Elementary Security: Raising Kids Privately in a Public World
Ken Smith brings 15 years of offensive security experience and a father's protective instinct to a talk that every parent in cybersecurity needs to hear. As the Director of Learning and Development at Petoran and a former red team lead at Bank of America, Ken has spent his career thinking about worst-case scenarios. Now he applies that mindset to raising his elementary-aged children.
The Defining Moment
The talk opens with a powerful anecdote. Ken realized he could identify a distant acquaintance's three children from a crowd, knew their school, their medical history, and their parents' faces, all from passive Facebook scrolling. That realization, combined with his penetration testing background, led him and his wife to keep their children entirely offline from birth.
Social Media by the Numbers
Ken presents sobering statistics: 92% of US kids have an online presence by age two due to parent sharing. The Surgeon General's report shows teens spending 3.5 hours daily on social media double their risk of poor mental health. 40% of kids ages 8-12 are already active on platforms. When surveyed, kids' top three observations about social media were: it makes them feel worse about themselves, worse about their friendships, and they cannot stop using it.
Real-World Consequences
The most impactful segment describes a professional engagement where Ken's team built target packages on high-net-worth executives. Through one executive's son's social media, they mapped football practice schedules, driving routes, license plates, and identified isolated intersections where a kidnapping could occur. This is not theoretical risk. This is a red teamer showing you exactly what adversaries can do with publicly available information about children.
Practical Controls That Work
Ken's family approach includes treating passwords as sacred from day one (his kid refused to share an iPad password with a friend), using silly sentences as passphrases, time-boxing device usage with Apple Screen Time, disabling YouTube algorithm autoplay, monitoring all video content within hearing distance, and using Steam's family sharing features for gaming. He removed Roblox after inappropriate content surfaced in the first session despite parental controls.
The School Battle
Particularly valuable is Ken's experience fighting schools over photo waivers. He was the only family to decline, asked about document destruction policies for classroom TikTok accounts, and dealt with a photographer who snuck a photo that ended up on a newspaper's front page despite no signed waiver.
Who Should Watch
Every parent, especially those in cybersecurity who understand the threats but have not operationalized protections for their own families. Also valuable for anyone working in education technology or children's digital safety.