Summer camps use facial recognition so parents can watch from home
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
If you asked pre-teen me how I would deal with a grown man determined to abuse me, I would have talked tough. But when that time came, I froze like a rabbit in the presence of a coiled python. Over the course of my life when other victims shared their story with me, I am always reminded how shockingly easy it is to abuse a child. For the record, one of them ended the abuse when she gathered the strength to simply whimper the word "no".
For all the confused commenters that wonder why we have this cameras-everywhere trend, it is because there are a multitude of adults like me with their secret abuse stories. There just doesn't seem to be competing ideas on how to prevent child abuse.
At the very least if you are a dad, tell your child this, "if an adult harms you, I know it will be difficult but you must tell me. I'll probably get angry at first but I promise I'll calm down and I won't do anything rash, etc.". I just assumed my dad would lose his temper and either wind up in the hospital, jail, or both. But then again given the stigma of being an abused boy I probably still wouldn't talk which appears to be the norm and why it is so widespread.
The old discussion about security vs freedom again. And I don’t think there are easy answers to that.
It's all in the parent's hands, as it should be.
So they now remind the kids their parents are watching, so they’ll smile.
Time for a new era a camp movies. Not sure if it would be a comedy, black mirror or horror movie.
By definition, someone is always "on the outside".
It was such a relief to get away from my whole family for a week when I was a teenager.
That was in the 70s. I would have gone nuts if I'd been raised by the helicopter parents of the 90s who were always on the verge of calling social services on my wife and me because we didn't always supervise her every waking moment. Hell, sometimes we didn't know where she was when she was a teen. And the psychotic version of obsessively intrusive cyber-stalking parents that exist now makes me not want to know young parents.
I'm a father, in my mid-40s, and my son just turned 25. So, I definitely parented though the first wave of helicopter parents. I just don't get it. Sending my son out on his bike to roam free was the best part of the day for all of us. And summer camp was a welcome break from the tedium of suburban life - for all of us. He got to run around outside without concern that we were watching; we got some time to catch up on our marriage or whatever else needed tending.
And any time we tried to force control his life, it created more problems than it solved. We always had more success just letting him do his thing and trusting that he'd mostly do the right thing (he stumbled a few times, but most of us have).
Maybe the kids are used to this level of obsessive control? I’m not sure if this sounds more damaging for the kids or for the parents.
This also sounds only a _really_ small step away from just having cameras everywhere that the parents can watch 24/7.
I’d really like to hear a persuasive argument as to why this is at all reasonable.
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2017/09/06/a-dad-in-bc-l...
In today's dual income norm where you don't know your neighbors, that doesn't exist anymore. That & the new laws creates helicopter parenting to assuage these new anxieties.
Also, parents read in the newspaper every day about terrifying incidents that happen to other people. So they believe those are likely in their neighborhood. They are in the newspaper because they are rare. But people aren't very good at evaluating probabilities.
> After a weeks-long investigation, the ministry concluded that children under the age of 10 cannot be left unsupervised — whether on a bus, riding bikes around the neighbourhood or walking to the corner store, he said.
It's so sad our world has never been as safe as today.
This isn't an administration completely out of control.
This is a society completely out of control.
The administration simply reflects the prevailing social attitude, and that attitude is that we want to take away the rights of children to properly develop (and more to the point, limit the rights of parents to allow their children to develop) and hand it over to concern trolls and/or the paranoid so that they may exercise power over their neighbors under the guise of looking out for them- remember, abuse from CPS is always initiated by a "concerned citizen". Oppression, after all, is always at its worst when the oppressors act with the approval of their own conscience.
Societies typically fail to deal with this kind of person appropriately, because when risk is exposed it both presses emotional buttons and provides an easy way out (by banning the risk).
The way it's correctly dealt with is to write laws that ban society from paying that kind of Dane-geld. These laws codify things called "rights"; and their primary function is to prevent unwarranted risk aversity (be it genuine, or fake to score political points) by setting down a baseline beyond which those that spread terror are not negotiated with (that your children will be abducted unless you pay the ransom of never letting them outside, or that they'll grow up to be mass killers unless you pay the ransom of banning rock music, D&D, and video games), even if the allegations are correct (a child raised in a locked cage will by definition never be abducted).
Utah has passed such a law (I'm not sure about other places, though Red states are by current definition more likely than Blue ones to do this) explicitly codifying the right of way of minors of "sufficient age and maturity" in its state definition of "neglect" so that State power can't be abused to harass them. While it's not a permanent solution explicitly recognizing the rights of persons of sufficient age and maturity (as it could easily be changed later, and even if minors had the explicit right of way they would be unlikely to realize if it was being infringed), it's a good first step.
Kids walking over to the neighbors house 'unsupervised', playing in your private back yard and other small things isn't enforced in practice, but stuff like this is.
Put yourself in the shoes of some jerk from a wealthy suburb. For your kids entire life they have been under the supervision of one of the following:
You
Your spouse
A babysitter hired by you
A fellow parent (e.g. soccer coach)
A teacher
Who are camps staffed primarily by? A bunch of 18 and 19yos. Sending them to a summer camp is downright terrifying. What if they drown. What if they break an arm. What if, what if, what if....
Parents need to grow a pair and let the damn kid out of their sight and under the supervision of someone whom they cannot query for information about how their kid is doing. This facial recognition BS is replacing that feedback.
Personally, I think it's all crap but I understand why some people like it.
And yeah, nightmarish. "Welcome Panopticamp , where everyone is happy or else!"
Several camps my kids have gone to use Bunk1 to post pictures of what the kids are up to. Sometimes there are several hundred photos (for a large camp they may have a full-time photographer who is also putting together yearbooks and social media).
The software can flag which photos are more likely to have your child in them. It saves a lot of scrolling. That is all.
“Oh look, there she is! Cool.”
There is no way I’m calling the camp unless I see blood streaming down my kids face. I have never called the camp except for medical issues.
Mostly the pictures make me jealous of all the cool activities they get to do. They give a topic I can mention in the bunk notes (instead of mailing a letter you write a message and they print it and hand it out, and your child can write a reply which gets scanned in and emailed back the next day.)
Cause what is described here is absolutely insane.
The first results of this method of parenting are comming in, and I will tell you only the most hilarious result: some guy, 25 or something, came to a job interview with his mother (and I am not joking)
https://www.salon.com/test/2015/09/04/debunking_the_myth_of_...
Non-parents: starting a family is fun and can actually be reasonably-priced.
Like it or not, engineers have a social responsibility, and this they should be able to refuse to make certain types of products. In other fields (biology and medicine for example), there is a notion of ethics. We need that too.