Google has another secret browser

For comparison, and as a rant to substantially agree with you....

Microsoft has e.g. actual child Hotmail accounts, where the parent can whitelist who they can email and who can contact them. Gmail does not and has no intention adding such a thing. They did eventually add child accounts as part of the Family Link effort, but there's really no controls at that level. I recall seeing internally at Google that instead of adding such facilities to Gmail, they just preferred to a) cover their eyes and pretend that <13 year olds didn't have accounts by tossing that into the agreement and asking for a birthday b) proposing some blue sky alternative communication system for children (I forget the name of this effort, but it was I think 2016ish time frame?), but it had mock-ups and hand waving and big discussions and PRDs etc but was guaranteed to go nowhere because it was a giant vision parallel to y'know... actual-reality...

Microsoft also has global time limits across all devices. And far more granular control.

Anyways, you're substantially right about all this. It drove me nuts that we struggled to deal with access to harmful content and had no control over it, and the worst part of it was working at Google at the time and seeing just how not--seriously this is taken or at least the level of organizational paralysis that was preventing action.

Apple's system isn't much better than Google's FWIW.

They probably realize it is hopeless to try to lock motivated kids out of their devices. And it might be a nostalgic memory for them, maybe they aren’t too motivated to implement this stuff. Most of us had full control of our devices growing up, right?

Once the dust from the YouTube Ad-pocalypse settled and advertisers started spending money again, I feel like Google lost interest in a lot of child safety stuff.

Can you post the doc?

1 and 3. The quiet detente at Google is product won't be too ambitious if engineering doesn't go out of its way to do anything:

90% of the time product lays out a minimal rushed vision, engineering huffs and puffs that it might be impossible, then people work about 20-30 hours a week complaining that the designers didn't tell them exactly what to do and the teams they need to integrate with won't help, and you deliver 80-90% of the original minimal "vision" and slap eachother on the back.

And that was _before_: A) spent 18 months firing people, while some managers took advantage of that situation to punch down. B) they nuked the performance review system, 80% are exactly the same with their Significant Impact, another 10-15% have scarlet letters, and 5-10% get rewards.

Any deviation from that and someone perceives you as being on their turf and finds a way to punch down.

And good luck getting management to care, just like the real world, no one wants to get within 100 feet of trouble.

Then you're faced with the invitation to appeal to a VP, a coin flip where you have to guess at if they're going to back you, and even if they do, facing the fact you nuked your career anyway because you broke omerta.

Google itself is abandonware at this point. All of their services have bugs every single day. UI feels unpolished. And God forbid you have to talk to support. Some dude in India who doesn't understand English responds through email and keeps repeating the same script.

True, but maybe a little idealistic?

Every parent can use a little help. There's so much that your child sees and hears, you want to be there to help explain it to them when they have questions.

Hand them a device that shows anything happening anywhere in the world? Maybe a little help there, limiting what they can easily stumble upon, is a good thing.

If you think that your child would be vunlerable to anything in the web, then most likely you should not give the phone to your kid.

phone has many utilities I want kids to use: make calls, check mail, maps, weather etc.

The issue is that they are using it for secretly watching tiktok for example.

On iOS, the ability to prevent (say) the use of social media after 10pm is very useful. What would you, as someone who "cares about your child" do instead?

I honestly don't know how television got such strict laws and regulations on children's programming, when viewed in comparison to the complete wild west, that is the modern app store.

With time and pressure.

Right now you have a fun new technology which people are still infatuated with, bought by one of the biggest companies to ever exist, in a country which openly permits business-to-politician payments through lobbying.

The wild west won't look anything like it does 50 years from now

“Television” doesn’t have strict laws and restrictions.

Over the air broadcasts do. The broadcast spectrum is considered publicly owned and is leased to television operators.

I guess you could say the same about the cellular spectrum. But how deep do you want government regulation to go since Google operates over the internet? Do you really want the government controlling internet content “for the children”?

And if they regulate app stores, especially on Android, do they also regulate what you can distribute from your own website?

Not sure who is downvoting you, but you're absolutely right.

Just like Meta/Instagram, they're playing lip-service to the concept, but not really taking action.

Frustratingly, out of all the platforms & BigCorps, Microsoft's parental controls and support for child accounts seems the best.

For many parents this might be no big deal. But there are genuinely children who've ventured into self-harm, eating disorder, etc. content on account of the wild-westness of the Internet combined with weakness of this crap. And it's absolutely maddening to see how pathetic they all (including Apple) are treating this.

The sheer fact that I can't differentiate between "Has ads, and you can pay to get rid of them" and "Has 15 different currencies that make the game no fun unless you pay a fortune" in the Play store is proof that Google don't want to promote good business practices.

Those controls work best as a soft limit - strong enough that going around them would be clear, unambiguous disobedience.

Which could very likely go undetected, therefore unpunished. It's not like it's a family-room computer that's easily monitored.

After all, they're parental controls, not NSA-proof security. Making them technically bulletproof would arguably be worse for everyone.

It sounds like they're about as bulletproof as as screen door. I would be much better to have them as strong as an locked exterior door, maybe not "NSA-proof" (the door is vulnerable to locksmiths and battering rams) but strong enough to keep a kid out.

I think you're describing the point of view of the phone makers. Parents I've interacted with are in a whole other world. If you limit YouTube, you're limiting YouTube. There should be no caveats.

I think anyone expecting these security-related features to work as expected would regard it as a vulnerability.

If I read that correctly, in the second case someone can bypass the pinning feature to access your personal information via the default browser's active sessions. That would be a compromise if that's the case.

Yes, and the worst part is I don't think it's even a side effect of organizational structure because I've seen it in so many places. There is just a quirk of human psychology where "if you touch a problem it belongs to you now," and the result is a situation where everyone would be genuinely happy and eager to help but nobody (except the newbie) dares try because the consequences for trying are immediate and dire.

support - whether external customers or internal stakeholders - is a game of hot potato

I’d like to shift this a little:

Support who’s primary metric is handle time is in a game of hot potato.

From a business perspective the managers and leaders always feel like there’s too many fires which inevitably leads to either pressure on front-lines to “go faster” and “stop doing unnecessary work” (aka “taking time away from the fires”) or some level of management that’s intentionally blocking higher-ups from seeing those fires so that they look like they are managing the department well (and in this case not only is there the same pressure on the front-lines, but there’s additional pressure about not reaching out to anyone except through that manager.

When the primary metric is handle time, the issues pile up, there’s never enough people to handle it, and the business slowly sinks as no one with a budget sees the “ounce of prevention [that can prevent a pound of cure]”.

However: If the metric is minimum number of departments an issue touches before it’s resolved it’s a whole different thing. Suddenly playing hot potato is a problem and “problem ownership” is praised. There are other metrics too that produce different support cultures (and sometimes different games), but the reason hot potato is so popular is that those other metrics all require top-level execs to be comfortable with spending now to save down the road.

You're totally right in the general case, but in the specific case of security vulnerabilities it makes sense for there to be an exception (even if the action taken is just to hot potato on your side).

I feel like my experience with big cos is that the "that's another team" might go like this:

Parental controls is essentially maintenance mode and has 1 dev nominally responsible for it, maybe their workload is divided between that and a bunch of other stuff that they deem their "real" work. The way the component works means that bugs typically get assigned elsewhere in the system very far away from parental controls; you, the owner of Contacts, land a bug like "Your feature XXX has the following failure in parental controls mode." The team responsible is like ... "Why do I care about this? Why should I take a code change for this? Isn't that your problem?" Whoever is responsible for parental controls might not care, but if they do, they don't have political leverage over the owner of the Contacts app or whatever. Therefore, won't fix.

The "that's another internal team" reply was presumably more about bounty than vulnerability itself.

Yeah, that's my read. Basically the first line of support said "parental controls and screen pinning don't count as security boundaries", and the author is upset not because of an abstract argument about impact but because they want to get paid.

Should they be security boundaries? Honestly I'm mixed on this. First because the threat mode is totally different when the attacker is your teenager (i.e. who exactly is the harmed victim? The parent?).

But mostly because the whole idea behind bug bounties is to encourage disclosure of vulnerabilities that would otherwise be sold and deployed against the public at large. That is, the bugs have "value", and we're all better off if the purchase price is borne by the software developer than the criminal. There's no market for parental controls bypasses in that sense.

The result was the same. Someone was reporting a bad thing. The bad thing never got fixed.

It's most likely because when you forward any internal information to any outsiders, you will get a stern dressing-down by your manager.

Android's WebView is Chrome, process sandboxing & all. Unless the Contacts app injected a JS handler, which we have no evidence of, then it's no less secure than Chrome is.

This is how the current ps5 jailbreak works iirc