I am back!!!
And I brought Jacqueline Jayne with me.

Make some noise for an awesome episode

After taking a brief pause, I’m back at full speed with my shows: Redefining #Society & #Technology on ITSPmagazine Podcasts — ready to bring you bold conversations that challenge assumptions and question the role of technology in our lives.

This is the first episode published for the 2025 season, but trust me, many more are already recorded and coming your way soon.

And we’re kicking things off with a big one.

 Australia recently banned social media for kids under 16.
A bold move? Sure. A solution? Well, that’s where the debate begins.

In this episode of Redefining Society & Technology, I sit down with my Australian friend Jacqueline Jayne to break it all down. JJ is a cybersecurity and human risk expert, and she’s got some strong thoughts about why prohibition never works.

Let’s face it—does banning something ever actually solve the problem?

We explore the unintended consequences:
Will this really protect kids, or just push them to riskier online spaces?
What about the communities that rely on #socialmedia for connection and support?
Who’s actually responsible for educating kids (and adults) about online safety?

Technology moves fast, but knee-jerk policies don’t always keep up. Instead of banning, maybe it’s time we start educating.

Start with the teaser video https://youtu.be/6wKbgTeNux8

Then move on the full length video https://youtu.be/5ZehKjNsavc

Or listen to the audio if it is your preferred media https://redefining-society-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/the-great-australian-social-media-ban-fixing-a-broken-system-or-just-breaking-it-more-guest-jacqueline-jayne-jj-a-redefining-society-and-technology-podcast-episode-hosted-by-marco-ciappelli

The importnat thing is that you listen now and join the conversation -- comment below!

Let’s rethink, redefine, and challenge the way we approach technology in society.

Subscribe to the podcast for many more stories about our relationship with technology and what it means in our digital-analog hybrid society.

https://redefiningsocietyandtechnologypodcast.com/

Enjoy!

#Technology, #CyberSecurity, #DigitalSafety, #SocialMedia, #OnlinePrivacy, #InternetRegulation, #TechEthics, #DigitalLiteracy, #CyberAwareness, #FutureOfTech, #HumanRisk, #ParentalControls, #OnlineSafety, #HybridSociety, #TechPolicy, #BanningSocialMedia, #DigitalCitizenship, #DataProtection, #CyberEducation, #TechForGood

Current State

For a while now we’ve been using Family View to allow my son (age 10) to play select games from Steam library acquired over many years. Appropriate for him were mostly Myst and Civ games, but also Fez, which he’s really enjoyed.

Family View unfortunately has a number of shortcomings:

• It’s on everywhere for your profile, including in the mobile app, so you have to enter the Family View PIN to do normal things like game purchases
• If you click a Steam link elsewhere while in Family View, it deeplinks into the app but is sometimes blocked as above
• Any playtime, saved games, or achievements are associated to your profile, since the child is effectively playing as you

I was therefore pleased when Steam announced their new Steam Families feature. However since it requires setting up a separate account for the child I hadn’t gotten around to setting it up… until today.

Family Creation

This was the easy part. After leaving Family View, I enabled the beta feature, restarted Steam, went to Family Management, read the fine print, and created a new Family. (I hear it )

Adding someone to your Family requires them to be your Friend first, so we’d need a new account for my son.

Account Creation

This was mostly straightforward but we ran into some minor issues. Some of this was my fault for making things more complicated.

First off, this is actually my second account for COPPA purposes, since kiddo is under 13. I accepted all the terms and such. I’m just assigning it to a child slot in the new Steam Family and letting him use it.

I used the iCloud+ Hide My Email feature to generate a unique email for the new account that just points to my email inbox, and created a new Steam login item in our 1Password Family. (There is a vault that he has read-only access to on his computer where we keep his logins but he can’t change them without our help.)

Actually creating the account using this new email was a little tricky for two reasons: the first was that Steam kept wanting to automatically log back in as me even after explicitly signing out (not sure what was doing this); the second was that the reCAPTCHA on the create page wouldn’t display any challenges and after submitting we would get an error about not using a VPN or proxy service. We turned off iCloud Private Relay and 1Blocker and used a Private tab to get no cookies and that seemed to work. My guess is that Steam blocks the Akamai egress IPs that Apple uses for spam reasons?

I got a verification email and then we were able to log into “his” new account. He made up a username that’s a reference to The Mitchells vs. The Machines and uploaded a wombat image he had on his desktop for some reason.

Family Invite

This part of the process is where it got more confusing. Admittedly I barely use Steam these days and certainly don’t use the Community features.

I started by going to the new account’s Friends view, searching for myself, and adding me as a friend. (While I was at this I realized my Steam profile still had my location as Vancouver, WA from almost 8 years ago!) This gave an error about how that wasn’t supported.

I noticed that his account wasn’t enabled for Steam Community and tried adding that but still no go. Then I noticed in the support article that you can’t add friends until you’ve spent $5 on Steam… yet another anti-spam technique!

We reversed it and invited his new account to be my friend, which worked. There were two confirmation emails, one for accepting the invite and one for confirming that the account would be a Child in a Family. This was a little annoying since the emails were on my device and the links wanted to jump into the Steam app logged in as me, but we got it sorted.

The actual parental controls set up under each Child in Family is pretty nice, and easier than the old Family View game selection mechanism. I selected some games in my library to share and set his account to (hopefully) not see any mature content or community content.

Once this was done, his account appeared to be in Family View, but when you click the icon it takes you to your Child view of Family Management instead of prompting for a PIN.

I also had to disable the old Family View on my profile, which was a few clicks and in a different place than the new Family Management features. It would be a nice enhancement to make this transition all part of one step.

At this point we were ready to play, and conveniently we didn’t have to redownload anything because his account’s library was approved for the same game installs.

There was one more thing…

Saved Games

As I mentioned, he was about 70% done with a new Fez playthrough on my profile, and we would want that on his profile. A comment on this thread pointed me in the right direction.

I opened Terminal on the computer my son had been playing on and dropped into the Steam folder to poke around:

% cd Library/Application\ Support/Steam

Inside the userdata subfolder I saw two numeric folders, one of which I recognized as the ID of his newly created account, which was mostly empty. The other ID subfolder had several other numeric folders. Looking at the files that contained it was clear that these were game saves, but it wasn’t immediately obvious which was which.

I opened the Fez page in the Steam Store and noted that the URL had a numeric ID in it, 224760, which matched one of the subfolders. The contents looked promising and related to Steam cloud saves:

% ls <my Steam ID>/224760
remote        remotecache.vdf
% ls <my Steam ID>/224760/remote
SaveSlot1     SaveSlot2     saveslot0

This corresponds to the three saves that show up in-game in Fez: my original playthrough from years ago, a short one where I was showing him the game a few years ago, and the one he’s been playing through the last few months.

I figured worst case the game just wouldn’t load them, so I copied the entire game directory across user profiles:

% cp -r <my Steam ID>/224760 <his Steam ID>/

We opened Fez from his Steam library, and there were the three save slots, ready to go!

Then we made a mistake… we opened my original save, and Steam immediately granted him 10 achievements that I had gotten based on my game state! Oops.

I did find this guide on resetting achievements and launched Steam with the console using

% /Applications/Steam.app/Contents/MacOS/steam_osx -console

While the Console tab now appeared, it was greyed out, presumably because we were in a Child account. I did also try to delete the other save slots on disk, but they still appeared in-game, presumably because I didn’t update the other cache files. Maybe something to figure out another day.

Conclusion

We’re now all set with the way we’re going to use parental controls and accounts on Steam for the foreseeable future. There are still a few sharp edges, but it is a beta…

I think this was harder at points because we were previously having him play on my profile under the soon to be old Family View. If you’re starting a kid on Steam for the first time with no existing game history it should be much easier.

https://blog.ultranurd.net/2024/07/07/steam-family-setup/