Despite building an increasingly screen-focused world, billionaire tech leaders are keeping their own children away from the tech they helped create.
As far back as 2010, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs told a New York Times reporter his kids had never used an iPad and that, “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.”
Since then, the trend of Silicon Valley billionaires keeping their families away from technology has become even more pronounced, thanks in part to the rise of social media and short-form video.
At the 2024 Aspen Ideas Festival, early Facebook investor and billionaire Peter Thiel joined Chen among the ranks of tech leaders who are setting strict limits on screens. Thiel said he only lets his two young children use screens for an hour-and-a-half per week, a revelation that prompted audible gasps from the audience.
Other tech CEOs, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Snap’s Evan Spiegel, and Tesla’s Elon Musk, have also spoken about limiting their children’s access to devices. Gates has said he did not give his children smartphones until age 14 and banned phones at the dinner table entirely. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, in 2018, said he limits his child to the same 1.5 hours per week of screen time as Thiel. And finally, Musk, who bought the social media company X, formerly Twitter, in 2022, said it “might’ve been a mistake” to not set any rules on social media for his children.
Yet, as the trials against social media companies continue and country after country moves toward legislating what Silicon Valley’s billionaires have quietly practiced for years, the private behavior of the world’s most powerful tech figures stands in contrast to what they’re promoting and building
People get pissed at me but, as a short-term solution, I’m okay with giving up my ID in order to lock kids out. I personally think it is the lesser of two exceedingly great evils.
Ideally, there’d be federal regulation of these platforms in every country banning algorithmically-elevated content, ads, privacy violations, and holding the operators of these platforms accountable for CSAM, but I think that will take decades.
Personally, I don’t feel comfortable giving my ID to social media. Especially not with the many data breaches that are happening these days. I think it was a month or three ago that Discord had their data breach and got thousands of ID’s stolen of people.
Yet Discord still decides to push forward their “verification system with ID or face scan”.
Also here’s a screenshot of a comment someone once made and that also got me thinking about the future of “showing your ID and/ or Face scan to ‘protect the kids’”. Another note; people and especially teenagers will nearly always find ways to get around rules. I mean, we all were teenagers before and we often also got around the rules.
At least germany is working on a system where people are able to verify that they are over 18 (and maybe other things if they extend the system) without needing to send the ID to some website.
They use the Zero-Knowledge-Proofs which is still quite young.
A plus about that is that it only says if the person with the proof is older or younger but not who it is and other stuff
But sadly its not reality yet
“Lesser, greater, middling, it’s all the same. Proportions are negotiated, boundaries blurred. I’m not a pious hermit, I haven’t done only good in my life. But if I’m to choose between one evil and another, then I prefer not to choose at all”
Like the responder below, I do not feel comfortable giving my ID to social media sites. Hell, we had our government controlled, medical database (Medicare) get hacked and leak PII. And the yanks had their SSN pasted all over the net.
And those were a supposedly hardened pipelines.
Trust Facebook? Really? Nah.
People get pisses at you for good reason
Why does it need to take decades though?
I bet if there were actual consequences for this shit, like in the form of seizing assets from the broligarchs who run these companies, and giving them to the victims of their creations, the issue would be solved very quickly.
Also, having people upload their ID seems like just another obvious surveillance ploy/invasion of privacy in the name of safety. These people who have given us nothing but reasons not to trust them, just keep offering us more and more solutions to the issues that they’ve created.
“We’re doing this for your own good. You should say thank you.”