its praises. I really like the term childwashing as I just see it everywhere yet still don’t have many real solutions to work with so when I see something remotely promising it’s hard not to give into what they are selling. Pretty much the snake oil salesmen of the current era. We see them with various phones whether they be selling freedom or privacy, etc. They’re usually expensive phones from crappy ODMs or entry level phones with a huge price tag and subscription. There’s nearly always some kind of paid ecosystem involved, and I suspect it’s because a device like this requires very little physical infrastructure. Buy phones from ODM (Original Design Manufacturer), make deal provide MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) services, hire some developers in a country and pay them basically nothing, put marketing paint on a website and ship product. Collect return. Minimal effort is required to keep the money making machine going. Pay for team to continue marketing, spamming social media, in order to obtain more subscriptions. If the whole thing becomes too much work then sell it to someone else and make even more money. bitsondatadev: > So, I think the real technical solution is to get either an iphone, iwatch, or graphene type phone. BTW I already have a graphene pixel tablet we use for long trips that stays on airplane mode as we’ve pre downloaded a few open source paint and other activity apps and YouTube videos. Honestly my son plays with timers for hours. It’s important to remember children are people too and have a right to some privacy as well. One other product I saw, literally creates alerts for every video, song email or message the child interacts with even from their friends. I think that’s a bit creepy, and it’s important to remember children are people and not pets. You can likely remember when you were a child having conversations with other kids that you probably would not have had when if an adult was constantly watching, surveilling, hovering and keeping tabs. That is entirely normal and I can certainly remember such situations. Devices can be used by abusive parents too, (we’ve heard of some cases like that), particularly when those parents have beliefs that fall outside of the general consensus of normalcy in a community. I think it needs to be approached as a sliding window, as a child ages they should be given more agency and independence. At age 15-17 etc, or thereabouts they should be practically into adulthood or close to it. Everyone is different. People that are over 18 are not magically more mature in the world, in fact I’ve met people in their 30s and 40s which, frankly are less mature than some teenagers. It happens. What is interesting is in most places a child can obtain a driver’s license at around 16, which I’d argue is a far more serious responsibility. Communication builds trust and a relationship where they are far more likely to come to you “as a friend” to tell you about something that is a concern/seek advice rather than “as a parent” which will instruct/command the right solution/behavior. bitsondatadev: > Anyways, my main needs really would be some device with limited service that respects privacy and enables the communication and SOS like features. I have considered meshtastic but agaom haven’t looked into it deeply because… time and such: https://meshtastic.org/ Apple also has various parental controls which give quite granular control. bitsondatadev: > Maybe for now it just needs to be a graphene phone with my own set of restrictions and here’s a concept continuously having conversations with them about what and how they experience the world. That’s the most fun part, they grow up so quickly so it’s important to enjoy the time you have with them. Find some interests, to share together, that will stimulate a healthy online consumption. With YouTube there are pretty much channels on every interest known to humankind. The issue is when people just put a tablet or something with young child’s hands, pay no attention to it and then wonder why the algorithm has simply made the decisions it has. Not everything requires a technical solution.