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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^
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.
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.
How about simply ask for a pin or password when trying to buy or order? And parents not tell it to the childeren. Lock the ordering feature for ten or twenty minutes after five failed attempts. no fancy age detection algorithm needed. Strong passwords keep out adults so they should keep out the childeren.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
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.
Rubber thimble on the finger, press a little harder. Spend the other ten minutes figuring out the numbers game.
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
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.
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.
Just be careful with the eye impact of LCD screens, especially at such a young age. Google it. I think that what's being implied by the guy who replied earlier.
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>
... 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"
No... I'm just assuming that the parent is actually has a clue, and not so self-absorbed that they won't pay enough attention to their kid(s) to recognize the patterns that would indicate such activity.
Perhaps that's a pretty tall assumption, however.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'