The FTC order allows them to do so. The problem was the apps are marketed to monitor employees and minors of which the installer is the legal guardian, both which are completely legal. But it was being used in some cases by customers to monitor other adults, which is not legal without consent. The company agreed to get the users to check a box saying it was being used for minors or employees, both which remain legal uses of the apps.
My mother, on the other hand...
I don't think spying on your kids should be common, but I absolutely know people who have had kids get into some trouble or have good reason to be worried about their safety, and use some "spying" apps to keep an eye on them and help with accountability. I've known helicopter parents, for sure, but I've also known parents who have had close calls with kidnappings, kids who had some brushes with the law and were struggling to keep their distance from the wrong crowd, etc. If a tool fills a need for safety or helps keep honest kids honest, sometimes that's the right tool for the job while they go through the awkward phase of being adolescent: dependent on their parents, the responsibility of their parents, but not mature enough to be 100% on their own and making serious life-affecting decisions.
Would you say the same for the many parents that are in jail for abusing their children?
> The government and Google don't go to jail for neglecting me, either.
The government is the one who will put your parents to jail if they neglect you. Most of the arguments that I have seen regarding parents being allowed to spy on their children also apply to the government.
Yes, some people abuse children and go to jail. No, that doesn't mean that no other parent should have the ability to monitor their child. Blanket government surveillance is bad, and I said the same thing about parents spying. But I have no problem with specific cases of specific individuals judged as needing closer monitoring, like ankle monitors for flight risks.
I think there’s a false assumption that these kinds of apps are used by parents to replace communication and other methods, but it’s part of strong communication between kids and parents.
Some parents will abuse this ability and there's nothing to government should do about that. Good parenting is hard and some form of tracking is important.
My daughter had a phone from the age of 10, she uses it for google and email at school (it's part of their classes), texting me when her bus is near the bus stop so I can drive to collect her and for texting her friends. She is not allowed to use her phone to install apps that can communicate with people that she does not already know and this is something I periodically check on with the view that I will check less as she gets older. I am actually super impressed that she is not addicted to her phone like you would imagine a young girl would be.
One of her friends does have instagram and other social media, I have checked her pages out and she has many followers that are men and much older than her. I wish her parents would check her phone more often.
Regardless of what some childless anons on the Internet think, it's bloody hard to parent in the age of the iPhone. A simple solution is to not let your kids have anything but I've always believed that giving access to what everyone else has is fine as long as it's controlled with reasonable boundaries put in place.
I'm sorry you feel so defensive and feel such a strong need to justify your choices rather than contemplate the possibility that some people who disagree with you have a fine parenting track record, have been at it longer than you and have thought a great deal about some things.
I wish very much that I had a means to educate more parents. But I am no longer a full-time wife. I have bills to pay and I still support my adult special needs sons and the world has made it abundantly clear that the things I know and wish to share are not worth money.
But in a nutshell, there are hidden costs to the kind of approach you are taking. It is akin to the saying "Going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."
I chose to not tell my children "There are bad people out there that will want to do unspeakable things to you, so you should be afraid, very afraid." because I felt that would rob them of the very innocence I desired to protect and preserve. Instead, I taught them by example what genuine respect looks and feels like by setting the standard for that with how I treated them.
They were taught they could say "No" to people -- including me -- for things like hugs and kisses. They were taught it was their decision, not mine.
But I would happily play enforcer. If someone didn't respect their decision, "Come get mom."
My oldest inferred based on his experiences that protecting himself from a bully with violent force was completely reasonable when he was at school and getting Mom was not an option. He didn't even feel it was noteworthy and I learned that story years later.
Rumaging through your daughter's phone sets a precedent that future boyfriends or husbands can take advantage of to her detriment. And there are better policies that achieve the same thing without that.
My sons have been online since they were two and five. I arranged kid-friendly menus to help them find things of interest to them easily with little risk of exposure to undesirable parts of the internet.
They were not constrained. They didn't want such exposure. They were happy to stick to the things I helped them access that met their needs without having to be hassled with this other stuff.
I know this is a touchy subject and you will probably be offended. But it's touchy because both sides of the argument are personally invested, not because your personal investment somehow trumps mine.
I was molested and raped as a child. I thought long and hard about how to protect my children not just physically, but also emotionally and psychologically. They are old enough that I've gotten to see the fruits of my labor.
Unfortunately, no one wants to know what I did. I'm just a woman, so I must be stupid or something.
We all have our bag of rocks to carry in this crappy world.
I don't believe I am setting a precedent with my girls that it's ok to be spied upon. If you know a better way, I would love to hear more about it.
"Unfortunately, no one wants to know what I did. I'm just a woman, so I must be stupid or something.'
I want to know!
Why do you think you need to do this? Why does this need to be a hard constraint dictated and controlled by someone else?
My kids were given some general guidelines from a very early age. I tongue-in-cheek would say "No naked pics and no instructions on how to build bombs." They are my kids, so they understood what I was trying to get at.
They also had it explained to them that as a parent, I had latitude to intercede on their behalf, assuming they stayed within certain boundaries. They understood that crimes like murder or arson would change that fact and put decision making power out of my hands and into the hands of strangers.
My power as a parent served them. It was not weilded in an authoritarian fashion.
If a child is getting their needs adequately met "within the rules," they have no reason to break the rules. When my kids proved consistently incapable of following the rules, I wondered what was wrong with my rules and tried to improve my process.
Is there some reason your child would desire to talk to untrustworthy people she doesn't already know? Is she bored? Is she lonely?
People don't take risks of that sort merely out ignorance. They do so out of desperation. Otherwise, they are quick to go "Nope, I don't need to keep this shitty app for talking to this awful person that I don't even like. Ugh. Moving on."
I'm not sure the above quote is true at all. Sometimes your kids want things that you won't give them. You can't keep 100% content kids 100% of the time.
Everything you said sounds reasonable but I think kids can get themselves into bad situations even if they are happy and well adjusted. Sometimes hormones can kick in and make you talk to people that you would never normally talk to.
It's easy to say that kids that are talking to strange adults online have serious issues in other parts of their lives and fixing those issues will fix everything but I think that's a really simplistic way of viewing the world.
I was a very happy and content kid but still got mixed up with things I should not have just because my personality was adventurous and addictive at the time.
I'm not assuming my kids will follow my behaviour but I've seen the overly sexualised content one of her friends posts and all of her friends just thinks shes cool for doing so now she has the popular girl feedback loop. I doubt her parents know. Maybe she's got some other issues and addressing those will fix everything or maybe she hasn't got issues but she's just addicted to it?
Even if she has got other issues, the first sign might be the crap she does on her phone so it's good if her parents see that sooner rather than later.
Maybe you're a great parent but you also had great kids which is only really partially under your control? Not every piece of undesirable behaviour can be easily traced back to an underlying issue that can be fixed. Sometimes it just is.
The reason why I ban her from talking to strangers online is because I don't want her to be groomed while she's emotionally vulnerable. Girls can get hooked on the idea of older boys sometimes, I don't think this means they are unhappy and even if a kid is unhappy in some part of their lives, that's normal and that's ok. Sometimes being unhappy is fine and you need to teach your kids how to deal with that but I'd like to know if she's 'self medicating' by sending naked pics to older boys because more subtle signs of an issue might be hard to detect. It's a busy world with two working parents and large demands placed upon us by her school so it can be easy to miss something.
I suggest you start a journal, explore your own past experiences and try to figure out what went wrong and why and why you still blame yourself so much all these years later such that you need to project your fears onto your daughter and can't trust her to have better sense than you had.
Kids doing "bad" things are frequently expressing baggage from the subconscious of their parents that the parents aren't even aware they are hanging on their children.
My children were taught from the age of two "It's your body. You can touch it however you want. Just do it in the bathroom or your bedroom with the door shut."
When my youngest hit puberty and became hard to deal with because he was hormonal, I explained that his problem was not called "my bitch mother." It was called testosterone.
I explained that his system was flooded with hormones and this was why he felt so angry. Knowing that explanation caused him to stop looking for someone to blame his anger on.
When he was too ranty, I would say "Ugh, you sound like some hormone soaked teenager." He would say "I am some hormone soaked teenager."
He would try to tone down the ranty bullshit and I would try to have some patience and tolerance for the fact that it wasn't entirely under his control.
The reason why I ban her from talking to strangers online is because I don't want her to be groomed while she's emotionally vulnerable.
What I'm trying to tell you is that you are currently the person doing the kind of grooming that gets girls into bad situations.
I think girls tend to like older boys because boys tend to lag behind girls in social skills. Girls interested in older boys are often just looking for someone who is a good social and emotional match.
I've had relationships with older men who thought they could control me because of the age difference and I've had relationships with older men who were clear they needed to respect me. Men who thought they could control me got quite the shock. I don't react well at all to efforts to control me.
You are teaching her that a man that loves her and wants what is best for her will seek to control her as a normal and caring part of a healthy relationship instead of teaching her "Anyone trying to exert that kind of control is in the wrong and should be told to stuff it."
We probably need to stop here because I have very strong views that sending naked pics to someone via internet is vastly safer than a lot of other activities and our laws and culture should promote such safe practices rather than vilifying them. We should punish people for sharing such pics with others without her permission, but she should be allowed to show anyone her body via photographs if that's what she wants as a safer alternative to showing them her body in person.
I made my peace with my sexuality a long time ago. That isn't always deemed to be an asset by people when such topics come up.
Maybe you're some expert level parent that most other parents just can't be. Maybe it would take me years to gain the parenting skills that you have but by that time I have already pushed my daughter over the edge?
Your one size fits all approach is sad. Why do you feel the need to fix everything by trying to be some sort of perfect parent? Is this because your parents were not perfect?
It would be a criminal offence for her to send nude pic to other people, it would also be an offence to solicit those pics.
I thought we were aligned on our opinions from your first post but sadly I now just feel that you are very lost and somehow got lucky that your kids turned out ok.
I though maybe your previous post was a one-off but nope, you really are coming across as condescending.
Hopefully by pointing out passages people are likely to find condescending and off-putting you can figure out how to tone that down so it doesn't get people's backs up and drown your message.
Took me a second to figure out what the personal attack was.
Editted post. Is it better now?
It's just irritating to see the condescension and repeated imputing of motives of other commentators go unchallenged. It's rude and disrespectful. Does HN have some other mechanism than peer commentary for dealing with rudeness?
If you're going to react to rudeness and so on by posting replies in the thread, though, it's important to do it in a way that doesn't break the guidelines yourself. Otherwise this place just gets worse.
Sadly, that's not a viable career.
I agree and second 'pcwalton here. I don't always agree with what you write, but I always appreciate seeing it here, you have one of the best insight to comment length ratio.
I suppose I should say "Thank you." I'm actually quite uncomfortable with public praise. I have moderating experience and my observation is that trying to be well-mannered and say "Thank you" or otherwise acknowledge such praise tends to cause a rebound reaction where someone feels a need to counter it with some kind of personal attack (something that's already happened here in fact). It also seems to do bad things to the group dynamic.
So I've long had a policy of studiously ignoring public praise as the least worst thing I can do. But that seems to make me standoffish, which causes other problems.
Some things seem to have no actually good answer, especially in public spaces. Anything you post publicly will be interpreted differently by different people. When the group is large enough, that easily turns into a push-pull dynamic as the group tries to sort out which side "wins" the argument.
I thoroughly hate that to the depths of my soul.
My background is participating in online support groups. My belief is that if ten people reply to a question, you should have ten different answers that add information, not one that is "For X" and nine more that vehemently argue about being for or against X. X should have little or nothing to do with the other nine answers.
So my writing style is based on shooting for statements that stand on their own and actively seek to avoid that nonsense. No one has to agree with me. I'm not trying to win an argument. I'm just trying to explain a point of view as clearly as possible and put out a piece of information as best I understand it.
Overall, I'm mostly happy with my writing style, though I continue to try to find ways to improve it. "There's always room at the top." You can always find ways to make it better rather than resting on your laurels and stroking your ego.
There are some constants that almost always apply. Don't hit, don't steal, don't abandon, try not to yell. But outside of those, I'm convinced that a lot of what you see as parenting advice out there is just survivorship masquerading as wisdom. Some people get really easy kids, and they confusedly believe that they were awesome parents. Some people get really tough kids and have to try strategies parents with easy kids never had to reach for. Even this is an oversimplification, since there are actually many different dimensions to parenting, not a simple easy to hard continuum.
I can absolutely believe there are some parent-child relationships that would not tolerate phone surveillance. There are also parents who would use the capability unwisely. On the other hand, there are children who are not very responsible, and there are plenty of things on the internet and out in the world that can prey on these kids. Only you know your relationship with your kids. "Don't surveil" as a commandment does not fit with the three I mentioned earlier. It's certainly not an absolute.
surveillance [1]
n. Close observation of person or group, especially one under suspicion.
n. The act of observing or the condition of being observed.
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This is CERTAINLY your responsibility toward your children. (The lack of it is known as "neglect".)
Personally, I do not let my 6 year old go to the small neighborhood park by himself. But if he has a remote monitoring device, I do.
As he gets older, there will be other cases where he will be allowed to do things only under some type of supervision.
Obviously it varies by age and maturity, where age 0 requires earshot proximity, and age 17.5 requires comparatively minimal attention to diet, education, and recreation.
"No surveillance full stop" is simply wrong.
"No electronic surveillance" is I think unwise and ignores opportunities for safe, constructive experiences.
"No secret surveillance" is I think a fair statement.
There will come an age where your son's concepts of trust and responsibility will undergo a metamorphosis, and ordering them to keep a surveillance device on them might make them develop trust issues, and atypical expectations of privacy in their personal relationships, which may take them their entire young adulthood to work through.
P.S. '93 til ;)
As someone who still had a bedtime of 8pm in high school, I agree with you. I ended up leaving home at 16 just so I could live on my own terms.
Old enough to use technology well, but young enough to require oversight of some manner.
Americans seem to have a very strange notion of what children can do at what ages. Kids at age 8 can reasonably go to and from school if it's close enough. This of course relies on living in a walkable area and I guess that's partially where the problem starts in the US. Parents got used to the idea that kids need to be transported by car or a specific, restricted-use school bus, leaving no freedom or agency for the children. Yes, growing up involves making mistakes, doing mischief, testing boundaries, learning what it is like to lie, feeling what a resulting bad conscience feels like, what a secret feels like etc. Yes, it may mean that the kid may skip a class or go somewhere they are not supposed to, but usually these aren't life shaking mistakes, unless there are deeper problems at home and with the parental environment.
However, a truly dictatorial parental surveillance scheme, as is now possible through tech, may inhibit the information transfer even more. Combined with practices like constant parental transportation, structured extracurriculars every day, no recess at school or homeschooling a very dystopian picture emerges.
I really hope this wave won't hit Europe.
And the effects are already showing: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/02/27/generati...
Mother who gained custody had sever bipolar which led to days where she literally would not get out of bed.
When I was in 6th grade I remember having to pack lunches for my sister who was 4 years younger and make sure we both went to the bus stop and got to school each day.
It was a bit more difficult when I hit the 7th and 8th grades as the school in the area started those grades an hour earlier than K-6 and my sister and I no longer rode the same bus at the same time.
We managed pretty good, and my sister and I are very close to this day because of how we took care of each other growing up.
I also had immense freedom, no curfew/bedtime and freedom to roam unsupervised unless my grades slipped. I enjoyed the freedom so I managed to keep my grades up my entire education.
It helped that cell phones in the hands of every child were still not a thing, just as I turned 18 and moved out on my own is when I remember getting my first cell phone.
Again that is cherry-picking.
Yes, I walked to school alone when I was 12. Also when I was 7.
But school is a consistent, well-known location with adult supervision at the destination. The amount of maturity required for traveling to school is minimal.
Kids can do a lot more open-ended activities than walking/taking the bus to school.
I think that is the main sticking point people have with parents surveilling their children when concerns are expressed. Especially when doing things like reviewing all of their childs text messages, web browsing history, etc, the worry is that the parent will likely seek to moderate almost every interaction their child has with another person which is a very scary overstepping of boundaries that has never even been possible before. This rises to a level that concerns everyone in society, really, as they will be interacting with those children as they grow and when they reach a premature adulthood, having been robbed of many formative experiences 'for their own good.'
surveillance !== supervision
A quick look and they might seem equal but when you compare the underlying values they’re nothing alike.
My parents gave up on trying to track / surveil me because I knew more about tech than they, and because it was more or less an open challenge to me to try and break whatever software they installed.
Do you want someone peering over your shoulder and breathing down your neck all the time?
There are a very few people I really trust and love in my life, and if they had a crystal ball into my soul and history and could read my every thought and action, I wouldn't mind. In fact, if we were smarter and could handle that scale of information I'd even like it. I'm as open with the people I love as possible. Surveillance becomes an issue when it is done by adversaries, such as various large corporations you and many people here might work for, your government at every level, etc.
Absolutely this. However, there's a caveat. If a minor gets in certain troubles, the parent is held responsible. So, if a parent knows their child has a tendency towards stuff that will get the parent in trouble, I'm a lot less against the parent using tech to keep the child in line.
I generally agree. But the solution here isn't lecturing people on the internet. The solution is helping parents find better parenting methods.
I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years. I've tried to write about it and one piece I wrote got more than 60k page views.
But it didn't make me any money. And I'm quite open about being dirt poor and wanting to develop an earned income.
On the one hand, I would like to see the world be a better place with better solutions. Poor parenting has larger consequences, including higher incarceration rates down the line.
On the other hand, one of the things wrong with this world is the shitty way women get treated. Part of that is an expectation that they don't deserve an earned income for so-called "soft skills" (oft called emotional labor). They are expected to do caring type things out of the goodness of their heart.
I've literally been helpful to people with big personal problems -- because I'm quite good at that -- while I was homeless and been told, more or less, "Fuck you. My needs matter. Yours don't. Quit panhandling the internet."
So I'm at a point where I kind of feel like "No, fuck you. I don't owe you anything, you asshole."
I stopped giving away so much of my time and expertise for free via the Internet to ungrateful assholes who think I don't deserve anything in return.
I don't know how we make a better world. But I'm quite clear that volunteering to be a victim for the benefit of other people isn't it. All that does is teach them their abusive bullshit is totes fine.
So if you want a solution here, find some way to help parents be better parents that doesn't involve them crapping on someone else in the process.
I don't know how you do that because actual parenting experience fails to have the cache that college degrees have. So I don't know how you find someone with answers that actually work that the world will actually respect as a bona fide expert. College degrees don't necessarily confer genuine expertise in this domain, but it's the kind of thing audiences will pay for.
People around here (and indeed in most of the internet) are paid for their information in attention and kudos. Your information would need to be almost unique and worth >£1000k for you to be able to sell it for money in todays attention starved market.