Parental controls are an antifeature. That KDE does not attempt to facilitate unethical abusive control of young people is a boon if anything, and it would be really sad to see that change.
Please reconsider your methods of raising children. All locking up their digital life will do is erode trust between them and you. A cop/criminal dynamic in your family will not get you anywhere good, and is not something a freedom-oriented project should be supporting.
Parental Controls are absolutely necessary in modern internet environment. Modern internet is based on predatory practices which is hyper optimized to focus on click rates by making contents addicting, tracking and targeted contents so that to make sure the user is addicted to the content as possible.
And the best demographic for corporations/advertisers is children as children don’t have necessary experience they are at a position where it is very easy to capture and addict them with all this. There is a whole system on internet with sole purpose to target children and make sure they are completely addicted to there solution.
Forget children even adults are not aware that they are being targeted like this. There are billions of dollars spent on thousands of psychologists and algorithms to best manipulate people to give them money.
“Freedom” is such a catch-phrase which have lost all meaning in modern world and political environment. No absolute freedom is not possible. Especially when “freedom” is synonymous is to allow others to manipulate you and destroying of livelihood and mental health just so they can earn few more bucks from you in exchange of constant dopamine rush. I am not going to go any more details into it. If you really are able to understand please look at the advertising business model. Look at how Facebook earns billions of dollar despite not “selling” anything and providing a service for “free”.
Current internet is not 90s or early 2000s era where internet is for people. Current internet is for making as much amount of money as possible and corporations have found out the age-old tradition of making as much money as possible as easily as possible: Drugs and addiction.
You said it: this problem affects adults too, and yet when adults are targeted with unwanted monitoring and control on their devices, it’s “stalkerware”; when children are targeted with the very same, it’s “parental controls” and framed as a good thing. Except it really isn’t, the harms remain the same, the only difference being the victim’s age. The “parents’ rights” case for denying young people privacy and autonomy on a whim is not rooted in good faith; again, an authoritarian cop-criminal dynamic is not an acceptable substitute to understanding.
If you’re worried about user-hostile addictive online platforms, you should make your stance clear and discuss it with your children as with fellow human beings.
Your entire logic hinges on. “Age is just a number”. That’s completely, legally and morally false in every single way for children.
Children don’t have complete freedom. They can’t. Freedom means responsibilities. Children don’t have responsibilities both legally and morally. Thus they can’t have similar freedom to adults. I am not going to go any more moral details about why children don’t have responsibilities and why children can’t make choices.
Being on internet means the user have to make choice. “I agree to location services”. “I agree to being tracked for personalized ads”, “I agree to get tracked for survey purposes”, “I agree to send usage and telemetry data for improvement of the said product” all of these are choices. A child can’t make this choices about themselves in this scale.
Children are humans. they are not adults. Again. A Child can’t make choices when it comes to all the examples I gave above.
Current laws regarding online activity of children is a grey zone because there have been no laws yet but if it were to expanded on the same logic of other laws regarding agency of children, laws regarding crimes committed by underage persons, etc then I am pretty sure new laws would completely forbid children to have unrestricted access to internet unless under parental supervision and parents being liable to serious fines and negligence charges.
Of course as we have seen with “age verification” laws being promoted, that’s another way of doing it I guess although the actual reason of doing this is completely different and is for tracking purposes only.
“children are incapable of choosing for themselves” and “they don’t deserve agency without responsibilities” is exactly the kind of abuser’s attitude I would rather not see influencing free software projects.
Arguments for child abuse are similar in their gist to arguments for slavery - in both cases, it’s someone trying to make up a case for why a certain category of people is inherently undeserving of basic rights, and in both cases it’s all bullcrap. Believe me, asserting someone does not deserve agency and thus must obey you because you said so is not what treating them as a fellow human being looks like.
I figure the forum’s moderators do not enjoy heated discussions very much, so I will try to stop engaging from now on.
While i do agree parental controls can absolutely be and are used for abusive behaviour, you also need to understand that we do not live in an ideal world. whether it be for computers or anything else, any parent will tell you that you need to at least somewhta restrict/control your child’s possibilities or decisions.
in the same way that you wouldn’t let your child do anything else it shouldn’t. and trust me, this absolutely is for their own good. and yes, that is an argument used by people to abuse children, but you must agree that just because some people choose to use that argument to hurt others, it does not make that argument completely invalid.
Not everything is black and white. you can have respectful boundaries with your children and have mutual trust and understanding, while still, for example, setting a daily usage time limit just to enforce that you actually mean what you teach them.
alas, children are not some skill check (not to say anyone was implying it was) where you can do everything perfectly and if you just follow the procedure and do everything right it just works itself out. it unfortunately doesn’t work like that and sometimes you need restrictions to enforce boundaries.
also worth noting I’m talking (and have experience with) mainly children around or under 10 yrs old.