A note to parents, teachers, and concerned, caring adults on digital content accessed by young people under their care.

The Internet is a scary thing to many, this technological wonder can carry any digitized data between any computer systems connect to it. This rightly worries many concerned adults as they don't feel they can fully protect their very precious minors, after all it's easier to protect our youth from physical threats than threats they can call up from anywhere in the world at any time.

My age at the time of writing this post my age is about 18 and a half. I recently was a minor under my nation's legal system. And as someone who recently was a "kid", I can better understand the mind of the type of child I was than many others who give you advice, and I also understand security and administrative control concepts since I was already learning about technology and cyber security. Parents, teachers, and other adults who care about children and teenagers under their care are rightly concerned with the content and communications these youngsters receive on their many devices. I am of course referring to the worry of a child or teenager accessing content such as pornography, ultra violent games and movies, bad sex advice, racist ideology, and other content that worries you; I am also referring to worries of communication between vulnerable minors and creepy individuals such as bad influences, those helping them to go to parties you'd never allow, cyber bullies, predators, and other people you fear contacting minors under your care.

There are three main ways to stop these situations from arising, I call them methods 1, 2, and 3 respectively for this article.

1. Technologically - stop their devices from allowing objectionable content and communications to be processed by means of net nannies, Internet filter's, parental spy-ware, parental controls, and more.
2. Physically - keeping a close eye on the screen of the device by somehow stopping it from being used where you can't see, like putting it on a password.
3. Morally and mentally arming the minor - teaching the minor why and how to avoid and deal with the filth I mentioned earlier.

For the sake of this article I'll refer to all caring, care giving adults in charge of minors in any way as parents. I'll refer to all minors that live under a parent's care as minors while ignoring minors living independently as no parent currently cares for them.  I will refer to those in junior high as adolescents and those in high school as nearly adults, while ages 13 to 18 collectively will be referred to as teens or teenagers and primary school age minors will be referred to as children. I do this to refer to each step of a child's life by the responsibilities expected of them.

First I'll explain which methods are not practical and why before I explain one solution that can't be circumvented by crafty thinking, and the information I'm sharing may surprise you.

Using a Internet filter, parental controls, and other technological methods are pointless against a minor with any brains in their head at all, If my parents had tried to use a technological method to restrict my access to the Internet they would've failed miserably because I would've spent less than five minutes and broken through the Internet filter. The worst nightmare to a parent using technological methods to control Internet usage is a minor who has heard of TOR, VPNs, and other forms of encrypted tunneling services which will render your Internet filter and remote network monitoring completely and utterly useless. It used to be complex to use tunneling features but today we have many cheap or even free services that allow their users to turn them on and off as easily as changing the volume on your device.

There are many ways a minor can access the Internet without your knowledge. In my home town we have an amazing library with free and fast Internet and public computers with nearly unlimited time for free, and most if not all of your minor's friends have Internet access. This means that you cannot even hope to physically control your minor's access to technology no matter what you do or what the salesman for the cyber security firm tells you, a minor who's looking for access to technology has many options such as borrowing a friends computerized device, public computers, or they can save and buy their own computer from one of many cheap sources. Though physically controlling your minor's Internet access is better than using a Internet filter because you can watch them as if you were watching them in other activities, an older minor such as a teenager or near adult would spend little effort in circumventing you. The only to fully control their Internet access is to track their location in real time and check on them in person randomly which I could still stop you from doing unless you have one of those GPS enabled anklets for criminals which I'm sure would be slightly illegal to use.

The only way to truly protect your minor is to teach them from childhood the difference between right and wrong to the point you are more than confident they would be safe if you had no access to them as you cannot possibly protect them forever. Teaching a minor between the ages of 13 and 18 right and wrong is not easily done as they start to develop their own individual identity and become less impressionable to their parents while being exposed to new temptations and new peer pressure, and to top it all off their brains develop somewhat oddly as the receptivity to rewards (think dopamine rush) goes way up at the same time the sense of risk goes way down and their high level reasoning (morality, long term planning, etc...) is not as strong or as fast as their emotional response. I recently went through that phase, but my parents drilled a strong sense of morality into me from childhood which I still use every day and it kept me from getting sucked into the wrong crowd. My parents were not perfect, they made many mistakes as any human parent would, but more important than their relatively small mistakes is they were wise and loving enough to raise me to be a good and moral person. To give you an idea of our family handles morality, my family members and I have all left money (in cash, sometimes hundreds of dollars) out in the open and have never once had one of us intensionally steal one cent, we may be able to literally leave money on the kitchen table without it getting stolen but you don't necessarily need to be able to do that to protect your minor. My parents know that I would never cross the proverbial line, and they know that I'd come to them for help if I needed it, they were never worried about me on unrestricted Internet access as they knew I knew how to stay away from danger and that I would come to them right away if I messed up.

Kids need to be taught right from wrong and then allowed some freedom under your watchful eye so you can diagnose any issues before they get to take on a cold and unforgiving world. Once your minor becomes a teen they are no longer under your control, even before they can drive I be be almost certain that they could find a way to get around if they wanted.

Here's a thought experiment for you to think about: if you left your teenager alone for a few days whether it was planned or unplanned what would happen? Once they get access to shady individuals around them you cannot be there to stop them, you must be sure that you can rely on them to protect themselves and tag you in if needed, kids of course are different from teens and it's rare to find one that can adequately take care of themselves for longer than a few hours, but they still need to be trustworthy enough to leave for a few hours as that's basically what happens on the Internet since there is no possible way to be sure you are in control of what they see and hear.

Bottom line: you cannot successfully protect your minors be acting as a helicopter and hovering over them, they or their friends can and will circumvent you, rather you should be there to be tagged in when they are stuck and they should share a mutual trust that they won't seek out bad things and that you will love and care unconditionally enough to help them if they come to you. You cannot stop your minor if they intensionally seek out bad things, you're not fighting them in that case but rather fighting everyone they have met. Basically unless your minor is too lazy to buy or find another device (not likely by the way) and you can out smart every security minded programmer and enthusiast such as myself, then you are trying to stop a train. I don't care what the security company or school cop says, I can bypass any security you can find, I'm a nice guy and would never knowingly use my skills for evil but I cannot stop someone from learning or deceiving me into thinking I'm doing the right thing. I'm also not the only one out there with the capacity to overwhelm your efforts and punch holes in your Internet filter like it was paper, not all of them are so protective of others and some are downright nasty, but even they cannot easily harm you or your minor without your minor's help.

If you want help from a genuine person, my inbox is open. I check it as often as I can, and I will be candid with you. neuronmaker@gmail.com