Comment on Australia says platforms like Steam and Roblox have 'significant' child safety gaps
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I gotta be honest, I understand this position. I have a real difficult kid. We’re working on building trust, but it’s a process. The fact of the matter is that he seeks out inappropriate content and he can’t seem to help himself, just too impulsive.
There’s a reason for these behaviors, and like I said, we’re working on it. But in the mean time, we’ve had to completely lock down all technology in the house. And most of it is complete garbage when it comes to parental controls. Stay away from Roku for instance, that device is fucking horrible, just the worst.
Anyway, the thing is, sometimes parental controls are in fact necessary, but as long as they exist, things are fine. Steam for instance has a great system, you can control what aspects of steam a kid has access to, multiplayer functionality, the store, online content, etc. a all that can be switched on or off. And for games you can use their general rating system (which is imperfect) or you can manually whitelist individual games. Finally, you can lock it all behind a simple pin code. Honestly, this is how all such platforms should work, it’s manageable.
I don’t think there’s really any legitimate reason to complain about the systems steam currently has in place.
Roblox on the other hand… That’s a shitshow. We don’t touch Roblox.
Wildmimic@anarchist.nexus 2 weeks ago
These people are NOT talking about parental control, they are talking about taking control over what children have access to regardless of what specific parents think. If your child were less impulsive, as most children are, you wouldn’t have to be that restrictive - some common sense rules and limits would probably suffice, and these things are important to both build trust and develop responsibility in most children.
But they want to do the same with children online as they did with public spaces starting decades ago - taking away the possibility of experiencing the world on their own terms in adequate environments for those children who are capable of it. They are already taking away their communication channels on a large scale in addition to deanonymizing their citizens on the internet, and now they are still pushing for more.
The parental controls on Steam are absolutely fine, and there’s even the possibility of setting the account into offline mode or needing approval for every single login on the parents phone if they want to. Roblox… is a completely different can of worms, and i would never allow my child a roblox account, because normalizing what is going on there is a very bad idea.
Don’t let yourself get fooled. They want to decide how much you can trust your children, regardless of how good a parent you are or how well behaved you child is.