this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Hear me out. Maybe, if you are a parent, its your duty to keep an eye on your child, and exert some control over the spaces and people they interact with?
And how do you , practically, do that?
Before the internet, parents could exert control by knowing where their children were physically going and who they were talking to over the phone.
Even in the '90s and 2000s, parents could control a child's Internet use by limiting time on the family computer.
Nowadays? Just about every child has a tablet or phone. Even the ones who don't have devices at home, or have their device use monitored at home, have access to school devices.
Exerting control over a child's online activity now means monitoring everything they do on every device they have access to, including during the eight hours per day or so that they're on devices for school work. No parent has time for that. And if the child is deliberately trying to hide some kind of illicit online activity, monitoring becomes an order of magnitude more difficult, because, again, children have access to their own devices, school devices, their friends' devices, library devices, and dozens of other devices a parent may not even know about and has no ability to monitor.
I'm frankly horrified by the increasing requirements for real identity verification but let's not pretend being a parent is the same as it was in the '70s.
You went to a school where they had no controls over what you could and couldn't access?
My school was blocking harmful content on their computers when i was there in the mid to late 2000s.
When i got home i had something called CyberSitter on my computer in my room that sent logs of all my internet usage as reports to my dad.
It took me until 16 when i went out and bought my own computer with my own money before i had "unfettered" access to the internet.
Were these tools impenetrable fortresses? no, of course not. but they were a damn sight better than the ISP level blocks and legislating the "good" companies out of existence that the UK (and others) Government is currently engaged in.
Not that any of this is really about "protecting kids" anyway