You would be the bad guy if you make him return it. Personally I would have a talk with your son about how unusual the act is and how his act could be used as leverage over him, nothing is free. Teach him healthy skepticism. Also call back those parents and tell them to fuck off, completly unacceptable they bought something connected and important for your son without checking with you first. They dont know your house or rules...
Edit: the phone isn't on friends family plan, right?
I host my own cloud and various other services for myself and whole family. Any 404 resolves to a rickroll and I'm never mad, often letting it play fully.
Americans avoid it like the plague for some reason. I always back in because I can look at the spot for objects or problems before I start backing in to ensure I dont hit anything. Backing out blind can be risky otherwise.
At minimum ensure the rest of the world stays 20 years ahead of us. Southern EU has been heavily powered by renewables for over a decade and were still somehow discussing their merit.
I paid for a year of an incogni family plan and wiped my whole household off the internet. Within a month google searching largely stopped coming up with hits other than accounts I personally created. I've been quite happy with the service, It took no effort just $100.
I went a little crazy and setup my own wireguard VPN network, all the remote hosts connect to the VPN and the primary server connects to each of them and pushes backups. Because I use btrfs and lots of snapshots I use btrbk, annoying to setup but now my hourly snapshots get pushed everywhere, minimal bandwidth and it flawlessly has worked for years.
My father wants to sell his deep sea fishing boat, no more fish to catch. He is so heavily restricted on what he can catch there is no point going out anymore. Meanwhile when he goes out into international waters and fishes based on these rules he has to dodge all the international fishing trawlers that scrap the ocean clean. Very frustrating.
For what it's worth I hope he sells his boat. It's stupid and wasteful to burn 200 gallons of gas to perhaps catch one shark. It's painfully wasteful.
I do this except the offline copies are raspberry pis, they grab an update then turn their network card off and go black for about a month. Randomly they turn on the network card, pull a fresh copy and go black again. Safe from randomware and automatic.
I have a trailer (workshop) with solar power, batteries, a raspberry pi controlling everything and a cellular hot spot. It pumps all the solar, battery information and light controls over MQTT and home assistant over cellular. So yes its possible, what do you want to do?
I'm not a doctor and a dude, just speaking from personal experiences and shared stories, but are you on birth control? Birth control pills made my wife emotionally unstable when she was PMSing and finally she had enough and stopped taking them. It was a night and day difference and she hasn't taken them since. Just food for thought.
You would be the bad guy if you make him return it. Personally I would have a talk with your son about how unusual the act is and how his act could be used as leverage over him, nothing is free. Teach him healthy skepticism. Also call back those parents and tell them to fuck off, completly unacceptable they bought something connected and important for your son without checking with you first. They dont know your house or rules...
Edit: the phone isn't on friends family plan, right?