If you’re 25 now, you were 15 during the early wild west days of smartphone adoption, while we as a society were just figuring that stuff out.
Since that time, the major tech companies that control a big chunk of our digital identities have made pretty big moves at recording family relationships between accounts. I’m a parent in a mixed Android/iOS family, and it’s pretty clear that Apple and Google have it figured out pretty well: child accounts linked to dates of birth that automatically change permissions and parental controls over time, based on age (including severing the parental controls when they turn 18). Some of it is obvious, like billing controls (nobody wants their teen running up hundreds of dollars in microtransactions), app controls, screen time/app time monitoring, location sharing, password resets, etc. Some of it is convenience factor, like shared media accounts/subscriptions by household (different Apple TV+ profiles but all on the same paid subscription), etc.
I haven’t made child accounts for my kids on Meta. But I probably will whenever they’re old enough to use chat (and they’ll want WhatsApp accounts). Still, looking over the parent/child settings on Facebook accounts, it’ll probably be pretty straightforward to create accounts for them, link a parent/child relationship, and then have another dashboard to manage as a parent. Especially if something like Oculus takes off and that’s yet another account to deal with paid apps or subscriptions.
There might even be network effects, where people who have child accounts are limited in the adult accounts they can interact with, and the social circle’s equilibrium naturally tends towards all child accounts (or the opposite, where everyone gets themselves an adult account).
The fact is, many of the digital natives of Gen Alpha aren’t actually going to be as tech savvy as their parents as they dip their toes into the world of the internet. Because they won’t need to figure stuff out on their own to the same degree.
I wonder if someone could set up some form of tunneling through much more mundane traffic, perhaps even entirely over a legitimate encrypted service through a regular browser interface (like the browser interface for services like Discord or slack or MS Teams or FB Messenger or Zoom or Google Chat/Meet) where you can just literally chat with a bot you’ve set up, and instruct the bot to do things on its end, and then forward the results through file sending in that service. From the outside it should look like encrypted chat with a popular service over that https connection.