This Company Wants to Make Setting Parental Controls Much Easier For You
Who knows if k-ID can pull it off, but they've got their heart in the right place, and platforms could do worse than follow their lead.
A Crossplay reader recently emailed me with a familiar conundrum: “Every single one of these parental control systems that I've ever tried to use is a nightmare.” Apple, Google, Nintendo—doesn’t matter. Managing how children access games is a labyrinth that rarely feels like it was developed by people who actually use them.
Such controls are, incrementally, getting better. Some of that is driven by increased scrutiny by regulator scrutiny around the world, as we better understand the consequences of children being chronically online without appropriate controls and restraints in place. The regulations are fluid, and not the same from one country, or even state, to the next, which creates problems for children, parents, and developers.
“As a parent I have had the same experience so many of us have,” said Kieran Donovan, CEO of k-ID, a company building technology for developers and parents to have more control over playing games, in an interview with Crossplay. “As soon as my eldest was online I was confronted with all of the fragmentation between different ecosystems, games, services, and was shocked to discover what my son could access (or who he could chat with), with limited or no parental tools for transparency.”
k-ID made three announcements at last month’s Game Developers Conference:
k-ID Developer Platform: What k-ID is calling its “Global Compliance Engine” and “Compliance Database,” which provide developers with a database of worldwide privacy and safety regulations, with an API that can be integrated into games to scale and change games based on those regulations and what settings are picked by a parent or caregiver. It’s already being used by some developers.
k-ID Family Platform: Relevant to the people reading this, an application that would, in theory, allow parents granular control over games. It’d exist with a database of games that compatible with k-ID that allow that level of control.
Imagine if controls over game experiences were platform agnostic? It’s unlikely k-ID becomes that, but ideas like this from move us in a better direction, where parents can focus on the decisions about what’s right for the kids, instead of fighting interfaces.
“At the core of our philosophy is respect for the child and their rights,” said Donovan. “It's also about respecting the differences that can exist when building experiences for younger kids as compared with teens. It's about respecting those youth where they are—not importing rules from one jurisdiction and applying it everywhere, but delivering an experience in line with legal and cultural nuance where they live. Finally, it's about recognizing that not every 13-year-old is the same, and the digital maturity or vulnerability can vary wildly.”
The lack of more granular control is so true. I recently allowed my seven-year-old to dip her toes into regular YouTube, but it’s a child account with severe restrictions on it. Nonetheless, one time she was watching her iPad a few feet away from me, and I heard “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!” blaring out of it. She’s sensitive to swears, so she’s the one that told me, but I deleted the app and told her we’d revisit once I’d had a chance to figure out what happened. It’s possible the content A) slipped through the filters or B) was deemed appropriate, but neither feels great.
This is worlds apart from what k-ID is hoping to accomplish, but it’s the same bucket, where it feels like you can take the right steps to protect your kid and still mess up.
It’s how you set parental controls on your kid’s Switch, but doesn’t apply to the eShop.
“We want to create meaningful connections between parents and their kids' gaming,” said Donovan. “This means understanding what games their kids are playing, why they love playing them, and what things they can talk to their child about to better understand their kids' experience in the game. We have built out a whole range of features to build that connection.”
One feature of k-ID is a “maturity slider” that naturally adjusts some settings. It requires trusting k-ID’s analysis and determination of what maturity is, but when most settings are rooted in binaries of a game being on or off based on how much time they’ve spent playing, anything is better than what we’ve currently got.
“We have a ‘happiness index,’ which helps parents understand what configuration or preferences typically see kids report their experience as most enjoyable,” he said. “This is directly connecting parents to understand how they can be part of their kids gaming, while at the same time making the experience in the game an order of magnitude better for youth.”
“We want to create meaningful connections between parents and their kids' gaming. This means understanding what games their kids are playing, why they love playing them, and what things they can talk to their child about to better understand their kids' experience in the game.”
The terms “kid” and “child” and even “youth” is hardly clear, either.
“Many privacy laws define a ‘child,’ and many civil and other laws define an ‘adult,’” said Donovan. “Online safety regulation is one of the first to specifically address ‘teens.’ The convergence of all of these means that online platforms need to navigate more than just privacy, which includes things like onboarding, consent, and profiling (as it relates to kids). But platforms also need to address the experience within their platforms (chat, algorithms, loot boxes, and more) to ensure they are age appropriate—and this affects both younger kids and teens in different ways.”
But it’s early days. Developers can access k-ID’s tech now, but it remains to be seen what kind of adoption k-ID sees, if any. The Family Platform is in early access, and I’ve asked to be put on the waitlist to check it out. I’ll report back when that happens.
Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.
Also:
Do people still want in-depth guides to each platform’s controls? The reader at the top asked me about them, and while I want to do them, it would require something drastic, like shutting down Crossplay’s regular posts for a few weeks, while I sorted out the research and production on them. I’ll consider it, though.
k-ID is probably not the company that solves this problem, but that VC money is now being poured into the idea tells you where the winds are headed towards.
Is the art associated with this company giving anyone else AI vibes? It’s hard to tell these days, but even if it’s not true, a good reminder: just pay artists, man.
Speaking as the one who wrote in, yes I'd love those guides! But I recognize how much work it would be. Even a lighter level, like talking to parents who use these settings and summarizing their personal best practices, would be helpful.
Your Youtube "bitch bitch bitch" incident is a perfect example of the problems with any automated content-flagging system. The best settings in the world, either managed by myself or by a company like k-ID, are useless if the content itself isn't properly flagged.
Human-powered classification is useful. My kids aren't ready for R rated movies, and I trust the MPAA to flag things properly - they have people applying ratings to each individual film. Similarly, Apple Arcade is a human-curated collection of kid-friendly stuff. I'll let them install any of those apps. But human-powered classification doesn't scale. And when an algorithm or some other automated system is flagging content, at a certain scale it's destined to let stuff leak through.
I'm increasingly convinced that the only way to truly handle this is to watch/play things with my kids and do a qualitative analysis of what they're into & what they want to engage with. And that's exhausting, and leads to "no" as my default answer until a parent has the time & brainspace to dive in with them. I don't like it.
I think those guides would be a useful resource. As a parent who frequently sees questions about games and media posted to the local town parents group on FB, it would be the sort of article I could share as a resource. So it might also benefit Crossplay as an introduction to new readers. Though I have no meaningful insight on how effective it would actually be in growing your audience.