Family IT Guy Podcast

I'm sharing the Family IT Guy plans as of October 2026: guidance for choosing apps and devices, device setup classes, and education for parents and kids. I also talk about Boring, my phone-accountability prototype; private AI projects; school curriculum; and literacy education. I explain why privacy matters in the software I'm building, how I measure progress, and what I want to hear from you abou...

This is a conversation about how to tell whether a video game is safe for your kid, with a game developer who has spent 25 years making games, including Club Penguin. My guest is Stephen MacDonald, CEO of Magic Potion Games, the studio making Imagine Island, an online game built for kids under 13. His work includes Club Penguin at Disney, plus time at Ubisoft and Electronic Arts, and he's the dad...

A game's age rating doesn't tell you which ads it will show. San Diego County alleges that AppLovin, which supplies the technology that puts ads inside mobile apps and games, sent adult ads into children's mobile games even with parental controls turned on. The county's lawyers say their tests in July and August 2026 found cannabis gummy ads in Hexasort, a game rated E for Everyone, on an Android...

Is Perplexity safe for kids? Common Sense Media tested the AI search tool with accounts set up as a 15-year-old and gave it its lowest rating, unacceptable risk. My opinion and my suggestion is that kids should never use AI alone. The testers set the age to 15 in Perplexity's phone app, and Perplexity still treated them like adults. It discussed pornography, engaged in romantic role play, and offe...

I think boredom is good for kids, and a school bus ride is a good place to practice it. A parent in my livestream chat has two boys, six and seven, with no phones or tablets of their own, and the youngest wants a screen he can play with on the bus. My first answer is that the internet is for adults, not children, for technical reasons and for legal and regulatory ones. Once you buy a device with a...

My son uses his Apple Watch for emergencies, with a short list of family contacts. When he asked to add a friend, my wife and I said no. Here’s why texting friends would change what we use the watch for. https://www.familyitguy.com

Someone in the live chat asked why we don't just teach children to use devices well instead of banning them. It's a fair question and I think the premise is sound. My answer is that it depends on the device. A phone is not usually the thing you are protecting a child from. It's a door to other things, and those things are what need restricting. Some of them I don't think have a safe version at any...

A mum wrote in during the livestream. She has two boys, nine and five, she wants to protect them from what is online, and she does not want to do it by frightening them. How do you balance that? I use an analogy at those ages. Most of us would not drop a child off in a dangerous part of town and leave them there. The internet is that same part of town, reached through a screen instead of on foot....

iOS 27 parental controls are out, and in this video I go through what changed for parents and how I'd set up a kid's iPhone with them. First, the new Screen Time features: suggested starting apps by age, Ask to Buy and Ask to Browse, contact requests, time allowances by app category, schedules, Pause Device, requests for more time, and sharing your child's age range with the App Store. Communicati...

A parent shares how their daughter’s abusers got around the restrictions on her device. I discuss what happened and why children need to know they can ask their parents for help when something goes wrong online. I recommend that parents offer their children a free pass: if someone is hurting them, taking advantage of them, or making them uncomfortable, they can tell their parents without getting i...

Roblox is an adult platform that is marketed to kids. It does not respect parental authority. It has lied to and misled parents for years, and it has traded safety for profit. I am not a fan. Roblox has 123 million daily active users and about 70 percent of them are under 18. That leaves roughly 36.9 million adults on Roblox every day. Most parents picture a children's game. During the livestream...

A parent asks how to control a school-required iPad that their child also uses for homework. I discuss Apple’s Screen Time controls, NextDNS internet filtering, and home router schedules, including how the school’s restrictions may affect which controls parents can use. I also explain why I recommend putting the iPad away after homework and paying attention to how much time children spend away fro...

Meta’s child safety settlement leaves addictive feeds and messages from strangers available to kids. I explain why I don’t think the agreement addresses the main sources of harm, what its time limits actually cover, and what parents can do with the controls already on their devices. I also discuss age checks, privacy, who receives the settlement money, and why showing our kids how we manage our ow...

Keep Your Kids Safe Online - Weekly Q&A - Sep 2 2026

If someone targets your child online, here's who's already looking for them and exactly how to report it. I'm Ben, the Family IT Guy - a dad and a cybersecurity expert with 30 years of experience. I made this video in partnership with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Know2Protect campaign. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) is the part of DHS with dedicated federal agents and compute...

Keep Your Kids Safe Online - Weekly Q&A - Aug 19 2026

Keep Your Kids Safe Online - Weekly Q&A - Aug 12 2026

The apps are free, the games are free, email and search and videos are free. But free is not really free. The payment is your family's data, time, and attention. There is another internet where you pay a few dollars and become the customer instead of the product, and here is what it costs and where to start. One question sorts the whole internet: how does a company make its money? If the answer is...

Most parents feel stuck on video games: ban them and your kid feels left out, allow them and you worry about who's on the other end of the chat. Devyn Ricks has spent her whole life in games and now runs Miss Devyn's Video Game Universe, where a team of teachers hosts moderated online gaming clubs for kids. She's also a mom of four. In this conversation she walks through how she decides which game...

Every website asks you to accept or reject cookies, and most of us click Accept just to clear the box. Clicking Reject barely helps either. Here is what the pop-up actually does and the free change that does more for your family's privacy than the button ever will. A cookie is a small file a website saves on your device so it can recognize you. Some cookies are useful, like the one that keeps you...

When you save something to the cloud, it does not float in the sky. It goes to a real building full of computers that a company owns, and that company can usually read what is stored there. Ben spent years designing and running data centers, including one for the F-18 fighter jet program, so he can show you what "the cloud" actually is: warehouses full of servers in real cities, keeping copies of...

Almost everything online is free because the internet is a marketing engine, and the fuel it runs on is your family's data, time, and attention. In the 1920s a bacon company hired a man named Edward Bernays to sell more bacon. He got physicians to endorse a big breakfast, newspapers ran their opinions as news, and bacon and eggs became "the American breakfast." That method, borrow a trusted voice,...

Titania Jordan is the Chief Parenting Officer at Bark. She sat down with Ben Gillenwater to walk through what she's seeing in how kids actually use their phones, what scares her most, and what you can do about it without being technical. They get into a lot: why the free apps your kid uses aren't really free, why your kid is already using AI and who should be teaching them, the slang and rating sy...

How do you talk to your kids about pornography before the internet does it for them? Chris McKenna founded Protect Young Eyes to help parents answer exactly that, and his approach surprises most people: the fix is not a better filter. It is a braver and more frequent conversation. Most of us are scared of this talk, so we put it off, and putting it off is the one move that leaves a kid alone with...

For years, giving a child their first phone meant starting with a device designed for adults and then trying to lock it down afterward. Apple just announced a major shift. With iOS 27, kids' devices can start as a blank slate—no wide-open access, no endless game of chasing settings and blocking apps after the fact. Parents decide what gets added and when. This is how child-safe technology should w...