Talita Pruett, a California mom of three children ages 14, 13, and 5, is doing everything she can to be a present, involved parent. But one issue weighs on her more than anything else: guilt over media use. She has tried it all: screen-time limits, content filters, charging phones in her bedroom at night, and regular conversations about healthy media habits. Still, she says, guilt lingers, both about her children's media use and her own.
At this point, you can have your kid put it on (if it's charged). The watch will say Bring iPhone Near Apple Watch. If you open the Watch app, it lets you choose to Set Up for a Family Member. Aim the phone's viewfinder at the slowly moving animation to pair, or select Pair Manually. Apple's tutorial is pretty straightforward from this point. I picked a passcode that's easy for my daughter to remember and picked her from my family list. I continued cellular service.
Get ready for a peaceful internet experience thanks to the AdGuard Family Plan. This tool lets you browse seamlessly by blocking all types of ads, so you can enjoy your time online with no distractions or frustrations. Not only will AdGuard provide more than your average , but it will also protect your privacy by blocking trackers, hiding your data, and stopping malware, phishing sites, and cyberattacks in their tracks.
YouTube is rolling out some additional parental controls, including a way to set time limits for viewing Shorts on teen accounts. In the near future, parents and guardians will be able to set the Shorts timer to zero on supervised accounts. "This is an industry-first feature that puts parents firmly in control of the amount of short-form content their kids watch," Jennifer Flannery O'Connor, YouTube's vice president of product management, wrote in a blog post.
I tried the usual tricks: switching off notifications, deleting addictive apps, moving icons around, greyscale mode. None of it worked. Without notifications, I just checked more to see if something had happened. When I deleted apps, I used the browser instead. And when I deleted that I would eventually reinstall everything in a weak moment. (Which usually meant spending even more time on my phone as I had to log in everywhere again.)
Open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad, tap your name at the top and select Family. Tap Add Member, then Create Child Account, and follow the onscreen prompts. You'll need to provide your child's name and birth date, along with parental consent using your own Apple ID password. Once created, the account is automatically added to your Family Sharing group.
In the past few years, governments across the world have rolled out different digital identification options, and now there are efforts encouraging online companies to implement identity and age verification requirements with digital ID in mind. This blog is the third in a short series that explains digital ID and the pending use case of age verification. Here, we cover alternative frameworks on age controls, updates on parental controls, and the importance of digital privacy in an increasingly hostile climate politically.
Discord is expanding the safety controls parents and guardians have access to in its Family Center, including increased visibility of their teens' activity, allowing guardians to control sensitive content filtering and data privacy settings, and giving them more control over who can DM their teens. New Social Permissions toggles will allow guardians to choose whether their teens can receive direct messages only from friends or from anyone who's a member of the same servers as them. However, Discord is still promising teens that, "As always, guardians can't see the content of the messages you send."
OpenAI brings ChatGPT Go plan to 16 more Asian countries OpenAI is expanding its affordable ChatGPT Go plan, priced under $5, to 16 new countries across Asia, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Thailand, Vietnam, and Pakistan. In some of these countries, users can pay in local currencies, while in others, payments are required in USD, with final costs varying due to local taxes.
Starting in the coming months, parents will be able to turn off chats with AI characters entirely for teens. This action won't block access to the Meta AI chatbot - the company's general-purpose AI chatbot - which will only discuss age-appropriate content. Parents will also be able to turn off chats with individual characters if they prefer more selective control.