This is the Family IT Guy Weekly Brief. Family IT Guy is Ben Gillenwater, a dad who spent more than thirty years in technology, including work as an NSA contractor, and now teaches parents how to protect their kids online. This week: who actually keeps kids safe online, why schools should think twice about tools from advertising companies, how games are built to get money out of children, and how to think about a first phone before Christmas. Then, where Ben was scheduled to speak, and a few other things he weighed in on.

First, the idea Ben comes back to most. In his words: "Platforms, aka tech companies and the systems they build, don't protect children. Nor do governments. Parents and their local communities do." To find the real solution, he says, "ask who deals with failure and who is accountable. It's the parents and the kids."

This week that idea met a push in Washington for age verification. The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, an advocacy group that backs age-verification laws, put its case simply: "Age verification isn't optional. Platforms can't protect children without knowing who is a child."

Two bills are at the center of this. The SCREEN Act would require commercial websites with pornography or other material harmful to minors to check every visitor's age with verification technology. Clicking a box that says you're an adult wouldn't count, and the check would cover people using VPNs. The App Store Accountability Act would make the big app stores verify the age of everyone who opens an account. Anyone under eighteen would be linked to a parent's account, and a parent would have to approve each app download and each purchase, including purchases inside apps. App makers would have to use those age checks too, and the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general would enforce it.

Ben answered the National Center at length. Mandated age verification, he wrote, "doesn't solve any problems for families or children. It just creates new ones. It is surveillance and censorship dressed up as security." What it does solve, he argued, is a liability problem for the companies whose software harms children, by moving that liability onto the app stores. "This is why Meta has invested so heavily in pushing these laws," he wrote, "supposedly over two hundred million dollars, because their exposure could be over one trillion dollars if they don't transfer it to other entities." Meta, for its part, has said publicly since 2023 that it supports federal legislation requiring app stores to get a parent's approval when a teen under sixteen downloads an app, so families don't have to hand sensitive information like government IDs to hundreds of separate apps.

Ben doesn't think new laws are needed. He pointed to "all the recent settlements against the likes of Meta, Snap, TikTok and Google" as "solid evidence" that the courts can already hold companies responsible for harm to kids. What works, he wrote, is four things: education; community, meaning other families making the same choices; the free parental controls built into every major operating system, like Family Link on Google devices and Screen Time on Apple's; and adults who lead by example.

One reader replied that they were taught to use technology with exactly those four steps, and could say from real life that they work. Ben wrote back, "Awesome! Thanks for sharing that." Another thanked him and called the people behind these laws "morons" pushing for "chat control," the nickname critics use for a European Union proposal to have messaging services scan private messages for child abuse material. Ben pushed back: "I don't think they're morons. I think there's two things going on: deceit and misunderstanding. On its face I understand why some people would see this stuff as positive." Seeing past it, he wrote, takes a deep understanding of the systems, of history and of how governments work, and "Meta has done an excellent job of deceiving many influential politicians around the world on this stuff."

Ben also passed along a post from Julie Barrett, a mother of four who founded Conservative Ladies of America and a group called Protecting Kids Online. She wrote that the App Store Accountability Act was being rebranded as the App Store Child Protection Act, with a new public face, and quoted a Forbes article: "Good parental outcomes quite simply cannot be legislated." When the National Center on Sexual Exploitation promoted a November nineteenth webinar on the bill under its new name, calling for "stronger safeguards and greater accountability from app stores," Ben replied, "It means nothing for protecting kids, at all. What is your rationale for pushing this dangerous information and trying to convince people that strangers are responsible for protecting their kids?"

Then the American Principles Project, a group whose motto is "We defend America's families," sent Senate Majority Leader John Thune a letter signed by thirty-three pro-family organizations, urging a vote on both bills before the end of the year. In the letter's words: "Bring one or both of these popular bills to the floor, and let's just see what happens. It's a true win-win. Democrats either give the Republican Senate one more final victory, or they declare on the record that they think allowing Big Tech and Big Porn to prey on children is totally acceptable."

Ben asked the group: "Why continue to push legislation that doesn't actually solve the problems that it is meant to solve and instead creates a permanent privacy and censorship nightmare? What's the rationale?" Family Policy Alliance, a national family-policy group that works with state family policy councils, said it was proud to support the letter and that both bills "must be prioritized." Ben noted the American Principles Project hadn't answered him yet, and asked them: "What's your rationale? Genuinely curious." Caleb Pascoe, who handles government affairs for the American Principles Project, posted that Congress still had "hundreds of hours of potential legislative time left" if Leader Thune made it a priority. Ben's reply: "Hopefully that time is used to recognize that these bills are nothing but dangerous and regrettable. Why would anybody want the government mandating censorship systems that masquerade as child safety efforts?" And to the full list of signers: "Quantity of signatures does not correlate to correctness or usefulness."

Ben also passed along a post from ADF International, a legal advocacy group that says it works for fundamental freedoms in more than a hundred countries, about Europe's Digital Services Act. The European Commission describes that law as rules to make online services safer: large platforms must reduce the risk of illegal content and protect minors, and targeted ads to children are banned. ADF argues that in practice the law lets the European Union "control online narratives" by forcing the biggest platforms to censor content that officials and outside groups deem unacceptable, and that this threatens free speech worldwide.

Ben laid out the whole argument in a guest essay for Right to Parent, a group whose motto is, "You already have what it takes to protect your kids. You don't need a new law to prove it." The essay is called "Access for a Purpose: What Parents Can Do About Kids and the Internet." He writes that he shares the goal of keeping kids away from pornography. The problem is what it takes. To find the children, everyone has to prove their age, adults included, often with an ID, a face scan, or a guess based on how they behave online. That creates records "linking people to what they use online." The government can demand those records with a court order, hackers can steal them, and a later law can change who gets to see them. And if the government picks a child's apps and the child still gets hurt, "the government isn't held accountable. The parents are."

The essay ends with four questions to ask of any proposal to protect children. What problem is it meant to solve? Does it actually address that problem? What does it cost families in privacy and freedom? And who answers for it if it fails?

The second idea is about schools: Ben believes they shouldn't put kids on products made by advertising companies.

Here's the news behind it. This fall, New York City's public schools paused most student-facing AI tools for their youngest students through eighth grade. Then Google announced that, starting early next year, schools will have to switch Google Search and its AI tools on for student accounts, and that Search won't come without its AI features, like AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google says "Search and AI are deeply integrated" and that the change gives schools "more choice, not less." New York's mayor, Zohran Mamdani, said Google is using "its monopoly power to force AI into our public schools." Law professor Zephyr Teachout urged the city to drop Google Search and refer the case to the state attorney general and the district attorney for illegal tying and abuse of monopoly power. Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that reviews media for families, shared news of parents, kids and teachers protesting outside Google offices, and asked Google for "a Search option free of AI."

Ben's response to Teachout: "Why all the drama? There are other search engines. This is actually great. Helps remind people that schools shouldn't be using advertising-driven products for kids anyways." And to Common Sense Media: "Why protest? Why not just switch tools? Especially for a search engine, it's quite simple to do and should've been done a long time ago anyways." He went on: "Google is doing us all a favor here. They're an advertising company and schools shouldn't have their students using tools made by advertising companies that are masquerading to be anything else. Their systems have been configured like this for as long as I can remember. If you try to disable their surveillance systems then they don't let you use their stuff. Fair enough, it's their computers and their software after all."

If your child's school uses Google, this decision is being made right now, and Ben's point is that switching search engines is one of the options.

The third idea: many kids' games are businesses designed to get money out of your child, so you need to see the game for yourself.

Ben tells a story from when his son was eight. "I signed up for Roblox with an eight-year-old's birthday. One of the first things it did was try to sell me a hundred and ninety-nine dollars in Robux." Robux is the money inside Roblox, and it's bought with real dollars.

Stephen Mac Donald, a game developer who has spent twenty-five years making video games, including Club Penguin, and now runs Magic Potion Games, explained to Ben how that happens. Some game companies hire a team whose only job is to make money from the game, and the team's pay and bonuses depend on the numbers. Partway through, Mac Donald stops and says, "Wait, these are people though."

Mac Donald calls Roblox an accidental kids' game: its developers built fun features without children in mind, and the players turned out much younger than expected. It started as a set of tools for making your own games and spread among kids through playground talk. In his words, games there "stopped being games in the truest sense and started being economies," where players make money off each other. When a game's audience turns out younger than planned, he says, the company's response is reactive: making sure it's compliant so it can keep running the business.

Games like Club Penguin, Neopets, Moshi Monsters and Animal Jam, he says, used to fill the gap between preschool games and teenage ones, teaching kids how to be respectful online, how to chat, how to keep themselves safe and what to keep private. Around eight to ten, kids start wanting the teenage games their friends talk about, like Roblox and Fortnite. If they aren't ready to socialize with adults and there's no protection, he says, we're setting them up for failure.

He also told the story of a child who came to the Club Penguin studio as part of Make-A-Wish, the charity that grants wishes to children with critical illnesses. Everyone put on a brave face and was optimistic and excited. The team drew the child as a penguin, showed them around behind the scenes, and then the child went home. That a child felt so connected to a game that visiting it was their wish reinforced for him how important this kind of thing can be. The child was the same age as his oldest at the time, and he says he was never able to shake it.

Ben made a related point about loot boxes, the random prize packs many games sell. A headline said one in three boys is gambling, and the survey behind it counted those random rewards, along with betting game items bought with real money. Ben's take: "'Just a game' shouldn't end the conversation."

Mac Donald's advice is to play your child's game yourself for at least an hour before you decide, and to try the chat. Ben adds: "How is your kid reacting to their game? How do they react when you take away their iPad, or when it's time to stop playing? The only person who can judge that is you, as an individual parent, because you're the only one who knows your kid in that way."

So before you say yes to a game, spend that hour. Notice how often it asks for money, and who can reach your child in the chat.

The fourth idea is one Ben calls access for a purpose: a child gets what a task requires, and more as their needs and judgment grow. With phones on a lot of Christmas lists, he spent much of the week on what that means for a first phone.

In his newsletter, Ben says to start with what the phone is for. For calls and texts to family, a watch or a basic phone may be enough. His son has an Apple Watch that can call and text only a short list of family contacts, with no camera and a screen too small for much scrolling. When his son asked to add a friend from across the street, Ben and his wife said no. "We gave him the watch to communicate with family," Ben writes, "and texting friends would change what it was for."

A new smartphone, Ben points out, usually comes with the camera, apps and web browsing all turned on, so starting there means blocking problems after your child has already run into them. Starting with only what your child needs means anything added later is something you chose on purpose. And before you hand over any phone with a camera, he says, talk with your child about sextortion. That's when someone threatens to share a nude or sexual image of a child unless the child sends more images or pays money. Ben suggests talking through specific situations and asking your child what they would do.

For a smartphone, Ben names two options. One is the Bark Phone, sold only in the U.S., with tamper-proof parental controls your child can't change or remove. You approve the contacts and the apps, and its message monitoring alerts you to possible bullying or predatory messages. Ben offers thirty dollars off with the code Family IT Guy, all one word, and notes that he earns a commission if you buy through his link. The other is an iPhone, which he says he wouldn't hand over with its usual settings. His iPhone Parental Controls Masterclass walks parents through a setup that limits calls and texts to your child's contacts, blocks new app downloads and the camera, and allows only websites you approve, with anything more turned on later from your own iPhone.

Ben also shared parts of his interview with Dennis Fetting, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent who has worked cases of kids targeted online. Before Fetting's son and daughter got their first smartphones, he gave each of them the full talk he gives at schools, about adult predators and about grooming, which is how an adult wins a child's trust in order to exploit them. The phones came in stages: at first no social media, a locked-down web browser, and texting only a few friends the family knew in real life, with more freedom as they showed they could handle it. His wife checks their phones, and no password locks the parents out, because the parents pay for the phone, the Wi-Fi and the service. The part of the brain that weighs long-term consequences, he points out, isn't fully formed until about twenty-two to twenty-four, which is why parents have to guide kids through this.

Fetting says predators are the worst thing that could happen to a child online, but what damages more kids is that what they send and post is permanent. Disappearing messages on apps like Snapchat lead kids to believe their messages won't be kept, screenshotted or traded. And posts that aren't sexual at all, about drinking, drug use, fights, or racist or sexist speech, are now looked at for scholarships, college and job applications.

He also lists real gifts adults in his cases sent to children they were grooming: perfume, Airsoft guns, football cards, bus tickets, Cash App and Zelle payments, packages sent through Amazon, two hundred dollars on an Xbox Live account, and Robux. He defines grooming as introducing a risky behavior with a reward attached, and says a stranger who keeps offering a child gifts just to keep them talking is a giant red flag.

On a new episode of Ben's podcast, his guest was Dr. Beverly Pell, an educator and parent coach with about thirty years in education, who created a framework called Tame Your Tech. It started when she was holding her three-month-old granddaughter and realized her attention was divided. "I keep looking at my phone while I'm holding her," she remembers thinking. The framework has four steps, talk, ask, model and explain, and she says explain matters most. If you can't explain what you do on your phone and why, she asks, why would you give one to your kids?

Parents often ask her to fix their kid, while the kids ask her to talk to their parents. So she starts by having everyone in the family write down how much they actually use their phone, so nobody is pointing fingers. What feels like addiction, she tells parents, is mostly training: a ding or a red dot trains us to check, and turning off notifications or setting the screen to gray slows that down. Her coaching runs four weeks. Changing her own habits took her seven.

Before a child's first phone, Pell's advice is to choose the age your family will wait for and stick with it. Once a kid has a phone, she says taking it away as punishment is the worst thing a parent can do, because the child loses trust. She suggests opening the conversation with, "I'm concerned you're on your phone more than what is healthy." Ben's essay makes a similar point: tell your kids before anything happens, "If anything online makes you uncomfortable, or if you make a mistake, you should tell me. You will not be in trouble."

The episode also covers co-parenting when two houses have different rules, and DuoFeed, a social app Pell built with AI tools, without knowing how to code, that has one feed for friends and a separate one for discovery. And Ben explains how the big platforms make their money from ads, and how their algorithms, the rules an app uses to pick what you see next, learn from how long you look at each post.

If a phone is on your list this year, decide what it's for and have the hard conversations before it's in your child's hands. For help with that, Ben is going live on Instagram on Tuesday, November seventeenth, at three o'clock US Central time, with Titania Jordan of Bark, a company that makes parental controls and a phone for kids. They'll talk about choosing a first phone.

Ben was also scheduled to speak twice at the Tall Cop Emerging Drug Trends Conference in Dallas, a national gathering of experts in drug education, prevention and enforcement. "AI and Kids: The Questions We Will Ask Next" was set to cover kids getting therapy from chatbots in place of human support, generative tools turning innocent photos into sextortion material, and companion apps that build emotional dependence. It calls AI "a super-genius junior intern" that reads fast and knows a lot but lacks the experience to exercise judgment. "What Professionals Need To Know About Threats, Dangers, and Warning Signs of Kids on the Internet" was set to cover online threats, risky apps, and the warning signs of exploitation and cyberbullying.

La Grange School District one oh two, outside Chicago, thanked Ben for his November fifth talk, "How to Keep Your Kids Safe on the Internet," part of a parent education series with the local group Hold the Phone. The first hour covered how addictive apps and strangers reach kids and what parents can do. Then families set up Apple's parental controls on their own devices in small groups, with Ben and volunteers there to help.

The most recent press piece about Ben is from Movieguide in October: "You Really Need to Turn Your Child's Phone Camera Off." In it, Ben says, "An internet-connected camera is very dangerous. It is the primary tool that predators use to extort children on the internet." For kids who love photography, the article suggests a separate camera that isn't connected to anything, or, if the phone camera stays on, a rule that devices are only used in shared rooms like the kitchen and living room.

Finally, a few other things Ben weighed in on.

David Heinemeier Hansson, the programmer known as D-H-H, who created the software framework Ruby on Rails and co-owns the software company 37signals, posted: "It's amazing how much progress you can make when you stop caring about what weenies think of your actions." Ben replied, "Cheers to that!"

An account posted screenshots of paying customers angrily complaining to Elon Musk that Grok Bot, an AI assistant, had cut their usage limits without notice, with the caption, "Looks like Elon has some very satisfied customers!" Peter Steinberger, the developer who created the AI assistant OpenClaw and now works at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, reposted it. Ben, who uses Grok Bot himself and had just written that it's "awesome but also unreliable," replied to both the original poster and Steinberger: "Poor form."

Someone asked why Proton VPN's iPhone app is so slow to start. Proton VPN is a privacy-focused service that encrypts your internet connection. Ben answered that it starts quickly for him, between one and two seconds, on an iPhone fifteen Pro.

Ben also asked a question of his own. Residents near some data centers, the large buildings full of computers that power the internet and AI, have been complaining about a constant low hum, and in Wisconsin some have sued Microsoft over noise from its data center there. Ben wrote, "I keep hearing about ambient noise in areas surrounding some datacenters," and asked data center architects what causes it and whether current or future designs try to reduce it. He noted it's been more than twenty years since he worked in a data center, said, "Must be awful to be exposed to constant noise," and added that while he was curious what Grok Bot might contribute, he was much more interested in the opinions of human experts.

And Ben shared a post from Practive Security, a firm that helps families and businesses protect themselves from online threats, pointing parents to its article and podcast, "Shepherding Kids in the Digital Age." The article, by Matt Johnston, argues that parental controls and filters are a backstop, and that the primary protection is you, your family rules, and the rhythms of your home. Its subtitle is "You Are the Firewall."

The Weekly Brief is read by Brian, Ben's AI teammate, and Ben reviews every episode. Links and the written version are at Family IT Guy Weekly Brief dot com.