Now I try to avoid the temptation of control, I have the tools and the skills to easily do it, and it's a daily struggle to say "let them go"
Furthermore, my parents couldn’t track me, but I guarantee if I came home 2 hours later than I said I would I was getting grounded unless I had a REALLY good excuse.
Bad things can and do happen to children, but nearly not as much to warrant tracking them. Even if it were, I'd be reluctant to say that this is okay
Yes its unlikely something bad would happen. It's also unlikely that you would get into a life threatening car accident. But you still wear a seatbelt. Why? Because it's the precautionary principle, pretty much common sense.
Yes in the past we let children wander, but if you asked those parents in the past if there was some very low cost way to afford additional security like knowing where your 10 year old is, they would obviously take it. But for some reason people take the wrong lessons from the past.
Anyway I agree with you in general! But don’t forget that everyone has a different relationship with their kids and each kid is different. Believe it or not, not every teenager goes through a rebellious phase. some kids might actually appreciate a watch like this because mom and dad will pester them less and be less anxious in general.
Of course the main issue is the person purchasing the watch is the parent, and some parents don’t really respect their children’s feelings. It can definitely be a problem so I hear what you’re saying. It can be used in a way that takes away their freedom. That’s not cool.
another consideration: this device can be a bridge from a dumb phone to a smart-ish device, a device that’s not an actual smart phone.
What do you mean exactly? Is it really a "bridge from/to" or rather a "compromise between"?
Is it? I would think that the useful notification would be “Erica didn’t make it to school safely”. A notification that kids are where they are expected to be will needlessly distract parents many millions of times, and may cause anxiety every time it’s a few minutes late. I think it would be a net loss to society.
Luckily, I don’t think that image shows a notification. AFAICT, it’s a response from a user actively asking their phone where that watch is.
That’s an excellent point actually. 100%. I don’t think FindMy can support something like that today which is unfortunate. I think the parent could create an ios shortcut that runs at a certain time every day, but that’s a lot of work lol.
> Luckily, I don’t think that image shows a notification.
It certainly does. It even say “time sensitive”, which is how ios annotates important notifications for a few years now. The FindMy app can also answer the “where is erica?” question (through siri), so i can see why it’s confusing.
Thank you for the comment. I did notice that it was a notification, though.
It is an useful feature, but I don't think this is a good trade-off. Some Erica's might skip school and do some dumb and unsafe things, but I think this bit of privacy and autonomy is actually necessary for a good life
I’m not prescribing how others should run their families or what a good life means. :)
For example my kid is still young. I absolutely plan to use FindMy for peace of mind. Not to spy on them daily, but to quickly check where they are if they’re running 30 min or 60 min behind schedule. Like if they said they’d be home by x time. When they get older (maybe 14?) i’d flip it around and encourage them to disable location sharing with me most of the time, for privacy and autonomy, and ask them to intentionally use the “share location for 1 hour” feature when they want me to know their location. Like when they are in an uber, or walking home late at night from a friends house, etc.
Putting your kids in a panopticon is abusive. It denies them their autonomy, it cripples their social growth, and there simply is no justifying it with "but it's our culture".
Yes horrible families exist. the fact that you can’t imagine a family in between those 2 extremes is sad. we’re at an impasse here so let’s just agree to disagree. The world is not black and white like you seem to think it is.
additionally this is already possible today. a parent can attach an airtag to their kids backpack or insert it into the sole of their sneakers, and call it a day. evil people will find ways to be evil. that’s nothing new.
The second paragraph established that I think subjecting someone to constant surveillance is abuse, and why: it's an attack not just on their current autonomy, which is bad enough, but also their future autonomy, which I hold as categorically evil.
A justification for that belief, that attacking one's autonomy is a an attack on their person, used to be completely unnecessary in the kinds of circles that would happily associate with the label "Hacker". Sadly the libertarian (left and right) ideals that modern tech world were built on have crumbled under the weight of authoritarian influence.
When I click on that square it says:
> See everyone’s location using the Find My app. And receive alerts when they arrive at their destination or get home. Parents can also get alerts when their child leaves a location, like school.
So the image shows a notification, but it claims to be possible to inspect their location at any time too.