Technology

So let me get this straight:

When I was 13, I managed to figure out the router password, disabled child protection for myself, then watched porn on my Android 2.3 phone that I had managed to put a custom ROM on because I liked the way it looked and had no idea what a "launcher" was yet.

This is not a hypothetical btw.

My parents were smart enough to enable appropriate blocking and secured access to those settings. I'm not sure something on-device was available at the time, but I included the bit about the custom rom to demonstrate that, even though I didn't know WTF I was doing, I was more than capable of fucking around with the tech to get it to do what I wanted.

So were my parents in breach of their duties on child protection?

I don't think they were. They actually did educate themselves (visiting a course / parent meetup to discuss and learn how to protect me from the Internet), and implemented everything they learned.

I was just a little shit and found a way around this.

And this is NOT an edgecase. Because guess what. It takes one kid in the friend group to figure out a way to circumvent parental controls, and then EVERYONE knows how to do it.

It simply does not fucking matter how well intentioned, knowledgeable, and present the parents are (mine were all of that).

Going "this would not be a problem if parents parented" is the LAZIEST fucking excuse, and I'm sick and tired of reading about it on here.

(Because I probably have to make it clear: I'm not advocating for photo/passport scanning, third party age verification,... and all that bullshit. What I think would be a FANTASTIC idea would be privacy-preserving age verification. There are two good ways to do this: 1) on a login attempt, prove that you are of age by presenting a fresh, signed token from a government service proving that you are over 18, and nothing else; site does not get any info, government does not know what you were trying to access; 2) a device-level age field. Proof here comes from the device itself, and can be 100% privacy preserving; just a "yep, is of age". In this scenario... GUESS WHAT, PARENTS GET ENABLED TO PARENT "PROPERLY" BY PROVIDING THEM WITH A GOOD, SIMPLE, PRIVACY-PRESERVING TECHNICAL SOLUTION.)