I never cared that my parents knew where he was because I was never trying to do anything particularly nefarious and my parents weren’t completely buttheads.
But this was pre mobile phone days (my first phone was a Nokia Ngage), so if I went out they wouldn’t be able to contact me in an emergency so it made sense to say oh I’m going to x house here is ther phone number. Now that mobile phones exist maybe that requirement no longer exists.
That is a trust based transaction when parent asks where their child is going as well.
Putting tracking malware and using surveillance all the time is invasion of privacy, teaching the child that surveillance is okay, and completely lacking a trust relationship, which is bad within a family.
I get the impression that many Gen Zers like to know where everyone is all the time. It's totally normal for them to have each other's GPS locations. Snapchat has a built-in map feature where you can watch your friends move around in real time, and there are other apps that offer this, too. I was blown away when I learned this was so commonly used and people just leave it on, so their social group just knows precisely where they are all the time.
They’ll learn the hard way. Hopefully the hard way is something serious to them but ultimately inconsequential like finding out a partner is cheating, and not like… being murdered.
Hey now, don’t assume we all do that. I don’t need the people I talk to knowing that the only places I go are work, my house, and the Chinese food place every other Tuesday. They might think I don’t have anything to do with my life. They would be right, but I don’t want them thinking it!
Yeah. I’m Gen Z. I was really taken aback when my high school friends had apps on their phones that showed their real time locations to each other. I was like “WHY?” and they responded along the lines of “Well why not?”… I have no words…
I never really understood the “I have nothing to hide” mindset. I’ve always been for privacy. I self host everything I use, and when I don’t (e-mail) I PAY someone to do it for me. No Google services in my life, no apple, etc, etc.
However, more and more I’m wondering if what I’m doing is worth it. Really, the people who “have nothing to hide” seem fine, nothing bad has happened, and it seems far more likely my information was leaked from a hack (credit carma I’m looking at you). Credit cards know where I am, what I buy… Its endless. Plus now I have stress about my self hosted services going down.
So these guys who share their location and just live in blissful ignorance, are they on to something? I think life would be ‘easier’ for me on their side…
The reason I close the toilet door is mainly because I know others don’t want to witness me peeing. If they didn’t care, I wouldn’t care tbh. Everyone’s priorities regarding privacy are different, but I think for every person at least something feels private.
That’s such a… foreign mindset to me. I can’t fathom being okay with having the door open and having other people just walking by. Hell, I close it when I’m the only one home.
I don’t know, it’s not like it’s a secret what I’m doing in there. Going to the toilet looks very similar for most people I assume, so it’s not like someone with decent imagination couldn’t know what it looks like anyway. I don’t see the huge difference in whether the door is open or not other than politeness.
I think you need to find a happy medium. I’ve accepted that I can’t control ALL the data I generate, so I instead aggressively block ads and any other marketing attempts towards me.
Yeah, it all boils down to your threat model. Not everyone has the time, resources, or know-how to self-host everything, so it’s about balancing convenience with privacy, which unfortunately is almost one or the other now.
This is kind of my point. I don’t feel there’s a happy middle right now and unless you go tinfoil hat information is going to get out.
My threat model is basically “do my best to be as private as possible”. But there is limits. I can spend $100 cash on gas or I can spend $100 on my credit card and get 2% back. Obviously I’m going to use my credit card. I still email people who use Gmail, People who have the facebook, instagram, X, etc on their phone has me as a contact, likely with my full name, email address, physical mailing address.
So why do I bother keeping my contacts in a selfhosted NextCloud? Why do I avoid the Google Maps app, or anything google when the wife uses all this stuff and I’m with her 90% of the time? I’m starting to think they have my information already anyway so why not welcome google into my life? I have to keep talking myself into the fact that self hosting is worth the extra work I’m causing myself.
Unfortunately it depends on the individual, so no one can really answer your question but yourself. For me, I draw the line when it personally becomes burdensome to maintain something. For example, I use Bitwarden to manage all my passwords, but I don’t trust myself enough to host and maintain a server and keep it online/secure, so I use their hosted service. I use google drive to store some miscellaneous stuff because of the free 15GB storage, but I don’t store any private files (personal photos, documents, etc.). I use ProtonDrive for more important stuff, and for very confidential files, I encrypt them first. I use google maps for navigation because of reliability and accuracy, but I use a separate google account for it. I know that doesn’t do much, but it keeps some level of separation for me personally. I still maintain a facebook account (although I barely use it) because of family, but I still use a facebook container on firefox and don’t use the mobile app. That plus all the privacy extensions.
The main thing is that it doesn’t have to be black or white. You don’t have to go full hermit, and at the same time you don’t need to fully embed yourself into the google ecosystem. Just do what you can and what you are comfortable with. As they say, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Yeah I think the bigger problem here is that it’s this hard to have reasonable privacy and governments like it that way. They don’t need a warrant to buy info, just to force release. I don’t like google knowing everything about me. I hate the cops being a check away from it.
For me it boils down to principles. You’re totally right and many companies I hate will have alot of my info due to others, but I’ll be damned if I cooperate with them.
Yeah maybe it’s growing up in the closet, but yeah. My wife knows where I am in general all the time, but only because I give her heads up. Nobody else knows more than they need.
It’s not even that I have anything to hide. Aside from not letting my in laws know we’re poly or other such things I’m not really hiding anything. I just don’t see why anyone should know. If someone insists on knowing for no reason then that’s weird and not cool.
When you says “resonate”, do you mean you don’t understand the sentence? Or do you mean you don’t see why you should care?
Re meaning, the sentence seems blindingly obvious to me. But maybe it isn’t… It means you don’t want privacy because you have something illegal to hide in your house, but because you don’t want to invite anybody in. I really don’t know how to explain it anymore clearly without repeating it verbatim.
If you don’t see why this is important or you think it doesn’t concern you, send me your address and I’ll come around tonite to take pictures of your furniture without your permission.
I’m a bit off-put by your tone, but no, I was being genuine. Saying it doesn’t resonate means whatever was said doesn’t seem as profound or meaningful as it does to the person who said it. So the phrase really means that you want to shut everyone out? I guess that makes sense, given the hostility in your response.
You read me wrong my friend. It was nothing more than an honest-to-goodness reply to you. No hostility. Be careful with written discussions, because you don’t see the face of whoever is writing and you tend to slap the state of mind you yourself are in when you read it. Imagine I’m writing this with a smile and that’s pretty much how I wrote it.
You don’t find the quote profound and that’s fair enough. To each his own opinion. Me, I think it’s a perfect description of the core issue of privacy: having the choice not to expose what I don’t want to expose for no other reason that I don’t want to. I don’t want to shut everybody out, I want to freedom to do it if I so choose and not have to justify myself or suffer consequences.
Gen Z here. I have Apple’s Find My location setup with my closest friends only (and my mom). I don’t have a reason to hide my locations to my friends, it helps with casually meeting up actually. “Oh XY is nearby, let’s meet and hang for a bit” And my mom has my location for emergencies and vice versa.
I disabled the snap map though as I have people on there that don’t need to know my location.
I am Gen Z and I’m not fine with that. I chose to go to college far from where I grew up so that I would be independent and free and do stuff on my own accord, like buying a motorcycle.
I have an organ donor on my license. But I’m not trying to kill myself, I’m just following my heart.
It seems like fewer people in my generation have motorcycles because 1) we have less money (although you can save by replacing a car with one) than previous generations, and 2) the older generations constantly push the narrative that having a motorcycle is equivalent to having a death wish, which circles back to the point that they shouldn’t be spying on us all the time.
You’re taking a line and putting it on the road against planes.
Follow your heart all you want, my math teacher in high-school had a motorcycle. Broke his collar bone, fractured his skull, broke his leg and had road rash. Much like smoking cigarettes, you’re allowed to take your life into your own hands. Don’t convince yourself that you’re somehow doing otherwise.
You sound so paranoid about safety I get the feeling you literally live in a suit of bubble-wrap. If they wanted your finger wagging they’d have asked you for it
And you are talking like people who ride motorcycles have a 100% death toll. Which is demonstrably false.
I don’t ride them, I’m 29 morbidly obese and have a shit sense of balance. I just can’t stand people who try to spread fear based on personal trauma they experienced instead of being factual about the real dangers of the world.
What makes you think learning from someone else’s stupid decisions qualifies as trauma? Oh, this must not be a lesson you learned growing up.
When you see someone do something stupid you go “no, I’m ok”, and your life is better for it.
You wanna die young, or cripple yourself? Go for it, be my guest. Don’t delude yourself into thinking it isn’t on the table because “not everyone who rides motorcycles dies”.
What makes you think learning from someone else’s stupid decisions qualifies as trauma?
I don’t. I think someone you care about dying in a motorcycle accident counts as personal trauma.
When you see someone do something stupid you go “no, I’m ok”, and your life is better for it.
See, this is what I mean. Motorcycle riding isn’t an inherently stupid thing, or at least no more stupid than driving a car or riding a bike. There is inherent danger in all forms of transportation. I don’t see you railing against the people driving two ton land torpedoes that we call “cars’ and killing people on motorcycles or those who walk.
Don’t delude yourself into thinking it isn’t on the table because “not everyone who rides motorcycles dies”.
The only one who suggested it.” isn’t on the table" is the strawman in your head
This is why I said you’ve got some personal trauma. You are insisting you don’t actually care about the safety of someone who you spent time out of your day to yell at for wanting to drive a motorcycle, then call anybody who says you are being excessive childish for not agreeing that motorcycles have a 100% injury and mortality rate and that the person who you supposedly don’t care about is doomed to end up like the teacher who supposedly isn’t a source of personal trauma for you
Edit to add: I’ll forgive your ad-homenins because it’s clear you need some therapy to overcome the death of that teacher you knew.
There’s significantly less chance of getting fucked for life if yiu actually wear proper safety gear. Doesn’t stop the danger of others, though. But it can lower damage.
I just text my parents if I feel like they need to know where I’m at, worked for me from middle school all the way to me living independently today.
Like a phone’s location services can be turned on remotely if an emergency calls for it, but as long as I’m good with my family then the vast majority of the likelihood I’ll ever need to know where my kid is while they can’t communicate with me is null since like 80% of kidnappings are over custody battles or other related family disputes.
To clarify, the location service is turned on remotely during an emergency call or after texting an emergency number to let first responders know where an emergency is, but it is turned off afterwards by the phone if it was disabled beforehand. And it’s only turned on during the call that the user initiates, emergency services cannot remotely turn it on, because it is the phone that actually manages the permissions and computes the location and not the dispatcher. Neither Android nor iOS allows emergency services to remotely turn on location services without you calling them first, since that would be a violation of your privacy and would absolutely be abused by law enforcement.
So everyone should be advised that you cannot check the location of a loved one unless you arrange it before you end up needing it.
Well yeah I meant being able to turn it on via family controls.
Just because I wouldn’t be using it personally save for an emergency doesn’t mean I wouldn’t rather my kid have it in the event of an emergency.
Of course they aren’t getting a phone period until they’re old enough that I feel comfortable they’re olden and wisen enough to let out of my sight for stuff other than school clubs and playdates.
Article reads as propaganda. No way that zoomers are into this. This just sounds like justification for abusive parents to spy on their children. As a GenZ, I don’t recall having a single friend with this kind of arrangement with their parents, but then again I mostly hung around the more questionable crowd where you actually needed privacy. Would really hope we stop bickering among generations and actually fight for privacy together
While more on the parent side of the age gap of things now, I know at least five offspring personally who do this willingly. It is a nightmare to me, moreso the fact that it’s basically impossible or was the last time I looked to find ways to do it that are foss.
But the point is, probably more people do it than you expect. This place is a selection bias, most people genuinely give no rats ass about their privacy, and, to the shock of many, trust their parents and like the safety net.
There are certainly secure privacy focused approaches they retain the agency of both parties which could exist. It’s a very real niche.
For real, how are Millennials falling for the same headlines that were used to spread stupid assumptions about their own generation a decade ago, but this time about Gen Z?
Contrast to you, I hang out with a pretty straight laced crowd, and we also don’t “track each other on Snapchat” like the article or the top comment here is saying because that’s fucking weird.
What’s gonna be the Gen Z avocado toast headline, I wonder…
Media literacy classes should be compulsory and deal with all this crap. Its pretty irresponsible as a society that we leave so much to people to figure it all out or be so vulnerable to exploitation and scams. So damn preventable and beneficial when people can help self-curate out the bullshit but echo chambers are also always gonna echo chamber, so there’s that too
So I live with a member of Gen Z, and it must vary from group to group, but the kids I come into contact with are always able to see exactly where their friends are, including randoms they briefly interacted with on Snapchat once.
I agree that It’s fucking weird. Location sharing on an adhoc basis to coordinate meetups makes sense, but they seem to have this open and broadcasting literally all of the time.
I also get a lot of chuffing and “You’re being ridiculous” when I try to point out how fucking insane, unsafe and dystopian that is.
I dunno, I still have location sharing on 24/7 with my millennial buddies from 10-15 years ago when we were partying hard and it was annoying to keep texting or calling to find out which bar or club you were at or moved on to. Especially when you black out and stop responding.
Just because a headline was published doesn’t mean people agree with it. You can literally publish whatever the fuck you want as long as you don’t cross a threshold that your core reader base stops trusting the publication. Fluff pieces like this are primetime space for just going off on bullshit with minimal repurcussions.
Beyond that clickbait/ragebait are absolutely a thing, and so is manufactured consent style propaganda.
Life360 just needs to have this article published in enough places that it seems like a ton of people are saying it. Gets the ball rolling for the appearance of people sharing this opinion when the reality is that they just got a dozen news sites to reword their press packet.
Sorry, I should have specified “in this comment section”. You’re absolutely right about everything you said regarding the online news circlejerk when it comes to “perceptions”.
There’s just a lot of anti-gen Z comments in this thread that make it seem like we don’t care about privacy issues or tech literacy, when a lot of us do, or we’re JUST learning about the importance of this stuff because the first of our generation are finally gaining independence and footing in society.
I’m a gen zer and I would absolutely freak out. I’d rather not going out rather than being spied 24/7 by my parents. Seriously, this is the best way to kill trust between children and their parents. Now even the social relationship between parents and children has to be extremely toxic and anxiogenic as a basic minimum requirement
That cant be real—holy shit. Thats worse than picking on kids that dont have an iPhone™️ or any phone or don’t have “the blue bubbles” from using iMessage (which nobody should ever use honestly)
Fight the system, if someone laughs at you for having a green bubble, just counter by saying you are special and they are just normies like everyone else with blue bubble.
I go even further and say “if you want the real and sick blue bubbles, get Signal”.
Otherwise, enjoy getting spied on and having all your data handed over from Apple and also iMessage is dogshit. Half the time it doesnt even get delivered/received and you have to literally call or message the person through some real stable means of communication to troubleshoot
Imma not even get started on iMessage --> skeleton key/zero-day purpose (this is conjecture but I vehemently reject any argument to the contrary)
Yeah, those people are delusional, but that’s what you get when you raise kids in a world where having expensive shit is more important than teaching them frugality, money saving, and being nice to each other.
Blue bubbles go brrrr, doesn’t matter the kid doesn’t have attention span due to watching TikTok all day, or eating junk food cuz parents order fast food and have frozen pizza every day for dinner.
Burying bodies in my garden eating shitty food in order to sate my hunger for human flesh which usually makes me go on a killing spree to calm my cravings for blood less productive.
See the thing is I’m fine with it because I know my parents wouldn’t have spied on me 24/7. If they were helicopter parents and DID check where I was every hour of the day I wouldn’t be fine with it.
My parents have always been VERY restrictive about anything but computers (just because they don’t understand them). However, I asked them if they would do it and they told me that’s damn outrageous
Used to share my location with my dad until he kept sending me a McDonald’s order everytime I was at McDonald’s. Then turned it off, lol. My mum still has it.
Im fine with my parents knowing where i am the only problem is that i would also share my location with big daddy google and im not fine with that. And my parents are divorced so i wouldnt share it with my dad… Also it would drain my battery
There are more secure location sharing apps out there that are end to end encrypted. My family uses Zood location www.zood.xyz when we are out and about and needing to coordinate our locations. It is handy to use sometimes but it doesn’t do all the spy stuff the other apps do.
I self-host Hauk, although I could not polish all the bugs myself, it works pretty well.
We have location sharing on 24/7, it was consensual on both sides, and it is great when coordinating.
I am 27, tho, back in my teenager days there was no location tracking easily available, but I’d use it in a heartbeat. Better than getting asked if I am already on the way home or still at the party.
I mean, just carrying a cellphone with mobile reception is almost like a 24/7 GPS tracker although obv no parent is generally going to be able to (not should they be able to) like warrant or subpoena that shit from the network carriers/towers
I’m 18 and fine with my parents knowing where I am so we can coordinate mealtimes and stuff. I really don’t care for having a third party spy on me 24/7 though. We just Signal each other “I’m at xyz location, be back soon” and that’s plenty enough.
That sounds far more (and acceptably so in my view) stochastic tho, like, do they have on-demand “lets see where lol is right now even though I have zero need to know currently” or is it just like u verbally check-in when they Signal u?
We just verbally check in and I’m totally fine with saying where I am. I believe the important thing here is trust. If, hypothetically, we were able to set up something privacy-respecting that communicated my GPS location to my parents 24/7, I wouldn’t be a fan of it. It’d feel like my parents are monitoring me because they don’t trust me to be truthful about my whereabouts.
If you actually need to, u can “share” as like a thing to attach your actual GPS location in Signal, no different from sharing a pic or file or dictation
My family tried to make me install the Spy360 crap last year.
My GPS spoofer made them regret that 🙂. A few check ins all around the world later (and other chaos) and they basically asked me to uninstall it. Lmao.
It pays to be more tech literate than your parents.
Back on topic, I don’t know very many people who have this thing who actually like it, so idk where the hell this article gets it’s sources…
Please tell me you’re educating your family in privacy issues. This tracking circumstance is an excellent opportunity to approach it with a education mindset instead of the stereotypical kids/parents conflict.
Check out www.theprivacydad.com it’s a great starting point for parents who don’t know tech enough to realize what’s going on.
They don’t care. We have ring doorbells and everything, no matter how many times I point to examples of these things being used for evil, they just brush it off.
They’re the “I have nothing to hide” and “I don’t care” type. And there’s no convincing them.
I’ll check out this link, though
EDIT: To clarify, I had resisted it and argued against it for a few months before it was actually installed. Using a Pinephone during that time stopped the stupidly invasive thing from working and I wasn’t using my S10e as my main phone for that reason 🤣
I mean their parents have probably been tracking them since they were kids so they just grew up thinking it’s normal, I also recently learned kids in school feel awkward if they aren’t walking to class while on their phone because then they feel like people will think they aren’t cool enough to have people to talk to at all times
This makes me sad. My brother and his wife always tracked my niece and nephew, and I feel like it did more harm than good. I remember agreeing to drive my nephew to buy fireworks, and on the way home I swung by Target to pick up my best friend a gift for his wedding, and my sister in law called my nephew and threatened to take his phone away because he wasn’t where he said he was going. Granted, I could have called, but it was a quick stop, and I didn’t know at the time they were watching him 24/7.
It is important to differentiate between able to know and contact tracking to enable controlling behavior. Knowing to help with communication and transportation arrangements is great, but nitpicking an extra stop on the way home to Target? Sheesh.
This is really what it comes down to, I think. When my newborn daughter gets old enough to have a phone and go out on your own, you bet I’m going to make sure I am able to know where she is at all times.
But I’m going to trust her to do the right thing and make good decisions, so I won’t be demanding she go only where I designate. Kids need to be able to do their own thing and learn through experience. The better lesson is to have them check in with a text every now and then, because it’s the respectful thing to do with family.
"Wait, you mean you're going to take away my phone so you'll have no idea where I am, ever, you stupid fucking dink? Yeah, that's fucking brilliant. Shut up and make me a pie."
I recently saw a video clip by Josh Strife Hayes. He was talking about MMORPG culture, but it can be extended beyond that. It's about the inability of people to be bored and impatience. Old people can manage with being bored. They can spend an hour not doing much of anything. But the further you go in time, the less patience people have. And that's not because they are better or worse humans inherently, it's because they grew up in an society where things increasingly got busy. So it also isn't a binary old people/young people, but a progressing state of people getting blasted more and more with stuff.
This is to the point where there are YouTube videos where people cut away little bits of space between sentences just so there isn't even a second of calm. Social media plattforms just bury you under content and new content suggestions. A lot of games don't even want to risk downtime and just throw all kinds of random content at you for you to work through., quick travel so you won't have a few minutes of calm walking somewhere. Just content back to back with more content.
And this ultimately leads to way more stuff for you than you can consume and an inreasing fear of missing out on something if you're not constantly on the ball.
This is to the point where there are YouTube videos where people cut away little bits of space between sentences just so there isn’t even a second of calm
Omg, i really, really don’t like that. It took a little while before i began noticing it but now i can’t ignore it anytime it’s happening. I simply won’t watch those videos because i won’t be able to focus for very long. It can be especially jarring how they’ll cut from one sentence into the next one and the editing makes it seem like their head glitched into another spot. I won’t follow any YouTubers that do this stuff, I’ll find something else to watch ¯_(ツ)_/¯
yeah I feel hobbies are really important and boredom is important for your hobbies, thats one reason I had uninstalled reddit in the past because I felt it was just too easy to open up reddit and not touch my hobbies in my free time. Also my younger cousin was once telling me about some kid and how he was an ipad kid, and I asked what that meant and he explained it about how it was a kid who the parents gave them an ipad when they were little to keep them calm. it was kind of funny the first time he told me but now that I notice it it feels pretty sad when I see it
Not gonna lie, I do this for podcasts more to save data and I def am not allergic to silence, per se but I definitely dislike having pure quiet around me.
So fly-on-the-wall refers to someone in the room who silently observes what is happening and said between whoever else is in the room—usually covertly so they are hidden and unnoticed.
So when I expressed the humorous wish to be there to watch your convo with the parents, I’m ironically ignoring the fact this entire thread is about spying and intrusive/unwanted surveillance.
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