My hunch is that for every form of parental computer control there are approximately 300,000 junior-high geeks who have figured out ways around it, and aren’t afraid to share; and another 300,000 porn sites that adult filters don’t pick up. But I could be totally wrong.
And if the answer to the above question is: 99.98% effective or something similar, then I have a follow-up question. How are the young lads and lasses sneaking looks at porn these days? Back in my day I’d just pay a stoner to go into the bookstore and buy me a magazine, or look at a friend’s collection, or sneak into my dad’s stash…
I expect that they’re not very effective against motivated teenagers. And I can think of no better motivation for teenage boys than the prospect of looking at some boobies.
A brief search of such offerings shows that most are just software installed on the main OS. Which means that bypassing it is as simple as booting off a linux DVD. You can certainly lock down a computer so it won’t boot off another source, but if the kid has access to the computer hardware, he can get around that, too. Basically, software like this is only likely to be effective as long as the parents are more technically savvy than the kids, and can spot when it’s been evaded. When I was a teenager, that was definitely not true for me and my friends (and some of our parents were software developers). I don’t know if that was typical then, or if it’s changed (I’m 30, now).
Putting the computer in the living room where Mom and Dad can walk by at any time is probably way more effective.
I read, and unfortunately I don’t have a cite on this because it was in a dead tree magazine and I can’t for the life of me remember which one it was, that kids/teens these days are more technologically savvy than kids were in younger years, but less technologically exploratory than kids who grew up in the 90s/early 2000s were. Hand them a smartphone and they’ll have it figured out in 2 seconds flat. Ask them to hand-code a webpage and they’ll just look blank and ask why you want to do that when there’s Facebook, Myspace, Blogger, Tumblr or various other “pick and mix” site creators.
The reason given for this was most of these kids a) Grow up with the parental controls in place and b) grow up with “it just works” hardware like the DS, the iPhone and various consoles and they have parents who are more or less technologically savvy. They’ve never had to manually configure a dial-up connection or DHCP settings to get online, or figure out how to use software commands to turn off the modem speaker so they could get online at night without the 56k chorus waking the whole house.
Whereas kids who grew up around the time I did grew up just as home computing was becoming popular, and had parents who often didn’t know one end of a mouse from the other. Mum and dad would come to us to fix things on the computer, school networks didn’t have very robust filters and we knew more than a lot of the adults around us, so when said adults tried to block our access to “questionable” material we just went “pshyeah, right” and worked around it.
As I said, unfortunately no cite on it, but it does make sense to me based on what I’ve seen talking to the kids of friends I know vs people who grew up when I grew up.
I will echo what the above posters said. I am 27. I was a lot more tech savvy than my parents were and the various controls stopped me for about 0.5 seconds. The one time I had trouble getting past it, access was a simple matter of uninstalling that programme. I also once blocked access out of spite to websites that ny parents used. They could not get past it.
I’m pretty sure that any method you care to mention is able to be subverted without much difficulty. However, if parents are smart most methods are detectable. Most teenagers aren’t smart enough to delete router or OS logs, for instance. If they have to get into a router to subvert something but don’t know the password, they can factory reset it, but then the parents will catch on when the username and password is default. If the teenager resets the CMOS to boot into another OS the parents will know (especially if the computer used to have a BIOS password), etc.
Sure, they may not know EXACTLY what you did, but they’ll know you subverted their monitoring.
On the other hand, the easiest way would be to have the teenager’s computer be a drone ghosted from a server locked in the parent’s room, and take regular automated screenshots of the teenager’s screen. There’s no way you’re getting past that unless you pick the lock to your parent’s room, and that’s SO easily detectable you’ll know something’s up. Of course, the server method gets into creepy hovering territory, not to mention it’s probably more expensive and requires more headaches than most parents are probably willing to invest.
Of course, every parental lock I’m aware of just works on the internet. There’s nothing stopping you from using an unsecured computer somewhere to put some “content” on physical media for later enjoyment. I don’t know if “the kids” do LAN parties anymore, but back in the day a lot of those were basically big porno swaps at which some computer games might have also been played. For kids who’s parents had their internet locked down or (more commonly in those days) just didn’t have internet at home at all, that was their primary smut source.
A teenage friend wasn’t able to get around a blocker without leaving traces that it had been bypassed – so he left traces of visits to various divorce lawyers, how to hide your assets, etc. Led to some interesting discussions between his parents!
That distracted them for a while, but when they figured out it was him … there were some consequences.
But after that they had a big talk with him about being responsible in sexual activity, & spam & virus safety, and then turned off the blocker programs.
This is simply technologically out of reach for 99+% of parents. Even something as simple as setting a BIOS password and checking regularly to see that it wasn’t reset is pretty complicated. Those are pretty hard to get around, but they require pretty technically savvy parents.
Probably the easiest way to get around this is having a device the parents don’t have control over. A used iPod touch or low-end Android tablet can be found for around $100, and easily hidden.
Yep. If you parent like a prison guard, your kid will think of you that way, and instinctively hide information from you at all times. Pick your battles…you don’t want to be one of those parents whose kids do the exact opposite of most of your parenting tactics when they themselves have kids.
I had parents who wanted to control what their 14 year old would look at, and I had a pretty standard explanation about how it’s going to be far more work than they anticipate. Also, that is their job. 14 year old boys are porn-seeking Terminators. And do you really, really want to know what porn they are seeking?
One client had me install a monitoring program called Spector Pro that would allow her to record and view every page and image he looked at, taking a screen-shot every couple of seconds. The weird part is that I later found out that she and her husband were “swingers”, so she was not in denial about her son’s masturbatory activities. Pretty damn creepy.
While each clause of this sentence may be true, the one does not follow from the other. Being open about one’s own sexuality doesn’t mean one is accepting of it in one’s children.
I run with hippies and pagans, all sex-friendly and personal empowerment, do no harm and all acts of pleasure are my rituals yadda yadda yadda…they lose their fucking minds when their own children hit puberty and develop secondary sexual characteristics and get sex lives of their own. All that “recovering Catholic” stuff is installed pretty deep.
Not all of them, but…yeah, I’ll go so far as to say *most *of them. I’d never make assumptions about who’s using nanny software based on their own proclivities.
I’d say, based on my experiences living with a sex-positive feminist BDSM practitioner (my fiance) that was raised Catholic, that Catholicism does seem to root itself pretty deep re: these matters. I was raised Baptist, and I don’t have NEAR as many hangups as she does around sex/relationships.
Do you see any noticeable difference between the average “recovering Protestant” and the average “recovering Catholic”, in your hippie/pagan friends, when it comes to their kids becoming sexual? I’m just curious.
Also, you sound like an interesting person. I love odd subcultures. I’d be interested to hear any interesting stories you want to share.
How effective are they, not for keeping kids from going to porn sites if they really want to, but at keeping the malware that is often associated with such sites off your computer? I could definitely see being at least willing to accept that your kids might go to porn sites, but not wanting the malware associated with these sites. If the kid is booting with a Linux DVD, that would presumably be quite effective at keeping malware off the computer. How hard is it for a kid to get around parental controls in such a way that malware can still get installed?