You might be under thinking it. I’m not familiar with Blocksite at all, but my immediate guess is that it may not cover all the possible things you want to block or do differently.
What I’m aiming at, is whether the extra cost of buying and using a specific service really adds much more by way of a wall then a simple system of phone-lockdown. A story to illustrate.
A little over a decade ago I was teaching a Friday morning FCA. I forgot my notes in an email. The school system blocked the use of Gmail. You could not access the website or use very many of Google’s features due to their system lockdown. (I think they used Barracuda at the time.)
I turned to the audience of about 30 or so students. Students at an early Friday morning Bible study. Students who were not known for being nefarious. I asked, quite plainly, for someone to get me into my Gmail account. I told them I would be in the office for a minute and when I came out I wanted to be able to open my email account. (You would be right to call me to the floor over my abuse of authority by requesting them to disobey their other authorities…)
Lo and behold, they came through. It took them less than 30 seconds and most of that was deciding to actually do it.
Whether you buy a specialized locked phone with a plan or make locked phone, they will always figure out a way around it if they want.
So, what are the benefits to a bought locked-up phone vs. a self-made one? I can see the use if you are so unfamiliar with technology to not know how to construct a self-made one, but if you can it seems like just as good a solution.
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Now that’s a howler!
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You’re losing me here, Joe. You say why buy a specialized phone rather than locking one down. Then you say kids are always going to get around something that’s locked down. The whole point of a specialized phone is that there’s nothing to get around. Now I’m thinking I must have misunderstood you, but I’m in the middle of this comment and don’t know how to go back and reread yours.
There are so many reasons I would argue for a simple phone like Gabb offers over any kind of locked down smart phone. But a big one would be simplicity. The vast vast majority of parents simply aren’t up for the task of trying to stay a step ahead of their kids or trying to manage systems. Gabb does not require any systems be managed.
But first, why not just a dumb phone? We tried doing that for our oldest son and found it a never-ending headache. Gabb is worlds better, and the original gabb phone was actually cheaper than the cheapest flip phone I found. I’ve tried using old dumb phones we still had around or from relatives, and we never found them to still be functional for some reason. Then, Verizon is the carrier that works at our house, but at the time, don’t know if it’s changed or not, Verizon did not have a simple talk and text plan. And using T-Mobile was the cheapest talk and text plan I could find, but they were a pain to deal with, and then of course the coverage was terrible at our house. Gabb has solved every issue we used to have. Their coverage seems to be excellent, they are cheap in comparison to most other options, and the only thing you can do on the phone is talk, text, and there’s a calculator and a bad camera. You cannot text groups and you cannot text or receive pictures. Bingo. Perfect for a teen. I don’t know why they just added an option for group and picture texting, but I think it was a terrible idea!
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That is helpful.
I definitely agree that simplicity is greatly helped by something like Gabb. And, to be honest, when we’re at this stage in several more years it may be that we opt for the simplicity rather than figuring out a lock-down system.
You’re final paragraph had something that I did not know about Gabb which is the picture texting. Now, that is something I have no idea how to block and it is something that I’d pay to have on a phone. The prevalence of sexting is something that has disturbed me for many, many years (going back that decade to those same kids) and the absence of the ability is worth noting.
I’m still not convinced that a phone like Gabb can’t be hacked to run surreptitious apps. I knew several guys I could pay to root my iphone back in the day. The guy who ran the Apple IT at Butler regularly rewrote the kernel code of OSX to run software that was incompatible on the new interface. Gabb is just as susceptible to override as a locked down phone.
But, the other two points I think are good and help me see why these sorts of phones exist.
I get the picture texting, but group texting? Seems like that would be helpful with no downsides.
Actually, the group texting thing I’ve never understood. I’ve just assumed it either has to do with bullying possibly or that somehow group texting and picture texting are tied together in a way that would be hard to separate (ignorance trying to guess). I realize that last comment makes it sound like I’m against group texting which isn’t the case.
There is literally no App Store. That’s the whole point of the phone.
Gabb is a computing device, and any computing device can be rooted and/or hacked. So yes, it is a technical possibility. But the work and know-how necessary for that means you are dealing with a whole different level of rebellion against the parents. Better in that case not to provide a phone at all.
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I think for many adults, a Gabb phone is enough. That’s all. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised by this little experiment of switching to a Gabb phone. It forces me to consciously make decisions that were always made subconsciously before, which is a good discipline for me. I spend more time on the computer now, but mostly only what I need to spend. One surprising discovery: I keep up with email better now than I did before when I was checking email on my phone. I don’t enjoy sitting at my desktop, so I tend to only use it for necessary activities and work. I’ve gone back to using Google Maps before driving somewhere unfamiliar (lol!)
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Perhaps, but I remember wondering what else my graphing calculator could do with its processor. I figured out eventually how to do some basic programing on it. Regardless, I don’t know that it would be possible to hack with something like this, but I wouldn’t be surprised.
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The problem though, is that you don’t ever need an app store to get apps. You can download them directly as APK files from websites. You can hide the apps on the phone screen with still yet other cloaking apps. And you don’t need to know how, you just need to know that it can be done and ask the right person (and perhaps cough up some cash.)
I think Lucas is right. If we are at the point where you can’t trust your child not to be doing that sort of activity then no phone is the best phone.
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I thought about bringing up the old TI-83 and the fun I had playing Block Man in high school. Kids and technology are a foe to be reckoned with. I remember a friend who was getting ready to go to college and had posted some stuff on a forum for the college. Another kid posted something snarky and my friend traced his IP address and asked him how the weather was on his street. That was still in the 56k modem days.
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LOL, such a foreign concept to me. How could you get an app when there’s no App Store? And how can you run anything if you have no data? This is why most parents shouldn’t be trying to managed a locked-down smart phone. For what it’s worth, my 19yo son is pretty clueless technologically. By the time he got a Flip phone at the age of 16, he could hardly figure out how to work it. So it’s not always true that kids pick up on everything incredibly quickly.
That’s just like asking how you can get music on the phone if there isn’t Spotify. Fair question, but the answer is simple enough. There’s more than one way to get music on a device and there’s more than one way to get apps on a device. The phone accepts an SD card which you can use to put music on the phone. There are lots of ways to transfer apps. Put an app on there and you’re halfway there.
That’s certainly another barrier, but I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t a wifi card in this device. It’s just turned off by software. Hack the software, and you can just turn it on.
Right, but some of the people that do the most damage with computing devices don’t have any clue how things work. They just know how to follow a few simple directions, or as Joe said, they simply ask somebody who does.
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Sorry, my questions were supposed to be rhetorical questions 
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Gabb blocks group texting to block picture texting because both are transmitted in the MMS format. You’d think it’d be possible to allow MMS and just not show photos in the messaging app, but that could understandably be difficult to reliably implement, or worked around.
Yay, so I’m not a complete idiot after all!
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In high school before the internet, I remember a few teenage boys writing, and sharing, games across graphing calculators. In college, I had a friend with pornography on his graphing calculator, certainly pornographic enough to affect young men with little exposure to such yet.
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Paul, this was me in high school… Lord have mercy and spare my kids.
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