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A Guide To Parental Controls For Kids' Tech Use [NPR.org]

 

Ben Zimmerman lives in a suburb of Chicago. Like a lot of 9-year-olds, he's fond of YouTube, Roblox, and Minecraft.

And, like a lot of parents, his mom and dad wanted to make sure Ben wasn't spending too much time on those activities. They tried to use Google's "Family Link" parental control software to limit screen time for Ben and his older sister, Claudia.

Ben went on YouTube to search for a workaround. When he couldn't find one, he figured one out himself. His dad, who happens to work in forensic data analysis, called it a "brute force attack."

Philip Zimmerman says he was "pretty impressed," with his son's resourcefulness. Ben comes off as what hackers call a white-hat, one of the good guys, especially since he told Dad right away. "I want [Google] to fix it so I can find another glitch for them to fix," Ben told NPR.

[A Google spokeswoman says they have fixed it.]

Screen time is a battle for many families. I've talked with parents who lock video game systems in the car overnight, hold on to iPad chargers, or who refuse to get a teen's cracked phone screen fixed, all to curb use.

[For more of this story, written by Anya Kamenetz, go to https://www.npr.org/2018/06/18...ls-for-kids-tech-use]

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