It's 2012 and your kids have an iPhone - Do you know where they are? I do. | Hacker News Reader

It's 2012 and your kids have an iPhone - Do you know where they are? I do.

hanselman.com

175 pointshodgesmr41 comments

This seems pretty alarmist. More than ever parents know where their children are(I don't think its a good thing). I also don't particularly care if anyone knows where my daughter is. There are plenty of children just like her that a predator could kidnap. If someone was specifically targeting her this wouldn't help them at all. Nor would a location services policy be a deterrent.

There are only so many things a parent can worry about. This isn't one of them. I can imagine the kind of parent that would implement a family "location services policy". It's the same kind that installs NetNanny for their 16 year old, reads their kids' emails, checks their cell phone logs, records their mileage every night to make sure they go where they say they're going, doesn't let them go outside alone, etc. The world is not such a frightening place. Let's not make it one.

This seems pretty alarmist. More than ever parents know where their children are(I don't think its a good thing).

To me it didn't seem all that alarmist, but probably because I recognized it as reference to a bump that FOX affiliate stations run, a narrator asks "Its 10 PM, do you know where your children are?" over the 2200 station ID.

I can imagine the kind of parent that would implement a family "location services policy". It's the same kind that ...

Apparently you can't imagine that kind of parent correctly. My father was an IBM-er back in the day, and when we got dailup at home he spent a bit of time explaining to my siblings and me how to be smart on the internet, and part of that was a "location policy" (pretty cut and dry, because back in the AOL days basically all he had to say was: don't tell anyone where you live). They didn't spyware the shit out of my computer, they were surprisingly hands off, to the point that months passed between my switching to linux and their noticing the computer looked different.

The world is not such a frightening place. Let's not make it one.

For an article that basically boils down to "make sure your kid knows what their phone is doing", I don't think its all that frightening of a piece. Seems like solid advice.

I concur with your sentiment but I think informing people/kids about how much information they're leaking is A Good Thing.

Unfortunately, most folks (including the kid in the story) have some expectation of privacy even though they've unwittingly given it up. Especially when fragments are given up in seeemingly separate places, yet reconstructing them is as trivial as a Google search.

That kid in the OP is probably going to get quite a surprise when his Dad asks him about the message he sent.

I talked to the Dad earlier this evening and the kid had NO IDEA that this info was leaking out. This issue isn't about being a helicopter parent or about being paranoid. It's simply about being aware. You tell a teen to put their wallet in their front pocket and you should tell them to click off on location services. This is just one of a thousand life lessons.

I'm the Dad from the story and I'm really grateful to Scott for pointing this out to me. It's less about being alarmist and more about having a chance to educate young people about the realities of modern technology. (and re-educate myself from a parent's perspective) I don't read my kid's emails or check cell phone logs and don't plan on starting. I believe giving kids freedom, and the opportunity to wield it, is what turns them into responsible adults. However, it's easy to take things like location services for granted. Conversation had. Lesson learned.

It probably would have been more helpful if this article had been titled after one of its bullet points: "Location Services Policies for Families."

If it seems alarmist, it's because scott spends so much time on the (frankly creepy) exposition and leaves his actual thesis as fairly shallow itemized points.

I am an adult, at age 23 and I have realized for years how much data leakage there is.

None of the apps on my phone get access to Location services save for 1, Google Maps. There is no reason why my status update to ANY service should require my location, and luckily at the moment you can opt-out from ever having to send a location. I am very happy that Apple required the App to ask for permissions first (on an API level) and wish they would implement this further for a few more of the API's (such as Contacts which was brought up here recently).

I still find it funny when even adults don't seem to realize that they are advertising their current location to anyone and everyone all around the globe. People continue to use Foursquare to let the world know they are on vacation making them simpler targets for thieves that want to burglar their homes, they make themselves easy to follow around. For some people the FBI need not plant a GPS tracker, the subject themselves accurately documents everything and everything they do.

Their are positives and negatives to using any technology. Location services can be extremely useful. If you are that worried about someone knowing you location you should reconsider using the internet, or a cell phone. Both these technologies can be used to track you. Basically, in the modern world, if someone wants to track you, they will find a way.

It is always good to watch how much information you are making publicly available but unless your willing to go off the grid it's not worth fretting over.

(In the case of kids though it is worth fretting over and parents should be doing more to protect their privacy online. Simple things like restricting access to certain apps/services on an iPhone can make a big difference.)

"if someone wants to track you, they will find a way."

true, but the key thing is how much effort does it take. If NSA-like resources are needed, well then you are pretty damn safe. But if some guy can find you in two minutes by using just Google, that's something you might want to check.

I use foursquare a lot to advertise my location. It's awesome.

Sometimes a tweet is more complete when a location is attached - I can just comment on something, rather than having to specify why the comment is relevant. Less typing, less fuss, cleaner words.

Often taking a picture makes it more relevant/meaningful when location data is attached.

When posting a Runkeeper update, it is often much better with the whole map visible to people (like when I cycled from SF to Palo Alto. Without a map, it's just a 56km cycling trip, with the map it's an adventure)

What I don't do, however, is make it possible to discern where exactly I live. Doing cluster analysis on all my location-aware updates everywhere will only get you to about a ~500m radius of my building. At least 300 people live in this radius.

Even if you pinpoint my building, you don't know my name. That leaves you with about 10 apartments to check. Without eyes-on-the-ground surveillance you aren't getting anything.

And if you're going to the trouble of eyes-on-the-ground surveillance none of my location-aware updates matter. You can see where I am.

I found your name in approximately three seconds.

> Even if you pinpoint my building, you don't know my name.

Is your name not Swizec Teller, as it says on your website and supposedly real name policy following G+?

Nope, not my legal name. Only people I send invoices to get to know my legal name.

Damn, Internet! You scary! ;)

Another source of information leakage is his DNS records. Either he hasn't been keeping up to date or you just found out the riverside street in Slovenia where his parents live. ^_^

That one's more pernicious; top-level registrars usually demand that it be accurate and might threaten to take your domain away if someone reports that it isn't. There are whole companies which specialize in the service, "we'll be your official DNS contact so that your personal data isn't leaked through the WHOIS database," but the last time I checked was I think two years ago, and at the time the service-providers for this were either (a) really shady or (b) really expensive. It looks like the prices have come down a good deal from where they used to be, though.

Namecheap offered me one year of WhoisGuard with my domain, and now it only costs $2.88/year. Gandi seems to offer it for free, and so does Google Apps if you get a domain from them.

You think that's scary, the Internet just yelled at me that "The life of SWIZEC TELLER IS 32.17% COMPLETE"

making them simpler targets for thieves that want to burglar their homes

Mostly a myth.

I always figured that to be true. Any thief capable of using the internet to expose a location and put in the planning to base a robbery on it has already graduated to much more rewarding and less risky crime than breaking and entering.

Like telling the muscle where to go for a cut?

Like brokering leads to those who haven't yet?

Happened to a friend of mine. What the thief didn't know was that his room mates were not on vacation, and were gun nuts.

Then again it was someone that my friend had once had contact with in a college class and the thief had gotten a hold of his twitter account.

But it does happen.

"It's 2012 and your kids have an iPhone".

That was sensational enough for me!

Too bad this is never going to be heard or understood by the majority of people, until it is too late. (Leave Facebook?! but how will I keep in touch with everyone?)

But don't worry, I have a tinfoil hat for this exact problem.

cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Readability'd http://www.readability.com/articles/ofwyqmdp

Damn. 3am on the East Coast and it's the day my ISP is expanding the virtual disk of my blog's dedicated server. Hacker News traffic has never taken me down before, but today it's scheduled maintenance. There's some kind of irony there somewhere.

Site's back up. My ISP so rocks for being responsive.

Wow.... did no one take away from this that that's one rude little kid? Texting/sending a teasing "ha ha" message to someone they don't even know?

Yes, location services have privacy/security problems. We get that. I guess I would have expected someone to point out that this kid's rude. I'd prefer they get a lecture on manners and social etiquette vs location/services/privacy.

In the next few years, I've got faith that technology will make location data control easier to deal with. I don't have any faith that this kid will get less obnoxious (and if they do, it won't be because of technology/privacy filter software).

The author notified the rude little kid's dad, who may have sent the kid to bed without dessert.

This is another reason I so wish cyanogenmod / google / apple will hurry up and 1) Create a guest account for my phone 2) make it possible to disable all background data sharing /synching save for a whitelist. This would both conserve battery and it would be so much easier to decide what applications gets acces to what. E.g. my antivirus wants finegrained location data, but works fine with coarse... (I should really uninstall that antivirus program).

One problem is that a lot of programs don't make it obvious how much they plan on sharing.

I usually figure that any information they get from me will just be used to get higher-rate advertising, and maybe set the time on my homepage (yawn). It doesn't even occur to me that they might want to use my location as a "feature", and not to deliver advertising.

These days, I'm worrying more about lobbies and gov trying to pass laws to give them larger inspection power about what citizens do, than about apps and services leaking random data. At worse companies will treat me as a product, gov can treat me as a criminal.

I think this article is a bit alarmist, because most kids are probably safe. BUT, there is so much 'leaked' data about most of us that it's a little bit scary about the long term consequences.

I'm not worried about the random individual who can look me up, correlate all my identities, look at where I've been in the past, etc. I'm more concerned about the institutions and governments who are building sophisticated dossiers on every person and correlating it with 'suspicious behavior'. We all know that this is happening right now, and the technology is getting more sophisticated, because we're partly building it. Oracle and IBM aren't selling their petabyte clusters to the creepy guy down the street, they're selling them to government agencies and mega-corps.

This is all going to continue to get more scary until we wise up and pass regulations and personal-data ownership laws. (Yes, I said the big 'R' and 'L' words. Sorry, I'm not as libertarian as is considered cool these days.)

13 year olds can't get on Google Plus. I think all these accounts where fake, and make to catch his attention, possibly an covert smear campaign by Google's enemies. The attack is faux-childish too, children don't read Brother's Grimm these days.

Google Plus can't boot pre-teens who don't disclose their age.

I think the lesson in this case should be teaching your kids not to be a twerp to people they do not know. Not teaching them that they could accidentally be caught by information leakage while acting like a twerp.

My kids can have an iPhone when they pay for one themselves.

Until then, they have a PAYG $10 Nokia.

Perhaps that was a good move after all.

Hell, I'm a grownup with a job, and I don't have a smartphone. They're very expensive toys.

Scott knows where my kids are?! Creepy.

FWIW, on iOS, the you're asked for each app that wants access to location services. Further, you can turn this off globally for all apps, or individually for apps in the Settings app. Even further, you can lock down the settings app with a passcode required to make changes.

So, parents can lock down the settings for location services so that their kids... (whom I assume just say "yes" when running an app that asks for access to it) can't leak their location.

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