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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

> But I also understand the need for parents to keep a tab on their kids.

It's weird how quickly this has become normalized. Parent's weren't able to track their kids' location with this level of fidelity until fairly recently. Yet now this isn't just a convenience but a "need" that parents have.

This all points to looming acceptance of 24/7 location tracking in society. If you're used to having your every move tracked as a kid, why wouldn't you accept it as something the government "needs" to do when you're an adult? Eventually, everyone who remembers what it was like before you carried a GPS tracking system on you 24/7 is going to die of old age. What will the world look like then?

We're building a pretty grim future.

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We are. We're building the world of 1984, except paying to do it.

There are some upcoming requirements that cars "monitor for impaired drivers" somehow - which seems likely to be adding proximity-based blood alcohol sensors... or something of the sort? Details are unclear, but the speculation I've seen based on current technology is that your (always connected, always online, always updating...) car will now monitor the air to see if you might, perhaps, be impaired (or someone in the car is, it's far from clear to me how these sensors would work if a passenger were plastered).

I'm really not sure what I'm going to do when my current vehicle fleet needs upgrading, because "always online, always connected" is an anti-feature to me. Maybe just keep rolling my current stuff as long as I can keep it rolling.

I keep hoping that the upcoming generations will figure out how "edgy" being not-always-online is, and discover they like it. But that's a long hope.

Don't need to monitor their every move. I'm a parent that uses life360. I have notifications setup to alert me when the kids reach school and when their school bus drops them off in front of our house. Those are two spots I have setup in life360 to raise an alert if and when they are reached by their devices. Anything beyond that I know something isn't normal.

But the question remains, why do you need to know where they are? Is it concern for their safety, is it concern that they are doing something you may not approve of?

I'm fairly old so my experience of tracking kids is limited but I am really intrigued as to why we are now so concerned about having 100% visibility of what our kids are doing.

The flip side of this questions is how often do kids who are being tracked in this way either have problems that the tracking helps resolve, or deliberately work around the tracking so that they can do something their parents may not approve of?

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