Even if a child doesn’t have a phone of their own, they often borrow their parent’s phone to play games or watch videos. Most phones don’t distinguish between children or adults when it comes to the data they collect.
The Librem 5 respects the privacy of you and your children by running free software that does not track you. The Librem 5’s hardware kill switches allow you to disable the network completely with a flip of the switch so your child doesn’t accidentally end up online, making it the best phone for a child’s privacy.
Speaking of putting expensive phones in the hands of children… We really need to get some protective case options spun up quick. Maybe it’s time to get those official dimensions, incorporating button and port placements, etc., out to the world.
Great video. I ordered the Librem 5 a few months after my daughter was born, and I remember that Todd’s posts talking about the type of technology he wanted for his kids really struck a chord with me then, and this video brought that back.
The child sees the father carefully turning off all the kill switches, before handing over the phone. The first thought of the child will be, “Oh cool, it’ll be really fun to play with those neat looking switches.”
20 minutes later: “Oh lookie! Daddy is no longer paying attention to me playing this dorky game. Let’s try that game that looks like a globe. Wow, it is showing me something different every time I open it, not like my boring game that’s always the same. Let’s start touching stuff and see what happens. Wheee!”
Three weeks later: “Daddy, I wanna play with the phone! I want the phone! I wanna play…”
“OK, honey, here you go!” He hands his child the Librem 5 wrapped in 5 layers of duct tape. “Boring! Hey, let’s see if we can kick it like a ball around the room!”
Well, the message is that the child will not go online by accident. She may still go online on purpose, but that’s rather a matter to be solved by education and raising your child, not by technology. A child will outsmart any technology in no time.
yo are confusing parental control (protect environment from kid) with privacy features (protect kid from environment). For kids both are mandatory and neither is sufficient alone.
I’ve said before, a privacy respecting phone is not just for your protection, it’s also about protecting your loved ones, as they are often within (shared location, contact info, personal details etc.) that same data - or, as @Kyle_Rankin wrote, may use the same devices.
But for some researched comparison (“auto-mated analysis of 5,855 of the most popular free [Android] children’s apps”, 2018): just in this games section specifically aimed at children (where you’d think there would be some limits), over half of the games violate - sometimes heavily - data collection restrictions. And it’s likely worse for adults, in other/“normal” apps. And to give some additional background of the ecosystem, most games don’t program this functionality themselves but publish their games on top of some ready platform that provides the gamehouse the few metrics they need while the platform siphons data to themselves and their third parties one the side.
The study here and a couple of articles that elaborate it here and here.
Yes this is exactly the point. With kill switches you can make sure that the child can’t go online, make a call, or record themselves accidentally by launching the wrong program on the phone.
Obviously a child who wants to violate their parent’s wishes could flip the switch back. One of the most challenging security threats to model isn’t a nation state adversary, it’s a child restricted by parental control software because they have almost unlimited resources (time) and almost unlimited imagination. A child violating their parent’s wishes is not a technology problem, it’s a social problem and social problems solved by technology are solved poorly. It’s an issue best solved by parenting.
By the way, have you noticed that a parent’s default approach to protecting their child’s security with technology (lock up the device to tightly restrict what they can do with it, and track every step they take) is exactly the same approach Big Tech implements to protect an adult’s security? This is because Big Tech companies look at their customers as children that must be protected from themselves by removing as much agency and control as they can. Of course this also conveniently makes their customers completely dependent on them, like children.
We of course think differently and take a different approach.
HK is always a HK, a circuit break. Regardless how open the software and hardware is, you don’t always have time to audit each and every software you install. So knowing that some user friendly software may try to play smart and override your software measures, circuit break is a quick state assurance.
perhaps SOME people that work IN the gov. feel this way but in this case i don’t believe it was particularly inspired of you to generalize in such a manner … there are people in the gov. that are FAR from such an ideal … and even if it were possible for a group of people to attain such an enlightened state i’m not sure it would be necessary …
do you also believe that uncle SAM sheds a tear when he’s ordering a drone strike somewhere ?
