Debit card apps for kids are collecting a shocking amount of personal data
vice.com
vice.com
As others have mentioned, cash is near useless for children nowadays. He used to give me cash when he bought Robux etc but cash is also near useless for me.
I was concerned when I saw this headline but it's not quite clear to me what impact this would have on him, that wouldn't be gathered once he got a credit or debit card as an adult. Maybe because he literally purchases from only three places (Apple Store, Microsoft, Roblox) and donates to a panda charity.
Did your bank/ATM stop accepting it? Do you never settle debts with your friends?
not OP, but my bank literally does not accept cash deposits at its branches, nor does it operate any ATMs. I'm pretty sure I could deposit cash at a 3rd party ATM, but I've never tested that. anyway, I only visit an ATM a few times a year on the rare occasion that I do business with someone who only accepts cash.
> Do you never settle debts with your friends?
all the time, with venmo.
I do understand an respect the privacy argument for cash. but in most cases, it's not worth the inconvenience or sacrificing the 3-5% cashback I get on most purchases.
God help us if a truly authoritarian Hitler or Stalinist-type regime creeps into power in a large western country. They won't need to build surveillance structures at all. Everything will already be firmly in place thanks to increments of "convenience".
I find this amazing. I live in New York and use cash for the vast majority of my purchases.
Yikes. What are you going to do when your child learns about compound interest?
The "Parents are untrustworthy and break promises" lesson sounds like a bad plan to me!
Needs and wants are extremely different things. Let's not merge them together.
I want my child to be safe online and I want them to be able to communicate with their friends through the medium most children are using. These two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive and I can still be a good parent.
The bad idea is those companies then sharing information about children that should be private and parents should have a say in. Blaming parents when companies have outrageous privacy policies regarding child accounts is ridiculous. We have to teach our children to survive in this world.
My 9 year old triplets all have greenlight cards. This article is very disturbing. But they are learning fiscal agency, which is something my generation wasn't taught at all. When I finally got a job (at 15) it was way too late for me. I spent it all on coin-op video games. That might be reasonable at 9, but not at 15.
Sure I'd give them a laptop, I would even probably give them unsupervised access to the web after they seemed ready, but Apps are no good even for most adults.
That's called "being a parent" in my circle? I have a toddler that loves to throw the "you're not my friend!" at me when I cut off the TV and tell her it is time for dinner.
I never had a cell-phone until 17, despite all my friends having had theirs as early as the middle school years. Never mattered much in my case. I didn't have an X-Box 360 with Halo 2 and online gaming despite many of my peers having had that. Not sure why this is being seen as a "must have."
We aren't here to discuss how great your parenting skills are. My ex has a narcissistic personality disorder and ... well. Any time somebody brags about how great a parent they are - especially when it's in the context of controlling children - I automatically think they aren't a great parent. That's probably just me and you probably are a really great parent, but I promise you I'm not the only one here thinking it.
Also don't make the classic mistake of assuming your kids have all the same variables you did, or can approach the same variables the same way. You have to adapt your experiences to their environment and their personality/needs, often with different outcomes than what you experienced. Most parents are too cowardly for that and mess up their kids with strict enforcement of obsolete rules or letting them run wild with too little structure/guidance.
Oddly, my own children do not have that same issue. In a world of billions, there are no universal claims like this.
Because they don't tell you about it?
I remember things starting to change in middle school. kids started making same-day plans for after school and shooting their parents a quick text to say where they were going. I tried using the school's phone a few times when I was invited, but there wasn't always time to visit the office between classes. that was pretty clunky to do one or more times per week, and I knew I would be in big trouble if I wasn't there when my dad came to pick me up. so I just had to accept that I wouldn't be participating in most of those spontaneous hangouts until I got a phone.
like you said, everyone is different. some kids are charismatic enough that everyone else will work around whatever inconveniences they bring. others are not. I knew my parents had a very firm stance on stuff like phones, so I didn't bother complaining about it much.
I am (very) reliably informed that at one nearby school with 6th-8th grade, almost every kid, even the ones from very poor or unstable families, has a cell phone. The tipping point for "over half of my classmates have cell phones" seems to be in the 3rd-5th grade range.
The schools let them carry them around all day, too, which is very confusing to me. They're not supposed to use them, but they do all the time, and teachers/admin are reluctant to confiscate them on more than a "you can have this back at the end of the day" basis (and usually not even that), because parents freak the fuck out if you hold on to their kids' phone overnight, no matter what (and, with limits only way at the extreme end, I really mean "no matter what") they were doing with it.
Doesn't matter in this case, though, since most schools seem to have just declared defeat on the issue.
On the one hand, kids not being able to get off their phone to the point it impacts their performance at school is worrying.
On the other hand, school is kid prison, and I really can't begrudge any kid who, when having to listen to a teacher for hours on end, takes any opportunity to do something more interesting they find.
Agreed about the entire enterprise of school, as it exists, kinda being horrible kid-prison to begin with, though.
I'm pretty sure there's a selection effect in what you heard (eg you only hear stuff about kids using phones was something goes wrong enough to be headline-worthy).
For instance, I'm no fan of social media, but I wouldn't say it boils down to bullying and nothing else.
In this specific case, I dont want them do well in gambling social system. Seen damage it causes in long term.
Generally I agree with you tho. Just gambling group is fine for my kids to not fit in.
If you're in the toddler stage you control almost every variable. The game changes once they hit > 8.
Does that mean not having a WhatsApp account as well?
It's also why, last time I heard from a Facebook recruiter, I told him to make sure the next one to cold-call me had their general counsel's contact info handy so I'd know where to have my own attorney send the cease-and-desist. Seems to have had the intended effect, so far at least.
Not having any friends is unlikely. But if their friends are connecting and coördinating on their phones, the odd one out will be at a disadvantage. Depending on how close they are, this could be resolved by them finding a workaround as a group. (For example, buying a prepaid smartphone.)
Even if you do manage to make friends, a lot of people won't remember you're the only person they know who isn't able to see the facebook event everyone else is invited to.
When I was a kid, friendships were made in person: at school, extra curricular activities, at the park, etc. Maybe I’m so out of touch and kids never actually see each other face to face anymore and live entirely online these days. My friends and I did play games online together, and at school we’d brainstorm games that we could all play together. The point was to do stuff together, so we’re fine ways to make sure we were doing stuff together.
Are you telling me things have changed so much that nobody makes friends in person anymore?
It's a basic fact of life that the more friction there is to doing something, the less that thing will get done. Sure, some people will manage to make it work, but others won't be so lucky.
Also, totally agree.
They rationalize their choices with “I don't want to be around superficial people like that anyway” not realizing just how many people are judging and questioning their decision making process
“oh god someone thats going to talk my ear off about all the control they have over their phone but cant share a photo when signal drops on a hike”
Anyway hope it gets better, it shouldn't be “wealthy Americans use Apple devices and ignore cross platform chat apps” but right now it is. Maybe Apple’s Imessage and Airdrop go cross platform and help fix this culture, instead of relying on Google and a ton of OEMs to improve a UX they dont care about. People don’t want to send unencrypted SMS.
the culture itself created the rest of the consternation in favor of Apple. Apple can successfully lean on it being an unencrypted notification than an anti competitive practice. Even two iMessage users can randomly fail back to green bubbles and the SMS network, and it has nothing to do with competitors.
This is such a laughably exaggerated view. I would bet less than 1% of Android users choose not to use Apple because of some anti-superiority viewpoint.
Imagine your kid starts school for the first time and everyone shares their group chat QR code. Your kid can't and now will slowly be left behind as other kids set up plans to go skate, game ,whatever.
Why so?
In short: It's good for children to be upset and afraid of new situations. That's how they learn that they can rely on their caregivers, who ideally support them in overcoming those situations.
Children that lack this mechanism (and e.g. are disinterested in new situations, or completely overwhelmed by them to the point where they cannot act at all) potentially lack that skill in adulthood as well.
That does not mean you have to design those situations regularly. You dont need to upset your kids. It does not mean upset is something that you as parent should always welcome or ignore.
On one level, I agree with this. On another, I remember the restrictions my parents were convinced they had on me to which trivial workarounds existed.
In our school district (Arlington Public Schools in Virginia), children get assigned Google GSuite accounts by default starting in Kindergarten. They are used for a variety of things, including authentication to multiple school apps.
Parenting is about picking and choosing your battles, trying to get the fundamentals right and conceding the minor losses. You do your best and adapt along the way; any master plan will inevitably get the details wrong.
Now that a lot of society is cashless, children need a way to spend their pocket money even.
Surely parents can just use their own debit card when the kid needs something that can’t be bought with cash? Special debit cards for kids seem to add unnecessary complexity (and opportunity for abuse) to the solution for a really simple problem.
What if the child's gone to the store on their own?
The statement wasn't "there exists a store that still accepts cash", but "many stores no longer accept cash".
They only exist if you keep going to those stores.
You cant imagine 9 years old to go to buy ice cream or toy?
Well now you can see the point of the product then... it's about giving your children some freedom and responsibility for themselves.
Sounds good, but at the same time they'll miss out on quite a bit of learning that almost everything (that a child might want) can be had if only they beg/negotiate/throw a fit hard enough. Life gives me the impression that in a ruthless-takes-all world the negotiation skills taught by the latter have far more impact than the being reasonable about money skills taught by the former.
(sorry for the sarcasm)
And kids can go to store without babysitter.
2. I’m not sure of your point here. I meant if the parent wasn’t around to provide the cash the kid might have to wait until they are around. Not that they need someone to take them to the store (although this is highly dependent on where you live and the age of the kid).
It is completely different then having own money - which in fact allow all of us to pay when we want what we want as long as we have money.
Nobody is saying kids will die if they dont have own card. They wont die if they dont have books or toy cars either. But it makes perfect sense for familly to want those things, no matter how much people yell on clouds about kids not living as if it was 1836.
2. The point was to respond to babysitter assumption to make clear what I mean .
Maybe your kid went to hang out with some friends after school, asks for money to go to the cinema or just to get some food?
Why would you go out of your way to make your life difficult by avoiding debit cards?
> Money is hard to undestand when you don't work like a dog to earn very little of it, so this is even harder for kids.
It is not? If you role model financial decisions in front of them where they see, they pick yout habits.
I never lived within walking distance of a store as a kid.
We advertise sugary, fatty, fast food to them on the TV shows they watch. We get them addicted early to the dopamine hit of a the next big toy, an obsession which carries through to high tech gadgets and cars in adulthood. My local grocery store even has a tiny child-sized shopping cart with a flag on it that says "Future Customer in Training", so kids can mimic their parents as they consume.
In that context, debit cards for kids are a logical next-step. As soon as they hit 18 and can earn an income, now companies will have a nice fat history of buying habits and consumer behavior for these kids that makes them easily targetable.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/disappe...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27753727
How does this compare to that? Note that this is after they've chosen that using medical information is fair game for debt recovery, so it's a matter of time before this information, too, is used for that. Sadly our societies have chosen that surveillance is the future, and a lot will be needed to fight it at this point.
Is the fight to focus on really that some banks might use this info to market loans? I mean, sure, it can damage people, but ... not nearly as much as government surveillance will.
I spent all my money on computer games at age 12. At 19 I thought they were pointless and never bought one for the next fifteen years. The teenage data set would have been worse than noise for someone trying to sell me stuff.
Hell, even car companies are trying their best to turn cars into a subscription service.
I didn’t have a smartphone but I could text. Around 14 I wrote a little Rails app that would receive transactions via SMS from Twilio. We never ended up using it but it was fun to write. Shortly after that I got a joint checking account with a debit card in my name.
Not surprised at all.
Growing up I always had this belief that wealth was about building a big savings account, and that rich people where like Scrooge McDuck swimming in big pools of money.
This is, imho, a fantastic piece of propaganda. It's incredible how often people will say things like "Jeff Bezos is only rich because he owns so much stock!" As soon as you get your first big RSU payout you realize it is insane to keep the majority, or even a sizable portion of your capital in cash.
Even Marx saw that Capital, by its definition, is in motion.
The lesson of a savings account is that you should hand your money over to banks so that they can use it. But most kids aren't taught what it really means to park your capital in a bank. I remember how many times I was given the "miracle of compound interest talk" but nobody get fantastically rich from the growing interest on their savings account.
Today that's even more ridiculous, interest rates are way, way down and inflation is starting to rise. Keeping more than enough money to serve as an emergency fund is the same as just burning some of it for fun.
We are in an insane debt bubble, but that doesn't change the reality of how life works in an insane debt bubble. Using credit to buy things today, when interest rates are low and inflation is rising is far more rational than putting money in a savings account.
A better lesson would be to use that cash to buy things that are useful and can help build skills, which can't be taken by a debt collector. A guitar is a better purchase than a bunch of digital music, a laptop to program on is a better purchase than an ipad, etc.
I saved money all the time as a kid because I was taught that saving is good. One of the first accounts I got was a savings account. However, I soon learned that I needed to access that money so I got a checking account and started to divide my deposits between each. And on and on, you get the point.
To this day I keep a cash savings -- I need it. Yes its not earning as much as my other investments, but I don't need it to. I need liquidity and I value being able to pull large chunks of my hard earned money from the bank to do a miriad of things: spontaneous vacation, buy a car, medical emergencies, etc.
I think both devices offer something to youth. However, it seems like giving kids debit cards leans in the wrong directions as far as valuable life lessons. I don't want my kids learning to spend their money. Kids are already great a spending my money. They need to understand how money actually works (beyond spending).
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."