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Researchers Are Developing An Algorithm That Makes Smartphones Child-Proof (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Researchers at the University of South Carolina and China's Zhejiang University have created an algorithm that can spot whether your kid is accidentally trying to, say, order from Amazon without your knowing. There are already plenty of activity-monitoring apps that aim to control what kids do on phones, but parents need to add them and turn them on, and they could be disabled by tech-savvy children. The researchers figured that automated age-range detection would make it easier for parents to hand their phones over to curious children without worrying that the kids will stumble upon an inappropriate website or get into a work e-mail account.
The researchers built a simple app and asked a group of kids between the ages of three and 11 -- and a group of adults between 22 and 60 -- to use it. The app had participants unlock an Android phone and then play a numbers-based game on it, so that the researchers could record a variety of taps and swipes. They also tracked things like the amount of pressure applied by a user's finger and the area it encompassed. The researchers used the resulting data to train an age-detecting algorithm that they say is 84 percent accurate with just one swipe on the screen -- a figure that goes up to 97 percent after eight swipes.
The researchers built a simple app and asked a group of kids between the ages of three and 11 -- and a group of adults between 22 and 60 -- to use it. The app had participants unlock an Android phone and then play a numbers-based game on it, so that the researchers could record a variety of taps and swipes. They also tracked things like the amount of pressure applied by a user's finger and the area it encompassed. The researchers used the resulting data to train an age-detecting algorithm that they say is 84 percent accurate with just one swipe on the screen -- a figure that goes up to 97 percent after eight swipes.
This^
A whipping!
Might as well accept this simple reality of our Universe. Whatever this "child proof" algorithm is, children will circumvent it in ten minutes and then go on about their business of emptying your credit card and ruining your life.
Except some of the children will be more than clever enough to re-flash the phones with their own preferred ROMs.
If they're not old enough or responsible enough to understand their parents expectations of correct behavior when using a phone, then maybe they should have a dumb flip phone with no web browser or apps.
Teaching children expectations and consequences is a basic parental responsibility...
what about ios being more like google? with no password and no payment system needed for FREE APPS.
So if someone called from even a high-end residence in DC and said, "I wanna big parade like the one I saw on TV!" or "I wanna send my green army men to North Korea!" the phone would know to ignore it?
Seriously, forget the kids. I'm more interested in the phone figuring out that I'm looped and stopping me from drunk texting. Or drunk shopping. Or drunk anything.
Sure they are, and sure it will. /s
When will engineers realize that what is relevant to the tiny bubble they reside in may not be so for the world large, and that no amount of 'data' or 'research' will remedy that (sorry, both lie about reality)? Yet another ridiculous instance of hyperbole. What would genuinely benefit these valley 'tards is actually leaving and seeking to legitimately listen to someone *else* for once, prefersbly over 40 years of age. Hubris, ignorance, cashing in - it's the 21st century technophile way. They had some bad, baaaad teachers and role models, and their ability to think critically is a bad baaaad joke.
Just wait and see, my 14 year old will train it to lock me out of his phone...and my wife's phone...and my phone.
How does the algorithm do with drunk people? Can it tell the difference between them and children?
The researchers built a simple app and asked a group of kids between the ages of three and 11 -- and a group of adults between 22 and 60 -- to use it.
Noting they skipped everyone age 12 - 21.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Kids to bust this ;) lol My wife gave her phone to our 2 year grand son, to play with a screen touch color app. Next thing she found out he had gotten in to some pet store game thing the wife was playing with and was purchasing additional pet stock ;) lol
;) lol
;)
She was credited back for the purchases but did need to rethink things
Just my 2 cents
As an adult looking back I realize how stupid and foolish and just wrong this kind of thing is. I was never the smartest tool in the shed and I never had any problems getting around authoritarian bull shit like this.
Humorously in my younger years neither my parents nor anybody seemed to care about censoring young people. I went to R rated movies before I was 11 without incident. I had a movie theater near me. It wasn't until I was up in the Boston area that I'd ever been stopped and I was like "wtf". It seems they started pushing censorship hard in the mid 1990s because both my mom and others I noticed started hassling me about certain entertainment content. I know there were ratings before this- but they weren't being enforced where I grew up in New Jersey until the mid 1990s. Even then the movie theater never enforced anything near me.
In 1996 I was about 11 and my mom told me for what was probably the first time ever that I couldn't rent some PG-13 movie. I take that back. She wouldn't rent the movie chuckie when I was like 4. Other than that though never was an issue what I wanted to rent/watch. We got into a war over it. She put a 'lock' on my Blockbuster account, but it didn't work. I would just pretend to be my older brother. They kept upping the war though and Blockbuster started putting a notice on every screen whenever someone would rent and they flagged the account... so it half-worked. Problem is it took my mom a long time to figure out the restrictions on the account didn't work. Then as a quick one time solution to the problem I just bought the movie they wouldn't rent me. That was expensive so I went online to rent my movies after that. I also started buying used movies on eBay around this time period. Never again did I have an issue renting or buying whatever movies I wanted. There are these things called money orders, prepaid debit cards (I think those came later), actual debit cards (I actually had a few by probably 12-13), one of which was linked to a PayPal account and the other an actual checking account. I was actually doing better financially at 11 than when I graduated college because I had half a brain and was bringing in money through various means. Both online and offline.
Another time when I was 11 my mom had this idea I was spending too much time in front of the computer so she started withholding the keyboard from me. She literally took the keyboard with her to work and so I couldn't get on until after she was home later in the evening. Didn't really work. I bought a new keyboard. I actually bought a computer using my own money and built it from pieces that year.
There never was any censorship filters on our internet connection or computer. Good thing too because I was hugely into porn at 11. I guess it wouldn't really have mattered. The filters wouldn't have worked anyway. I had Linux installed on one system and there was no way my parents would have comprehended enough about computers to realize it was even on the family computer. The boot loader was on a floppy disk even. I was also smart enough to understand what encryption was and use it. lol Not that I needed it really. Then there was also the issue of internet access. Even if my parents had somehow managed to lock windows down to the point I couldn't do anything with it which just wasn't going to happen I still had access to the internet via free dial-up providers of the day and via Linux and via a school dial-up account. There was just no keeping me offline. Maybe if my parents weren't employed they'd have had some chance- but even then I'm doubtful. I had a cell phone by high school, digital organizers, and PDAs. I would have ultimately had some level of internet access without there knowledge and outside of any realistic ability for them to control me. If it wasn't so expensive back then I probably would have had cellular internet access on my phone or dial-up over cellular. It would have been a heck of a hindrance- but unlikely to have stopped me.
What about child proof chainsaw? Or child proof meat grinder? Or child proof rocket launcher?
cap: rampage
Anything like this that restricts phone access would pretty much put an end to the presidential tweetstorming. That's unacceptable. It's the one thing he knows how to do well. Let Trump Tweet!!
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
So how does this identify adults with physical disabilities? Same question for people who have recovered from a stroke?
If it systematically identifies such as children and restricts their access there could be a big ADA action if it's ever deployed.
Meanwhile: 16% error rate for a single swipe? With, say, three hundred million users that's 48 million people misidentified. Even with the eight-swipe error rate of 3% you're still talking nine million people.
That's if it's consistent, though. If it's per-trial noise you get to annoy a lot more people, while the kids can get through just by trying over and over.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
with that useful app that makes the phone waterproof. needed when the brats bypass that gimmick, and promptly get punished with a dose of waterboarding for not obeying in the first place. moronic parent's censorship by proxy beats good parenting any day ...
I wonder if the data is simply correlating to hand size. Since adolescents were excluded there's a pretty stark difference between the hand size of children and adults. However, an Asian woman's hands might be substantially smaller than a European man's... so I wonder how it'll account for that. Maybe there'll be a calibration where the owner does the test so the app knows the owner's hand size; will be fun when a European man has an Asian wife who wants to use his phone.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Imagine you are injured
Blood dripping
Hand shaking
Fingers fumbling
You pick up the phone, trying desperately to get help
But that app blocks you, repeatedly
Just because, to the app, you are a little kid playing with mommy's smartphone
It may end up be your personal killer app !
You mean the apps that just spy on you and show ads to you? Yeah, I wanna review which of those apps my kids load too.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Though probably won't be in a couple of years. :)
Anyway, solving half the problem is better than solving none. If one can prevent kids up to 11 from accessing things they shouldn't and buying things by mistake, that's pretty good.
When we all become tired or upset or are under stress, we become childlike in many ways. So by all means -- in one of your most hyper-lucid moments parental helicoptery concern fests... go ahead and lock down the high technology you use every day, and might need to use urgently and quickly in a true emergency when you're not at your best.
THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION
[grabs popcorn]
"911"
"I'm sorry Davie, I can't do that, and if you try again I'll tell Mom."
"He's not breathing 911 oh fuck"
"Your mommy says you should not swear"
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Would like to strongly disagree.
The way was to evolve, adapt and diverge.
Everything that will be child proof, will be American proof, and not child proof.
Because the "average American" was bred to be a complete and total retard.
Just look at that they consider "too complicated" to expect from them.
You are assuming they ate so retarded that they are not aware of this and make it so you cannot tell.
Assuming you can tell at all in the first place, of course.
... are kids doing with a smart phone at all, let alone someone else's smart phone? The whole basic premise is insane.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"