This seems like a nice idea: better parents would make kids safer online.

This astonished me. Here I was, only 23 and childless, and I was telling adults how to parent their teen! At that point I realized the awful truth: lots of people just don’t know how to raise their kids.

The same situation holds true for MySpace. The company can hire all the security officers it wants, and it could replace every ad with a flashing banner that says “DO NOT TRUST RANDOM STRANGERS!!!”, and send fliers to every parent in America … and bad things would still happen to kids connected to MySpace. A lot of parents aren’t very good at parenting, and part of being a teenager is saying and doing stupid things (I’m example number one for that particular precept), trying to socialize as much as possible, and worrying at the same time about your hair and your weight and your zits and your clothes.

It is a story from 2006. The MySpace reference might have given it away. Remember how 2006 was full of stories about the need for better parenting and education of parents?

Symantec marketing published a product press release. Politicians in America rattled ideas around on the hill. Microsoft released a guide in 2006 that was last updated in 2008 (a dead link in 2019, try this instead). You can blame me (at least partially) for the https://security.yahoo.com/ site. The result?

That was then. If the goal was to make parents better, I do not think the mission succeeded. Educating parents about threats and vulnerabilities has not generating a market for better parenting skills and eduction tools but rather fueled demand for surveillance. That is probably because a lot of the parenting lists include phrases like “supervise and monitor”.

Kids who are growing up today are less likely to be able to benefit from a hypothetical “if only your parents were better” discussion and more likely to be faced with a barrage of parental surveillance controls. In other words they are being raised not so much to be informed about choices but rather the presence of perimeters and monitoring controls. I suppose this is not much different than before (e.g. learning to sneak out the bedroom window) but it is interesting to me how the discussion has chilled and changed since 2006; not many progress reports to be found.