Privacy Parents, have any of you pushed back on provided tech for your kids?

Privacy Questions
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I am curious if any parents on here have had a school system provide you all with corporate hardware (in our case Chromebook) to use for the first 8 years of their education. Simultaneously, the classrooms use shared Apple iPads and televisions to push their screens up to a TV with Apple AirPlay but also say they can support an HDMI connection.

First, I have yet to reach out to our school because it’s still a couple years until our first child will be in the first grade. That said, I really would rather buy my kids their own devices or at the very least, have the freedom to install our own software outside of what is required for class involvement. I know the school district will likely give me some side eye, as fixing issues, installing certain hardware and compatibility is going to be a pain, but I feel it’s not only more educational for my kid to have to learn how to fix their own system than for them to learn to just comply with the use of a machine.

That said, I also don’t want my inclination to protect my kids privacy to make them the kid with the strange tin-foil hat wearing dad. Or maybe I do…but either way have any of you run into this and how did you all handle it while keeping a good relationship with the educators working with your kids?

Thanks

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I’d say let them have the school ones for school work and then they can have a personal one for personal stuff. Teach them separation early on. Also the school ones might require some invasive software that you probably don’t want on a personal device, like those awful test proctoring programs.

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I love this idea actually.

As for creating accounts with PII, should we just go about creating the minimum viable amount of information for school needs and recommend that this is an (for example Google) account that is to simply be their interface where Google is required by school and other online services?

I am slowly applying this to my own practice so apologies if this seems naive for this forum.

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Yeah the school is likely gonna give them a Google account, I would keep all that on the school machine and tell them not to log in on their personal machine. Generally Google’s enterprise offerings that schools buy are much more privacy preserving since they’re paid.

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You really cant really refuse what the school requires. Best you can do is to pick a school that caters to your privacy needs and even then there is no guarantee that you may find what you want.

I refuse the posting of materials that show my kid’s face on it at least officially from the school. But then when the classmates/classmates parents take a picture of my kid in it isn’t really a scenario that you can control without you acting all weird about it.

There is also the fact that schools aren’t really aligned privacy-wise. You’d want transparency and auditability of things going on inside the school. We don’t want secret shenanigans that we aren’t aware of.

People and companies will look for your school affiliation and it should be verifiable.

In the end, it isnt really the official school pics that bother me, its the random day to day things that my kid will regret seeing in the future - like seeing a bad behaviour or whatever is the social equivalent of a blackface.

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I am keeping away my kiddo from Tiktok, Insta and Facebook, and I am using Control D on all of her devices. I am also using screentime, but I am only restricting it to her sleep times. I created her a 1Password account within my Family sub. Got 2x Yubikeys for her too. Even though she is still young, she is able to use the apps and the keys.

I am also explaining her how social media works, dangers of it and positive sides of it.

For my wife, she is in Proton suite with Family sub, along with 1Password. We are using Signal for our comms and calls. My kid is using iMessage and Facetime because she doesn’t have a phone.

Every device of our household is connected to Control D, with a lot of ad & trackers blockers, complete block of religion, gambling, dating, malware, clickbait, etc. Hagezi Pro Plus also enabled everywhere.

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I’m still searching and not found wholesome tool like Google family link/parental control. In other words, this category is also dominated by Google and some proprietary ones like netnanny. Most of the network activities can be managed using DNS while blocking sideloading and developer options can be challenging.

Edit:
Parental controls on GOS - thread link.

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I’m working my way up to this slowly. Your DNS game is strong. My partner and I both have 2 Yubikeys, my kids still has a couple years until they enter the tech world, so none of this for them yet.

I am using keepassxc after some years of lastpass and surprisingly my partner hasn’t ripped my head off and she’s settling into it and Yubikey!

I haven’t heard of Control D…I’m certainly checking that out.

…keeping away my kiddo from Tiktok, Insta and Facebook…

I’m definitely going to keep my kids away from square one…but I’m really hoping a next generation of privacy preserving social apps come out. It’s hard to get my partner away from those because she has so many relationships through those apps and until enough people shift away, it’s not gonna be an easy ask.

I think my approach is going to be asking that we take stock of our close friends that we see in person and try to get them to a safe app where we can share and do more, then ask her to lower what she posts on the surveillance apps.

I’m gonna look for some more threads about strategies to approach this topic, because it is prevalent in a lot of our worlds and I think collectively figuring out how to have these conversations and where to find compromise to share with the community would be great. Anyone know of privacy community resources about the social aspects and educating your family and maybe other parents in the community intelligently?

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While we’re talking about DNS and family parent control, has anyone tried Firewalla?

https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/sections/115000949433-Features

Seems to cover a wide range of things we’ve discussed. I’m a network and data nerd but learning and applying good security hygiene is like brushing my teeth. I know I have to, but uggggghhh.

Still figuring out my threat model, it’s mostly keeping my kids safe but I’m moving more into content creation and going to run business things from home, so definitely want to avoid bad actors that small biz tends to face.

Also the occasionally totally legal use of torrents with no copyrighted material whatsoever.

Wondering if Firewalla is a good fit for those who have tried.

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Keep in mind that parental controls aren’t that effective and it may pick your kids’ curiosity to explore things that are blocked / find ways around your blocklists, even if it’s something they would not normally be interested in the first place

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Keeping your kid away from all of those apps may do more harm than good. Kids frequently use them to communicate now and it’s common for them to ask for one of those instead of an email or phone number. You’d probably be better off explaining the dangers of those apps and requesting that no personal photos or information are shared publicly on them instead of just having a blanket ban. If you explain your reasons and ask instead of tell, you won’t be seen as “the enemy”. Kids are also sneaky. Anyone that says otherwise was either never a kid or forgot they were one. The second your kid hits the teenage years your opinions on everything will be dumb and you’ll be an out of touch old person. Having an open dialogue is always better.

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I am explaning to my kid what is there, how the people hunt children, how people follow the “trends” and stupid enough to get themselves killed. how fake their lives are, etc etc. And she asked me to block the sites too, after showing some example videos and conversations of the pedos.

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Perhaps you start with the “why” talk as it’s important for them to understand why you as a privacy advocate likely question authority a lot and then turn around and apply certain decisions unilaterally. I certainly got annoyed as hell by that “because I said so” sentiment not knowing anything about my lack of frontal lobe.

Going from child to young adulthood is where the role of the parent (at least seems to) starts to become more hands off, and teenage rebellion is likely the natural way this catalyzes. If you trust your kid enough, maybe it would almost be fun to encourage them to get around your blocks and such. If they can then they are expected to use it safely but have no obligation to tell me until I’m able to figure it out and shut it down. This all seems rosy in my head right now, but I’m sure my kids won’t be as amused as I will be.

Anyways, all of this is super helpful. I’ve dabbled in a low privacy efforts relative to this community with the I’m not that interesting ™ threat model, but since I’ve had kids, all I think about is privacy. It’s kind of like my own experience with big tech and mass surveillance was just the frog slowly boiling and I didn’t pay much attention, but when I had my kids it was like some new tadpoles were added to the water and I all the sudden realized how hot it was.

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Yes school gives a chrome book and a Gmail account. I have spoken to my 12 year old about online privacy but does anyone know of privacy guides written geared towards this age group? So it’s explained at their level. I have had trouble finding…found one about online safety from Google lol

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Have you looked at the EFF Surveillance Self Defense Guide?

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I have seen this. I’d also like to report that I’ve put together a course/lecture that I’ll be teaching to some parents in my district through our library. The SSD resources are one of the sources I’m using. I also pulled a bunch of the people reports on various family members and will use that to show all the information people can find on me, and information they have wrong, etc…

Also searched family members who I personally know have criminal records but didn’t find them. Out of curiosity I searched them in gov databases and that information wasn’t there either so it must not be public or perhaps reached statute of limitations or some legal thing? It’s kind of interesting that some people might use these websites to find out if people are safe and could be led to believe that someone is guilty of something they’re not or someone who is convicted is assumed to be without a criminal conviction.

Anyways, all that said, I want to use that kind of information to showcase that despite these sites trying to make this some sort of legal shady Ancestry clone, that it can easily be used by stalkers, doxers, and general hate groups who can associate all that information with public social accounts or other data like the cellphone datasets that showed people near various locations to dox them for assumed activities in that location, etc…

So then my big thing will be from there will be to inform them that they can come to privacy guides to slowly remove their information, but also, I would use that as motivation for thinking about how all the public, private, and illegal information obtained about their children could then be used by any level of actors in the future and that will be the motivation for why they should care.

Maybe this should be another thread at some point, but once I string the presentation together would this be valuable @jonah and friends?

I’d like to almost make all my materials and possibly take videos of these courses to make it easier for others to replicate in their little corners and keep our kiddos safe.

Edit: Also, would you all take contributions for kid focused privacy guides as mentioned by @Bhaelros? Or possibly both kid and parent privacy guides?

I think the simpler side of things to address would be the earlier phase where you’re giving children a clearer model of how computers, networks, and the world work and general guidelines to follow.

A whole other can of worms that may fall outside of the scope of this site, but is also very relevant to privacy are porn, nudes, the actually scary parts of the dark web, and so on. This all could fall under a more general computer literacy equivalent of privacy guides though. Even though some of what I just mentioned could result in intentional or accidental release of PII.

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I am following the harsh truth path for my daughter. I showed her some conversations of a pedo and several government and driver association funded videos about self-safety and perserverance. I also explained her what is wrong with the current trend, like Insta, Tiktok, Snapchat, FB, and how people are reacting to the videos.

She is still going to elementary school but she hates Instagram with her whole heart and argues with my wife whenever she sees her watching her Insta. That is making me proud.

I will also explain her about the password managers and basics of computers and privacy when she is capable of handling that information.

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From what I hear it is a bit of a “requirement” to use insta to fit in and things change in the teen years. I want to encourage all her friends and the community from a young age to start using alternatives like [Pixelfed] (Pixelfed Feature Overview) and the same devs are making Loops for Tiktok.

You could encourage her to be a “rebel” with her friends. Maybe you could suggest to your town to host one.