A Pennsylvania county has filed a lawsuit against social media companies, claiming their platforms have contributed to a youth mental health crisis through addictive technology and harmful targeted content. The Bucks County commissioners and the district attorney jointly filed the lawsuit in a California federal court on March 14 against parent companies of tech giants such as Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc., TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd., Snap Inc. and their affiliated groups.

If you don’t have kids who use children’s apps, you may not be aware of the lawsuits against Apple, Google, and Amazon for allowing children to make unauthorized (because unauthenticated by password) purchases in apps that are geared towards children.

You’ll need to pardon our rant, and if you are easily offended, you may want to skip this article. Because we want to know who the hell lets their kids register their personal information, including home address, pictures, and other personally identifying information or – even more mind-boggling – registers this information for their kids, online?

Countless parents wring their hands over trying to keep their underage children off Facebook, something which Facebook itself seems mostly unable to do, and unable to do at all if the child lies about their age when signing up. But one parent has done more than wring his hands: he sued Facebook.

It’s bad enough that Facebook is exploiting the data of minors who have accounts on Facebook. Now, the newest assault on childrens’ privacy is the recent decision to allow marketers access to the data in a massive databsase that contains the private data of millions of children – k-12 students – incuding their name and address, test scores, attendance records, sometimes even their social security number, and which lists whether they have learning disabilities, and more. So far New York and Louisiana have expressed their intention to enter the data of nearly all of their students, and Massachusetts, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, Delaware and Colorado have said they will enter data from “select districts”.

Ann Coulter is drawing ire after publicly tweeting the word “retard,” in reference to Barack Obama. When Coulter not only used the word publicly, but then staunchly refused to apologize for it, the community fired back in outrage, calling her remarks careless and offensive.

Toys R Us is throwing their hat, or rather tablet, into the ring by introducing the Tabeo. The Tabeo is a tablet made just for children, and is proving that it might be a worthy adversary for the new kid-friendly Kindle Fire HD.

If you are a part of virtually any social network: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and even Pinterest, you have likely seen either, “Joseph Kony 2012” or, “Let’s Make Joseph Kony Famous” meme’s cropping up everywhere. Who is Joseph Kony and why is everyone trying to make him so relevant?

Score one for the good guys: the Justice Department has said that they have taken down a huge, international child pornography ring that ‘met’ on an online bulletin board known as DreamBoard, where the members in the exclusive, members-only Dream Board child porn ring would trade images and videos of children involved in sex acts, all under the age of 12, and including children as young as infants. Heartbreaking!

We have often taken flack for saying that children have no business being on Facebook (or the Internet in general), and that parents really don’t understand the dangers of letting your child on the Internet without adequate supervision and precautions. Now a group of police officers is saying the same thing, going so far as to say that you need to have your child’s Facebook password, and monitor their activity on Facebook – even if it means stealing their Facebook password to do it.

If you are wanting or needing to give your child a cell phone, but want to be able to apply parental controls to restrict access, or even to make their access fully restricted access with them being able to call just a few numbers that you designate, then here is how to do it with T-Mobile. It is important that you understand these steps, and that you both a) don’t let Tmobile tell you that it can’t be done, and (equally important), b) don’t believe T-Mobile when they tell you that it has been done. You will need to do it – or at least check that T-Mobile has really done it – yourself. Here is how to lock down your child’s cell phone account and access, and apply full parental controls, so that they have no Internet access, and can only call and text to pre-approved numbers.

More information is coming to light about the situation with Google and David Barksdale, a Google engineer who used his access to the massive stores of data that Google has gathered about its own users to spy on the private lives (and data) of several Google users, who also happened to be minors. That’s right – Google employee David Barksdale was spying on children, even cyberbullying them, using the access that his position with Google afforded him to look at the private information of children. What’s more, it was going on for months.

A study conducted earlier this year has found that children between the ages of 8 and 18 are staring at an electronic screen, and using electronic media and electronic devices, a stunning 8 to 10 hours a day! That’s the equivalent of a full-time job or better, just using iPods, computers, cell phones, televisions, and other electronic devices!

We’d like to take this opportunity to tell you about what we think is the best website that provides both advice for unmarried fathers and divorce advice for men. Whether you are looking for information about a fathers rights to child custody (and if you are unmarried child custody issues can still go either way – custody of children is not dependent on your marital status – an unmarried fathers rights of access to children is the same as if he’d been married to the mother), information about the best way to resolve custody issues (is shared custody best? Should you try to win custody? Go for 50 50 custody of a child?), or information regarding children and divorce, such as the effects of divorce on children (how does divorce affect children?), this should be your go-to website. Fathers, get answers to your separation and divorce questions, information about how to cope with divorce with children, and how to deal with custody of child if never married, all in one place!

“Now Available – the Worlds First GPS Locator that Locates Your Child… Not Just the Device” touts the ad copy. The device being referred to is the Num8 children’s wristwatch, by Lok8u (get it? “Locate You”), and it is a GPS watch that allows you to track your child wherever they are.