Google releases smart watch for kids
store.google.com
store.google.com
They declined because they think watches are lame and nerdy. Only the most unfortunate kids get watches. They still can't carry them around the house, but I didn't gain much ground overall. I've gradually increased controls on and over the phones in my home, but the watch offer has never been taken up.
I think you're right that it could be an overlooked solution, but I suspect you need to sneak in before the kids are accustomed to a phone.
That said, I canceled my cellular plan on my original one and really mostly use it as a GPS device when hiking. It's easier just to use a watch that doesn't need charging day to day.
Subscription to cellular is $10/month.
And it let me set parental controls on it. No way was I getting him a phone, it's already way too distracting with the other devices he has access to at home.
She has gained a lot of independance because we are able to track her with the watch, and she is now proactively communicating with it to let us know where she will be etc.
I'm not enthusiastic about the teen years with TikTok/Instagram,etc but at least she will have been onramped gradually and hopefully it's a natural progression.
(a flip phone would also be acceptable but a watch is physically attached which is ideal for 7 year old).
This needs to be a campaign pushed at the school or even county level.
Better hope that watch is water- and shockproof because a healthy 7yo will find many ways to test those features.
1. Whitelist contacts for calling and text call - installing an app is a pain for older ppl / friends.
2. Music: Why not Google? This already has headphone support and the Pixel watch hardware which support musics.
3. Maps: in case they need to go A to B. WearOS has google maps, so this should be an easy add. School bus is on google maps for e.g, so being able to check time to leave would be great.
4. Battery: 16hrs at launch is not going to age well...
Overall, despite being in the market for this, would not buy.
Features kids didn't ask for and I don't want:
Gaming: There is a market for gamification, but it seems to me the product team went overboard and spent way too much time here at the cost of making a better kids watch. I have no doubt it can and will make some kids more active, but...
Sounds like a nightmare having to also manage your kids' watches and keep them charged just for them to barely make it through the day.
https://www.fitbit.com/global/us/legal/legacy-device-policy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Fitbit_products#Fitbit...
So I wouldn't worry them killing these ala the spotify car thing.
My bet is Google EOL.
If this lasts as long as Stadia it will shut down on Thursday the 5th of August 2027.
If you don't want this for your kids, just don't get it. If you are worried about folks knowing where your kids are and what they are up to, I have bad news for you about neighborhood gossip.
Obvious strawman comparing Google knowing vital stats and location about your child at any time with neigbors knowing and talking to each other about a kid.
I believed Pebble users could enjoy rich data-driven features without fear as long as someone like me had their back. That sense of mission was part of why I stayed on to the end.
Once Pebble and I were integrated into Fitbit I got to see up close that they are not a wearables company, but a surveillance capitalism firm that will profit from all available data, even not-technically-hipaa protected medical data in any way legally possible. No one there had any mission but share-price-go-up.
I quit 3 months before my golden handcuffs came off, because I realized I no longer wanted to be part of an organization so deeply negligent with security and unethical with data usage.
I then got to watch from a distance as Pebble user trust and user data was then gobbled up again, this time by Google.
Now firms like Google have fully saturated the adult market and seek to parasitically cause behavior changes in children while extracting highly profitable biometric data from them too.
A ratified-and-strengthened American Privacy Rights Act cannot come soon enough.
We have to convince our legislators to stop these predators.
> There are no third-party apps or ads shown to kids, and health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.
Sounds better than the regular smart watches.
Having kids inside gaming and not going outside is going to do more physical damage (childhood diabetes/obesity/metabolic syndrome) when compared to the very unlikely event of a child obduction.
For example, a maps app, to always get the kid home if they’re lost. Medication reminders. Fitness tracking. Emergency SOS. A calendar to remind them about family birthdays and upcoming holidays. School timetables. Medical ID. Payment cards or passes for travel (in Western Europe a lot of schoolchildren commute by themselves, especially on public transport) and spending their allowance. Let the kid choose to notify their family of their location as and when they want to. Empower them to use tech to their advantage but put their privacy first.
Children are going to end up as adults in this world regardless of whether we teach them, so we should be teaching them the benefits and warning them of the many bad actors. We should be teaching our children the skills they need to navigate the modern world. This includes technology and abusive/controlling relationships.
I believe a good responsible smartwatch for kids can exist. Alas, this is Google and helicopter parents exist, so this product is not it.
* GPS, I can see where my kid is at (not always super accurate)
* I can contact my child and my child can contact me (contacts are whitelisted)
* School time lock helps avoid distraction (locks most watch functions when at school)
* Knowing I can locate and contact my child helps me allow more personal freedom to my child. Within reason.
I hear you that spending that kind of cash is not for everyone. For me, those features make it worth it.
I am planning a prototype for an alternative to smart watches that will use LoRa Meshtastic as a platform. The main upside of this would lower upfront costs, and no recurring cellular provider bill. I think it would be cool to have a system where trusted contacts and kids friends could message each other. My goal is to build a management system parents could use to quickly set up a LoRa node for their child.
We are currently sharing a Verizon Gizmo 3 among multiple children. The GizmoHub app is not bad but its mandatory use is frustrating. Friends need substantial parental help to start communicating with the Gizmo user (account creation with Verizon). Forcing all communications through a dedicated and clunky app is a non-starter.
Battery life is the other challenge. Kids don't heed advice to conserve the less than all day battery life. Later when communications for pick-up are most needed, the watch is often low on power.
Ankles are usually only slightly larger in circumference than wrists, my Garmin even does OK at picking up my heart rate when I'm working in the machine shop and wearing it on my ankle.
It's kind of bad at all of these, but our primary thought is to have it be a limited capability device -- similar to a flip phone but a wearable.
This looks like it's trying to enter the same market, but with a bunch of really really really really stupid shit.
"Meet the eejie. The eejie is the center of the Fitbit Ace LTE. The more your kids move, the more goals they hit and the happier they make the eejie."
You'd have to be an "eejie"-it to buy into this cutesy bullshit.
The thing was an absolute turd. I think over 9 months I managed to get one message to go through to her, maybe two or three calls worked. She was never able to reach us when she wanted, and we could never reach her. End result was that we both experienced far more anxiety than if she'd had nothing at all - utterly counterproductive. Whether on wifi or 5 bar cell coverage, the damn thing just wouldn't ever reliably actually communicate. Support never figured it out though we did try.
The final straw came when she walked over to a friend's house across town one afternoon for a playdate, then I tried to call her an hour later to make sure all was ok and it didn't ring, as usual. I tried the location tracker thing and it told me she was in a dodgy neighborhood 20 miles away from where she was supposed to be. (People here will probably guess that it was getting location info from the address formerly associated with the WiFi AP at the house she was at - the parents had recently moved.) After that panic she and I both decided it was a piece of crap and we upgraded her to an Apple Watch as a "graduation present" from elementary school. It's worked perfectly, and it has been easy to manage controls and restrictions.
But what's nice is that it is a limited capability device. I'd love to hear more about the controls and restrictions associated with an Apple Watch. Apple's documentation is pretty shitty so I don't have a good feel for how it operates; just that the features exist.
I'm on the fence about switching to a dumb phone or an apple watch next year (middle school).
You call it bullshit, but maybe you just aren't the target market?
My kids have access to other electronic devices, but don't yet have a smartphone. The Gizmo is a nice intermediate step. They know what real games are like and they want those. As a parent I don't want the phone to be a source of distractions. Having these sort of half-assed games feels like the worst of both worlds; disappointing games that the kids don't like, and stupid distracting games that the parents don't want.
The problem is cohort. Friends have phones. Friends COORDINATE over WhatsApp (not communicate). This means, that in order for him to know that he can hang out with others, he needs a way to be part of that.
I remember very much noticing as a young kid that I didn't have some things some other kids had. But most of the time that was at home, rather than visible every day. And I was also a bit aware that some other kids had less than I did. (Parochial school uniforms helped.)
We could send them all to school wearing a potato sack and some of the kids with the whole foods sack would make fun of the kids in the food lion sack.
Please parents...look up the studies on how detrimental it is to hover over every aspect of your child's life. It's not good.
I raised five kids to adulthood with the last one finishing his freshman year of college this year.
None of them had devices until middle school and even then, it was restricted. We made our kids roam around like feral coyotes.
They are absolutely better for it.
At what age does Google think kids are responsible enough to be given such a device?
Remember the (long ago) episode when Schmidt suggested that kids change their names to avoid connection with online antics in the past?
The detractors here say "let the kids be free" and "no new tech for kids", but I wonder if those people have kids today? Parents WANT to give their kid's more outdoor freedom in this f'd up world. Tracking products like this give them more peace of mind.
At $10/month (or $5/mo with annual buy), this is competitive and possibly a new recurring revenue stream for Google's consumer products group.
Good job big tech marketing departments!
This is a bummer. It's still better than being android only or iOS only, but this would really have benefited from allowing standalone use with management from the web for instance.
For example, I'd be waaaay more comfortable letting my young kids (6yrs old) roam around outside the house if will lived in a safe suburb rather than a city. I think the same is true for this type of watch, I'd let them do more stuff at a younger age if I knew I could always get a hold of them and knew where they were.
[1]https://community.fitbit.com/t5/Versa-4/Can-I-install-apps-o...
This sounds like a great feature. I want my kid to be able to reach me in an emergency, but I want there to be zero distractions during the school day. Hopefully Apple implements this on Apple Watches that use Family Setup.
You know what also makes movement fun for kids? Being able to go outside. Not having helicopter parents. A bicycle. A football. Something is very wrong if kids don't even want to run around unless they're filling up rings on a screen.
There are some things that a smart watch simply can't do, due to limited screen size and resources. And if you're going to need to carry around a regular smart phone to handle those cases, why bother carrying both?
It feels weirdly redundant, more like a gimmick.
Don't forget Google refuses to repair their watches. Break the screen? Go buy a new one. Ifixit found that it's actually not hard to replace the screen/glass module but with one issue: Google won't sell you one.
In my imaginations the story was something like that: - How to keep next generations hooked into useless technology? - Oh, let's make their parents buy smartwatches to their kids, this way we A. will track them 24/7, sell other useless stuff too.
Like, the only reason you seem amazed is because you've made up an outrageous story about how the product came to be. Except you admit that you've just made it up and know very well it's not true, so presumably that's not driving your amazement.
0 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_monitoring_in_the...
If our world gets so broken, that parents need this, we should start changing our world
Fitbit is late and device is expensive for basic features.
Battery life is a little low.
Some kids would get distracted and socially disconnected from a smart watch. But there are loads of kids who aren't affected this way.
Why gamify children’s movement related activities? Instead of making them fun in the first place?
https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/714945#specs
It's a similar LTE-enabled smart watch with GPS for parental tracking and two-way text/voice messaging within the app, but from Garmin, which has a much better reputation for privacy - including a very positive review from the Mozilla Foundation: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/garmin-.... I would trust Garmin with my son's data. He's 7, and has been wearing the plain digital Timex I got him for almost a year; when he's 8 or 9 we'll get him a Bounce.
If you really want the bare minimum, look at the Vivofit Junior:
https://www.garmin.com/en-US/p/711538
which doesn't have GPS or LTE, just an accelerometer and Bluetooth that it uses to gamify fitness and activity tracking and (with parental management through the linked app).
See also DCRainmaker's reviews of the Bounce:
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2023/01/garmin-bounce-activity-t...
And the Vivofit Jr 2:
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2017/09/garmin-vivofit-jr-2-revi...
Fitbit is CRAP. let me reiterate. crap. C-R-A-P. crap. Lets use that in a sentence.
Mark grumbled, "My Fitbit is such crap—it breaks down faster than I can count my steps!"
And for those wondering, I moved onto Garmin watches. I mean if you're going to pay it might as well be a nice one and most importantly one that is reliable.
But, I know the apple watch will be supported for 7 years or so. This is a google product, so I expect it to be EOLed tomorrow. No thanks. Fool me 100 times, shame on you, fool me 101 times, shame on me, google!
Losing a young child must be terrifying, even if they’re found shortly after. I think the value proposition justifies the price, at least for a reasonable amount of parents.
same cost as a mid-tier smartphone, and 10/mo is for the networking features aka cellphone plan.
kid can't lose it like a cellphone since it's strapped to them, and sill gives them some basic call / text / tracking but without giving them access to the Play store, Tiktok, YT, etc.
the more i think about it the more i'm okay with the idea -- i've done the custom side-loaded android ROM for a kids phone strictly for the purposes of locking it down and it was a PITA.
OTOH now google gets to snoop on your kid 24/7 which i don't love...
It doesn't look like the pricing is much different, and for families with iPhones it would presumably be simpler to stay in the Apple ecosystem. Is there something I'm missing, or is this just for Android families?
Regardless, I'm happy to see innovation in the space.
Lots of carriers, particularly cheaper MVNOs, don't support LTE watches and even less support the standalone Apple Watch setup.
So in that sense, it is convenient.
Only the Pixel watch uses android.
I'll stick with a dumb phone for my kids, thanks.
Once again Google ties a product to a subscription service (beyond whatever lte connectivity which would be needed anyways). They seem to be always chasing getting that recurring revenue by adding unnecessary features. This adds little value, greatly increases the maintenance cost for Google, and puts the risk on the customer for whether Google will continue thinking it's worth it.
Worst of all, "Games". As a lover of games as an artistic medium, and a game designer myself, I'm just so tired of gamification crap being added to everything else. Flashy graphics and numbers going up are the "sugar" to games' "nutrition" of interactive experience, mechanical exploration, and emotional expression. Rewarding children with external rewards over building internal motivation is dubious at best, and incredibly harmful at worst.
Scummy ass shit. Incredibly direct tell about their true nature here.
I rather like the general notion, alas. The $120/yr annual plan seems not great but $60/yr offer for connectivity seems decent. Albeit it seems quite expensive compared to the expensive data-consumption a watch is going to have. I wonder if it works with other plans?
I can get a refurb Apple Watch SE 2nd gen direct from Apple for $209. I'm clearly not going to buy this Google watch because of the price.
Don't worry about it. I will be broken or lost far before those 2 years :)
You will wish it was lost.
In particular you'll be paying a monthly subscription, so you'll still be paying the same price whether you stick to this device for 10 years or not.
On the Apple Watch it's a completely different proposition, in particular you absolutely need to pair to an active iPhone.
Like is the watch supposed to replace the phone? Or if not, why bother? If you need heart rate monitoring, why does it need an internet connection?
my middle schooler is on their 3rd phone -- thankfully they were all cheapo, basic models. i'd love the idea to strap it to them, i'm just not crazy about a biometric monitor + something following them uber-closely all day.
This constant tracking of kids is unnecessary and dangerous. Generations of kids survived without their parents needing to know their location at all times.
And yes, I totally admit, some kids (very few actually depending on the locale) didn't survive. But we've traded this false sense of "safety" for kids that are so risk averse it is seriously negatively affecting their development. I highly recommend the writings of Jonathan Haidt - he not only has great arguments but also has a lot of data to back up his conclusions.
Kids don't need more tech, they need less of it (and FWIW, most adults, too).
This topic is always so alarmist. I have kids and a spouse. We all have Find My and Location Sharing on our phones. I don't FrEaK oUt that my kids are going to die if I'm not tracking their every movement. But it's nice to glance at Find My app and see if the kids are still hanging out at Starbucks or they got to school on time. It's convenient to see which corner of the park they're at when I need to go pick them up. I can see if my wife's still at Whole Foods and send her a message to pick up baru nuts. They can see if I'm still at work or headed home.
This idea of helicopter parents vs free-range glory is a false dichotomy.
If teenage me had something that tracked every location, and I knew it, and my friends had them on too, I'd probably miss out on a lot of stuff I cherish.
I had time limits, and a hard immovable low budget that made a lot of the bad stuff impossible. The rest was up to us to figure out and learn and improvise as we go. I'm better for those learnings.
Having said that, I'm not in this teenage parenting position today and so I have no idea what I'm going to do when i'm in that spot.
They need to be able to do things their parents disapprove from time to time, or just hide some behavior that they feel shy about.
Sex, meeting people outside of your social norms, attempting stupid stunts, and all that is part of growing.
The simple fact you can know where they are at all time steal those opportunities from them, and normalize spying so that they grow into citizens that will accept it in the future by the gov.
It also removes the parts of the day when they are on their own, and have to figure things out, then deal with the consequences of their action because the parents are not there to get them out of trouble.
Mine are grown now, but I’ve always told them: I’m not worried about where you are, I want to know where to go when something happens and you need a rescue. I want them to have the peace of mind that, if needed, the safety net is within reach. When I was a teen, my parents were in reach if I was in reach of a [wired] phone, but I didn’t always know how to tell them where I was at that moment.
Providing a safety net while allowing freedom boosts self confidence.
Your kids, however, freak out that you could be tracking them at any time. They are effectively barred from going anywhere that might not elicit parental approval, ALL THE TIME - not just when you are actually tracking them. It's the panopticon principle.
Depending on their age, this could have major effects on their development. If they are 6, it is probably fine - especially if they don't know you can track them. If they are 16, not so much.
I've heard other parents say they only track their kids in case of an emergency, while you admit you admit you track your kids for trivial issues.
I'm not a parent, so I wouldn't know, but I'd like to think I can trust my kid if he tells me he goes to school on time. Seems more useful to build trust than to know for sure his precise location, because there are a lot of things which can't be tracked by technology.
I gained very very significant experiences by lying to my parents about where i was. I never got hurt, not once, we were never running from the cops or anything and i solved every problem on my own. Those are invaluable experiences! A 6 year old simply cannot, but a teenager must.
What is your true motivation in tracking them? Is it based in fear? And I'm sure you're aware that any apps they have installed on their phone can also be capable of storing and selling this location data you'd like them to provide. Are you comfortable with Google storing a record of every movement your child makes?
I find it kind of hard to believe that they just happen to have location sharing on without any sort of incentive
I'm not sure what's worse: enforcing that outright or having them see that level of invasion of privacy as normalized
That’s creepy.
Choppers flying around and all that. But sure, its 'convenient' for you. It would be also convenient if we all had tracking chips under our skin, so that good ol' government can fight crime better, a wonderful world to live in.
Honestly, it's because I just don't care. I'm not worried about her changing plans or going somewhere without telling me (the feels dirty just thinking about) and at a certain age, I also won't care what my kids do. They will also change plans, or explore off the path. So what? But that one time I _really_ need to call them or they need help, we will be glad they have a little bit of tech on them.
I also find it somewhat interesting that many of the same people who are so worried about this type of surveillance _already_ have the devices and/or technical knowledge to surveil others and choose not to for whatever reason. For example, we have home networks and could track what our families do online. We _could_ put a malicious app into someone's phone, or a tracker on someone's car. Simply having the ability to do something does not imply that it will be done, and certainly doesn't imply that it will be done maliciously.
My wife and I have been looking for something exactly like this for our 6yo. I lost him on a ski slope once over a year ago and I think he's still traumatized. He recently was afraid of going on a class trip because he was afraid of getting lost.
This isn't for teenagers. It's for kids that are still attached to mama/papa. It's not necessarily even for everyday. But field trips, amusement parks, big crowded events, hell even shopping malls? I remember many times as a kid having my parents call out on the PA system when I got lost in a department store.
Valletta occupies a tongue of land thrust into the ocean. I got lost in the middle of the city, and had to come up with a plan for how to get back to my parents. I realized I'd probably be able to find it from the promenade as we had walked it a fair bit.
I recalled my Dad showing me the city map and pointing out the streets were on a very regular grid pattern perpendicular to the shores. So I headed down a street until I hit the shore. Then I realized I was on the wrong side, so I decided to round the entire coastline to get to the right, opposing shore. This was foiled by some sort of fenced-off military installation or something (scary!), but I was eventually able to make it to the other side by circumnavigating it. I got pretty close to our hotel when I ran into my Mom who was desperately searching for me.
My backup plan was to hover around streetside cafés looking for non-scary looking tourists speaking my language and ask them for help if it got too late.
It's so seared into my mind, I almost want to believe I'd still recognize the landmarks. I was definitely very scared and agonizing. But I've always felt very good that my plan worked and that I was able to get out of my first little crisis.
I'm not sure what the lesson of this story is. It's probably not to get your kids lost on purpose. Showing them a map of where they are and studying it together is great for sense of place and navigation, though -- make sure they know where they are at least roughly, not just that you can track them.
I’m really sorry about your son’s experience. Getting lost can be terrifying for a kid.
But being lost happens (eg I was lost in hunting woods at 8yo), and many commenters have shared their experiences. Being scared and eventually overcoming the fear is a quintessential growing experience.
Obviously there are countless caveats because each kid is different, and depends on the level of danger etc
However, I think this belief that humans evolved to be so sensitive to childhood trauma is incredibly over sensationalized. I'm no worse off in life despite getting lost a few times. Your kid will be fine.
Addition: Even outside of just the kids. When my wife works a late shift at the hospital, she would like a device like this for the walk in darkness out to her car in the parking lot. Or similar situation where she had to do an emergency road trip to handle an emergency with her dad and would like to have a device that can alert me and temporarily give location if she needs top stop and get gas at 2 in the morning.
or they don't hail from a culture where helicopter parenting has become the norm. Here in Germany tracking your kids like this would be widely seen as completely bizarre. There's a great Japanese TV show, called Old Enough, (that has been running for 30 years, long before smartphones existed), where kids as young as 2 and 4 run off and navigate public transport and do daily errands.
The HN crowd won’t be sympathetic but I most certainly am. It’s not until you get lost skiing that you realize how difficult it might be to meet back up, particularly if you forgot where you parked in the sea of cars. A kid might not know to go wait at the front desk too (which one’s the front desk anyway?) and then you have to worry about exposure.
Tracking can give kids more freedom, because you can let them roam where they could get lost. For example, you can take them on vacation in a safe but unfamiliar place and let them do as they want. If they get lost, just use the tracker to find them. You don't even need to go for them immediately, you can let them try to figure it out by themselves and only go if it becomes really problematic. What would have been an unacceptable risk without a tracker becomes possible.
When I was a kid, my parents would have given a lot for such a tracker as I had the uncanny ability to lose them in the most remote places. highlights include central London (not my country, didn't speak English) and in a forest on a mountain with a thunderstorm approaching. I survived, but maybe a tracker could have saved my parents some sanity, they still talk to me about it, more than 30 years later.
I agree with your entire comment. And apart from the parents that feel they need to watch their kids every move, what always astounds me is how little consideration is given to exactly what tech they slap around their kids' wrist.
"Oh, look it is Google, our familiar cozy uncle, so all is hunky-dory".
No, it is not! Google is an advertisement company. The biggest on the planet. Ads are their raison d'etre, core business. And learning as much as possible from your kid at the youngest age is part of their business model. Not to protect them, but to turn them into mindless consumers that click the most ads. And to use all that juicy data about your kids life in any other shady way they can think of, where some cold hard cash may end up on their balance sheet. It is ridiculous.
Now they have to interact with an adult somewhere to use their personal phone. And the adult has to trust this isn’t a ruffian looking to swipe his phone for kicks.
But a cell capable watch for $200 is pretty compelling; the Apple SE is sync only right, so equivalent apple watch is $350+?
And, he can set timers and alarms to keep track of his schedule.
My kids are pretty free-range, riding their bikes to/fro from school and hanging out at their friend's places.
I did not want a phone because it's way too distracting
As with all things it's a tool and will depend on how the parents use it. If I break his trust by spying on him, well, thats on me and of course a rather difficult one to rebuild. I also told him if he ever wants to turn off location services we can do that but he's okey with it for now.
Why are we living in a world where we think that kids do not deserve privacy? Or where we think that we cannot trust our children?
> Arkangel, an implanted technology which allows Marie to track Sara's location, current vision and hearing
Are you imagining a scenario where, maybe, a kid is walking by a house, but the tracking shows the kid IN the house. And then the parent who is watching every minute of their 10 year old's walk down the street takes their gun and kills the "pedos" and tries to rescue their kids?
Maybe that seems hyperbolic, but I really cannot imagine how this is dangerous. Or is it the idea that parents will let their kids do more dangerous stuff since they think if they can track them, then it's okay?
If a smart watch makes more parents comfortable letting their pre-teen kids outside of the house alone, that's a net win for everyone over the status quo where those kids are physically chaperoned 24/7.
How can we complain when our governmets do the same to us?
"Kids" is a very broad term - I don't think tracking older teenagers is appropriate but tracking a toddler (prob too young for this) through to teens is perfectly reasonable. Many people track their partners, family, etc via Apple and Google sharing locations.
It's not that kids need less tech, it's that they need less screen time. Arguably this watch isn't screen time.
Did they? The problem with this sort of claim is that it often turns out to be false. "We didn't have X and somehow we survived" often omits the fact that mortality in given demographics has dropped significantly since then. The people making this statement are survivors, and the ones who haven't survived don't speak up. Can someone back up this claim with data? My (very) quick search brought up only infant mortality rates.
There was a "looking back" piece of WGN-TV last week about a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old who rode their horses from Missouri to New York City to meet Roosevelt. Alone. All they had with them was canteens, and a map.
Then they bought a car with the money they raised along the way, and drove home to Missouri. Alone.
Today you can't get an adult to sit on a chair for 30 minutes without them using a phone, a water bottle, or both as a pacifier.
I get the tech focused millennial paranoia about this but when it gets down to it you have nothing to fear if the people you share that with actually respect you and your privacy.
I asked my boomer mother about whether she'd have liked to have had a gps on me when I was a kid in the 80s. She said she would have loved it. she worked until 5 and there was no "after school care" in our small town... she kept our pantry full of chips and soda and our video games new so that we'd be home when she got home, rather than out somewhere else with our friends.
To her, the lack of near constant panic attacks would be a godsend, and she wouldn't have felt so bad about using video games as childcare.
As a parent, my concern isn't about my kid being abducted... an air tag in their pocket would be more discreet. It's about letting them explore with a safety net. Go for longer bike rides, knowing that if it gets too dark, I can pick them up... that's not risk averse.
The level of risk for every generation has been dramatically lower since the 1920s. Both of my parents lost an older sibling... loss happened at the family level in the 50s. in the 80s, I maybe had one or two kids in my class that had experienced loss... a tractor accident or gun accident... but now there's been one child that died in the past three years at my son's school.
Risk had bigger consequences 60 years ago. Our kids are better off for it.
What are the dangers?
Maybe you should try to be open minded perhaps.
And cars used to be safe even without seatbelts!
It turns out times change. Before you think I’m disagreeing with the entirety of your comment, my own kids are the most free-range in-the-dirt kids I know. But it’s location-dependent. I trust cities and their people far less than wild animals.
(with their consent)
They did. Generations also survived without a polio vaccine. This isn't an argument.
> But we've traded this false sense of "safety" for kids that are so risk averse it is seriously negatively affecting their development
I see it the other way round. My kid's a bit too young to go off on his own or with friends, but it's not far off. If anything I'd say a watch like this makes me think he can go off younger than without it. The main problem is it's a Google watch, so I don't know how long it'll work for. And I don't care about games or payments; just a simple phone call/SMS service (locked down to certain contacts) with GPS pings I can see on my phone. And push to talk with friends would be cool, and probably send it viral.
(a) a wrist watch that allows parents to track their children with no obligation to share this information with anyone, and
(b) a wrist watch than allows Google to track and collect data on peoples' children and share some but not all of the data with the childrens' parents.
YouTube is where the real sinister stuff lay. I walked in one day to see my kid watching childish cartoons, but talking about abortion, child death, foster homes and divorce, etc. And not in like an educational way, but in a 'mommy doesn't love daddy anymore so got an abortion and now is going to send me to a foster home.'
Obviously I was mortified and angry, and asked why she searched this weird shit and she said it was recommended so just watched it. And she was right, it was recommended. It's completely full of garbage topics pretending to be child stuff. There's even one huge channel that appears to be Russian softcore porn making dubbed child content.
Sorry for the rant, but do not trust your children to Google or any other big tech company.
I am glad to be about 10 years older and have entirely missed this plague.
I once thought I should try harder to deal without these things. But where does it end? Should I shun electricity? I agree that should work to push the boundaries of what's comfortable/safe, but being disgusted at the idea of a kids wearing a smartwatch seems like an arbitrary point to draw the line, and even a bit hypocritical.
I mean, reliable public transport and a good bus tracker app would be better, but probably not realistic in my city.
If anything I see this as enabling parents to keep their kids on a longer leash so to speak.
This product concerns me not only due to corporate advertising surveillance but also parental spying.
I'd argue that children have less stake in privacy than adults. How Google knowing location of my kids could possibly affect them?
If you opt your kid into surveillance capitalism, you are the worst type of scum.
Remember it was once legal and common to buy children tobacco products.
This sounds great on paper: incentivizing employees to reduce travel costs and rewarding them for it! But in reality, you'd have engineers payed substantial fractions of a million dollars in total comp wasting hours booking travel, hoping to bank savings to use on later upgrades.
Maybe they think the average consumer doesn't care about what Google did with Wear, Chromecast, Daydream etc. But the early adopters are the ones who try these things first and I think they have gotten burned by Google too many times.
I'd love to hear more about this team for cost cutting, it really messed things up*: external, or internal?
* You may imagine I am finding some humor in "my SO is on the google cost cutting team and I don't get why this team exists, why would anyone want a watch for their kid." I am, but I understand where you're coming from, and I'm sure your SO likely would have learned more about the watch market before making similar decisions
Teens won't want this on their wrist in high school.
To me, it looks just like another example of Googs missing the boat and attempting to play catch up in an attempt to stay relevant by imitating what someone else does. Maybe that's a gross oversimplification, but that's the way it comes across to me. This thing clearly chasing Apple's device. Googs+ clearly chasing Facebook. Of course, there's their rash attempt at an AI. Googs just comes across a company without any focus other than AdSense, but desperately want to not remembered as a tech company that became an ad company.
Why did they just buy Splunk?
Fail. Adults struggle to recharge their devices every day and my kids certainly won't remember to. Garmin Kids watches, while drastically different in functionality and connectivity, last 12 months before a battery replacement is needed and are wildly more suitable for young kids.
[0]: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2023/01/garmin-bounce-activity-t...
LOL
"Tap to Pay (NFC)4(Coming soon)"
What? Why would my kid need Tap to Pay? That's just setting the user/Google up for a horror story where the watch wearer goes overboard on spending for some lame game with in-app payments...
Or are they expecting adults to use this as well?
If I lived in Chicago, I'd put my Ventra card on my kid's smart watch.
> Requires compatible payment card and internet access. Payment cards for supervised users may require a separate paid membership (not included with Fitbit Ace Pass). Payment card memberships or parents may restrict purchases of certain products or from certain retailers. Supports Tap to Pay only.
That formulation is poor taste imo
And I've just found from the Wikipedia page that "wild thing" in that book was inspired by the Yiddish expression "vilde chaya" ("wild animals"), used to refer to boisterous children.
No. The smartwatch is for Google, to track your kids.
The subconscious drive to give young children technology is no different in its psychohistorical origins than the Hitler Youth. One could ask for what purpose does somebody want to "monitor" themselves.
Is it for any great works or for the prolongation of bare life through the min-maxing of REM cycles.
Overseas contractors, third party apps that are used by said contractors, other cloud services and their contractors etc etc.
Words have meanings. And I don't think you know what they are. Google absolutely will be selling this location data to "improve the advertising experience".