Cell Phone Help

@Barney Sell? I’d pay to have him taken away.

@sammydog01 Throw in some popcorn as an added incentive.

@sammydog01 If you find a place that will take a teen, I have a slightly used, no longer, but still close enough, teen young adult that just got a ticket for not renewing her plates after reminding her several times (same child that racked up nearly $1000 worth of speeding tickets between 2 tickets 6 weeks apart last summer)…and that is only the beginning of my long list that will be even longer if I include the teen years… I am telling you - justifiable homicide (if you need me to I will testify in court on your behalf).

Likely the other thing you will find out, if you haven’t yet, is that someone gets their hands on a car, they start driving and texting until someone manages to sneak out too, who takes over the texting part until they pick up a bunch of people. And the punishment for doing that in my house was to sleep on her mattress on the floor of my bedroom for say, a month (since child protective services takes a dim view of chaining them to their bed) - which kind of wrecked my life but that was the only thing I could find that worked to slow her down.

No phone? No problem. Substitute in facebook since so many kids have notifications go straight to their phones. Only solution I found is all technology resided in my room at night. Off or I’d get a text ding on her phone at say, 3am. Of course that does not solve daytime inappropriate technology behavior.

On a mac computer Spector Pro worked well if you end up needing computer stealth knowledge (also had parental controls where you could ban specific websites too, not just general age inappropriate). Don’t know what works on phones (since I just took it away - sorry since I know this is what you were looking for) but likely there is phone software aimed at parental controls for 5 year olds would so hobble the internet that they can only access little kid sites.

There is also stealth software you can put on a phone that can send you any text, ring one your phone when their phone rings and you can listen, etc. etc. (apparently kills battery faster), ping location without them knowing, turns on their microphone without them knowing so you can listen in to what is going on around them. I was so tempted about that one based on what my kid was up to at the time - fortunately they do (sort of) mature chronologically grow up and move out - eventually - although mine engages in boomerang behavior, then tells me she is grown and can do what she wants, I tell her not in this hotel, go find another hotel if you don’t like the (very few) rules in this one.

Good luck. Just keep repeating to yourself there were good reasons why you had kids. The fact that you can’t think of any right now is not good enough reason to run away from home. And remind yourself they are brain deficient - it takes until the late 20’s for their frontal lobe (does, amongst other things, cause and effect reasoning) to finish developing…

@Kidsandliz

I am thinking that, perhaps, in some cases, it would be the late 80’s agewise, when possibly some brain maturity comes for some of us?

@Kidsandliz Thanks. It helps to know I’m not alone. He can start driving in a year (if we let him) so I really need to get things straightened out. He really is a good kid overall- just a screen fixation.

@sammydog01 Driving - get an ignition kill and a hood lock (those with google skills will figure out you just need to unhook it from the battery). Put the device to undo that to the left of the steering wheel someone out of sight but not so that you have to bend down a lot to undo it. If he is supposed to be driving at a certain time leave both unlocked. If not leave them both locked. And hide your keys.

Conversation one morning in our house
E: Mom the car is broken
Me: And how would you know that?

HA HA she told on herself.

I just about got laughed out of the car alarm shop when I asked for one to be installed (auto re-arm when you turn the car off, use key to disarm, can set one or both at disarmed. They wanted to know who would steal a 20+ year old ghetto van. Simple answer, “My daughter”.

@PlacidPenguin I have no idea what a “feature phone” is so maybe?

@sammydog01

What other people would call a"dumb phone".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_phone

@PlacidPenguin A dumb phone with a keyboard would be optimal. Verizon doesn’t sell them anymore. I want him to be able to text his friends.

@sammydog01

Did you try shopping on eBay for one?

@PlacidPenguin I don’t know which one to buy. They have too many.

@sammydog01

Well… Is there any kind of thing you’re looking for which could help narrow it down (even slightly) ?

@PlacidPenguin Is a dumb phone with a keyboard that is compatible with Verizon too broad? Toss in cheap maybe? And not totally crappy?

@sammydog01 you can text without a keyboard. I did it up until 2 years ago.

@sammydog01

How crucial would the camera be? (I.e Would it be used a lot, and as a result, MP of camera would be important? I don’t know what teenage boys do these days, so…)

Flip phone? Not flip phone?

@Pantheist He did too but he wore out the keys. A flip phone is a possibility.

@sammydog01
How old is this kid?

Would a Treo (Palm OS) work? Reliable, have keyboards.

I even had a Palm Centro that was good. Loved the KB.

Or an old blackberry?

@sammydog01 i have a flip phone… I cant remember who the provider was…will check in the morning…

@f00l Maybe something made in the last few years would be good.

@sammydog01
Is the rule zero internet on the phone, but text messaging to friends is ok?

Seems to me that most phones from 15 years ago had really rudimentary browsers, but no apps, and only 3G, so slow as hell, and they won’t display most webpages cause the browser is so primitive, so almost no internet.

You’d have to try each phone to see exactly what it would and wouldn’t do.

Moms, we salute you all.

@sammydog01
If the technical requirement is “almost no internet” or “no internet”, you may have probs finding a recent phone that does that.

iPhone 4 - are you planning a no-data cell plan? IPhones send and receive data all the time. Also with an iPhone the companies require a data package. Also w android.

The Palms and Blackberries would be perfect for this i would think. They both did calls and texting beautifully,and with no data, they’d run as fast as anything modern.

And they are nice devices, even if old.

Or would the kid react badly to something from the dark ages?

The KB on the Palm/Treo phones and the BB’s will prob be superior to the ones on the dedicated texting phones.

@f00l guessing the data capability is not a real issue since the acct holder can cut it off, right?

As she said - that wifi tho - that’s the trick to shut off.

@RedOak
If I were the kid in that circumstance, I would just acquire another secret device.

@PlacidPenguin perhaps they also do inappropriate photos?

@f00l The crafty kid (or ones with crafty friends) with money would replace the no data phone card with a data phone card so I think the phone needs totally hobbled - either with software or with a phone where this is not possible.

@Kidsandliz
How far es that stop the second or third secret hidden device?

@f00l @Kidsandliz

Not so much (if at all). at all.

@Kidsandliz Fortunately photos are not an issue- it’s just a major distraction. I would like him to be able to text his friends. Plus he’s smart so I really want something where YouTube has isn’t possible. I guess I’ll have to go flip phone. Sad.

@RiotDemon @sammydog01

Cnet was for the most part pleased with this phone.

As for Amazon reviews, the 1 star reviews focus on the fact that the seller(s) gave broken phones, so…

@RiotDemon I had that phone about 12 years ago and loved it. Its a little bulky, but not so bad that you can’t put it on your pocket.

@RiotDemon I had the next gen of this (the enV3) as my first phone. It was decent to start off but the build quality wasn’t that great. Things started to fall apart within about six months and by the time I got a new phone it was having issues with about half the keys. Now, that being said, I used the hell out of that phone. As in, 600-1000 text messages a day. So maybe with gentler use, it would be fine. You’re still looking at an extremely old phone with the enV2 though so it’s a crapshoot how long it’ll last, I’d say.

@Mehsturbator Thanks. Maybe I can find a newer model.

@RiotDemon
I had this phone an I absolutely loved it. I used it up until about 6 years ago! I would get it again but left Verizon.

@Mehsturbator Long story.

@Mehsturbator a mom’s gotta do what a mom’s gotta do…

@sammydog01 Fair enough. Something else to keep in mind is some of the phones may have internal SIMs. I’m not really sure how it would work to transfer that to another user, as they’d probably have to reprogram the SIM somehow. So there’s a chance that even if you were able to buy one secondhand, you wouldn’t actually be able to activate it. Just something to look into.

@Mehsturbator I had no idea. I thought they were on cards. I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks.

@sammydog01 http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/112907/how-to-protect-an-iphone-4s-from-internet-access

No idea if this is still relevant, it might have changed with iOS updates or something, but if you have the phone you could pretty easily go check if these things are possible. Or you could be brute force with it and fine a third party shop to disconnect the WiFi antenna, if such a thing is possible.

@Mehsturbator old Verizon phones didn’t have SIM cards.

@sammydog01 Oh and one more bit of advice (and I really hope I’m not sounding like I’m trying to run your ship for you, sorry if I am!): You may want to check that he’s still got whatever phone you give him every so often, especially if it’s one with a removable SIM. I know from personal experience that it’s not too hard to hide your phone from your parental units. I went something like half a year hiding my phone from my dad, though in my case it was because I didn’t want him knowing I’d dropped $700 on a phone. But in your case he’d be hiding it because it may give him internet access. Not sure what it’s like in your area but around here, it’s not super difficult to find a friend who will give or sell you their old phone they aren’t using. If it has a removable SIM, he could just swap that out and use a different phone. So if whatever you end up giving him has a removable SIM, you may want to check every few months or something that he’s still using that phone.

@Mehsturbator I set those controls on his phone but I bet he can get around them. I also noticed that there are no icons for a bunch of stuff I know he uses so he has them hidden somewhere. I can control data through the Verizon Family app- wifi is the problem. He is also probably reading this thread. I was hoping to find a texting phone to make it easier to keep up with his friends but it looks like we’re going flip.

@Mehsturbator @sammydog01 I currently use smarttalk (was using net 10 but smarttalk is $5 cheaper) so when you buy the SIM (with bring your own phone) you get a pile of different ones for different services, sizes of sims and you activate the one that works for you (the rest, if you activate them shuts off the one you just activated so no there is no market for the rest of them unless you can hack them somehow). Thus as long as the phone is takes/works with a Verizon compatible card you are good to go with a pay as you go system. If you have them on your plan then you’d likely have to buy a phone already Verizon compatible unless they also sell you sim cards for a “bring your own phone” system (which I have no idea if they have).

@Mehsturbator @sammydog01 too late to delete my message as further in this thread I read Version doesn’t use SIM cards.

@Ignorant I totally forgot they were bringing that back. That has the potential to be a good option.

@Ignorant good luck on them offering a Verizon version.

@Mehsturbator I did miss the reports about it not launching in the US due to operating on bands our carriers no longer use…So I guess we can scratch this one.

@Ignorant Ah I missed those too. I just saw they were bringing the phone back and was like “Huh. Neat” and proceeded to not look into it more. But at least we are finally getting the Type R in the US… So maybe in 30 years we will get this phone too!

@f00l

Not sure any of this will keep a kid off the internet when away from home tho.

To be honest though, when it comes to this, capabilities of the phone wouldn’t prevent a determined kid from accessing the internet (especially since nowadays it’s easy to access in the United States for the most part).

@PlacidPenguin
Yeah. Someine might be able to police that at home. Or not.

If I were a kid I’d be on the net, by whatever means. Short term restrictions might work for a while.

@PlacidPenguin
@sammydog01
@Mehsturbator
If the plan doesn’t include data, sim swapping won’t work I think?

But “borrowing a phone” from a friend with a sim in it that could be hidden - or an unactivated phone w wifi could that be hidden and used on other access points…

Kid could just openly carry the official phone and the secretly carry the unofficially phone.

@f00l

(In response to this post.)

The thing is though, a lot of people who comment on the forum grew up in a different period.

For some, the internet was unheard of, while for others, the internet had just come out.

I mean, I’m an early 90s “child”, and despite that in the 90s AOL sent out A LOT of CDs, accessing it was hard.

Nowadays though, especially since one doesn’t need an account to access the internet (well, unless a wifi source has a password or requires a special login), it’s a joke to access, and as such, policing a kid is hard, especially since like I said, there are numerous alternative ways to access it.

---

Incidentally, I found this article from 2010 about how much it cost AOL to send out all of those CDs in the 90s:
https://techcrunch.com/2010/12/27/aol-discs-90s/

@PlacidPenguin
Kinda what I meant. If I were a teenager - or an early elementary school kid today - and I got “grounded from the internet” for a time by parents, I imagine I’d be back online without parental knowledge with 24-48 hours, depending somehat on degree of supervision.

I would prob indignantly regard parent-mandated lack of internet access as being morally equivalent to being imprisoned and questioned by the Spanish Inquisition and act accordingly to regain it.

Kids will be kids. I certainly was one, in that sense.

@f00l

Kids will be kids. I certainly did that.

To a different extent though.

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Of course though, the difference between my posts and almost all of the other comments in this thread is that I don’t have kids.

I have nieces and a nephew though and I see how easy it is for them to access the internet (of course though, they are only allowed on YouTube), but it’s not the same.

I’m more of an observer of watching them access the internet. But despite that fact, I’m not ignorant (or @ignorant) at observing this ease.

Then again, they aren’t teens, so it’s not like they’re on social media and such.

@PlacidPenguin
I was a good child in that I mostly followed the rules publicly.

Perhaps I was a bad child in that when out of sight I did as I pleased, and if needed, covered my tracks.

This from elementary school on if not before.

However, aside from intoxicants and going where I had been told I wasn’t allowed to go, and stuff that went on w my social group, I didn’t embarrass my parents during those years. What we did in private or w friends stayed private or w friends.

We figured what parents didn’t know that didn’t hurt them, and (to our child- or teenage-judgment) didn’t appear to hurt anyone else, was our call.

@f00l

Now with social media though, those things wouldn’t stay hidden for long (whether intentionally or not).

@PlacidPenguin
Geo tracking would require some planning to defeat.

The rest would be easy. You don’t seem to have a conniving teenaged brain.

@f00l
Turn off the location services, perhaps?
VPN?

After only a few years of technological learning and experience, I can get out of nearly every restriction placed on a device or network, but I can also apply restrictions for others, if need be.

@DVDBZN
Anyone savvy or with savvy friends will be right back online.

Prison cell might keep them off. Not sure what else would.

@f00l I did not have a conniving brain until I learned I needed one after working with adjudicated youth and then adopting a troubled teen. I never would have thought of half of that crap on my own. My brain just didn’t go there. OMG that was an education and not in the good sense. Carries over into teaching with “excuses” and “proof” of “excuses” (around half are fake). Drives me crazy at times.

When I learned to think that way my kid (or her friends - actually it is mostly friends that taught her this stuff) thought I had spies everywhere. Nope. Tape recorder on the landline, take the cell phone at night (dumb phone with no internet), Spector Pro on the computer, read her friends’ facebook pages (to learn about parties…). Felt like a full time job at times. Kept her out a lot of trouble, although not all…

… a caution tho - your teen will hate you for the peer pain they endure when others see that phone.

Of course you could hold it over them if they misbehave, that you’d tell their friends it is a senior phone carrier.

… we went thru something I’ll guess was similar. After a lot of grief the only way we got out of it was negotiating a deal.

We said we want to give you the freedom but look at if from our perspective, if you were us wouldn’t you be shutting down the phone?

So help us get to a win win. We’ll give you the freedom until you abuse it (whatever that is).

And you agree up front in writing that if you break the deal you’ll accept us turning off the data on your phone and blocking it at our router (the wifi part). With no whining or complaining.

It hasn’t been perfect, but pointing at that agreement (make the agreement the strong arm) tends to bring things back into alignment. We put it on them to abide by their agreement. It is an integrity thing. You want credibility, right?

@RedOak He already gets abused for the iphone 4. He can just hide the flip phone from his friends. I hope this is temporary so I would like to keep the same carrier. What I really need is a keyboard dumb phone built in the last few years that works on Verizon. I’m not sure that is a thing anymore. The Verizon people said I could get an LG Cosmo and discovered their store doesn’t carry it anymore.

@sammydog01 like the folks above said - anything is available via FleaBay.

Since Verizon is not a GSM (SIM card) carrier they hold the “cards” on what they’ll register on their network tho. Nice thing about SIM card carriers is you swap the card into the “new” phone and dial. (Assuming the frequencies of the phone are compatible.)

@sammydog01
Why last few years? I think most modern phones come w wifi.

If phone has wifi, the kid will find places it can be used.

@RedOak
I think Verizon is like Sprint?
W sprint, no Sim for anything but 4g.

The other functions are built into the Qualcomm chips on the device. No SIM needed for voice/SMS/3G activation.

@f00l

Verizon and Sprint both use CDMA, but…

@f00l I can buy a flip phone today that doesn’t have wifi. Looking for a recommendation of a keyboard phone. They don’t have it either.

@f00l Yep - Verizon and Sprint dumb phones (pre-LTE) don’t need SIM cards. And that means if you are not the account owner or authorized, you cannot light up that alternative device since it needs to be registered by the carrier.

@DVDBZN I did this but a lot if the apps he uses are not on the home screen so he’s already done stuff beyond my understanding.

@sammydog01 @Barney

Eggplant? Maroon? Purple?

@sammydog01 A dumb phone and some kinda purple color. That’s a phone fit for a barney, so Barney gives her approval.

@Barney

They prefer to be called “feature phones”.

@PlacidPenguin But they have no features. (I hope I didn’t hurt their feelings.)

@Barney

That’s the feature.

@PlacidPenguin Oh.

@Barney

Truthfully, I’m still not sure why it’s called that.

@PlacidPenguin because it is likely from the day (based on the resolution of the camera so prominently listed on the phone) where a camera was an extra special feature vs a dumb phone without one…