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.
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.
Gen-Xers are also guilty of letting corporate surveillance happen, thereby letting their children grow under the watchful eye of big data.
I never said my generation was virtuous. In fact, I blame people my age for not affording the next generation what they themselves got to enjoy. Just like we blamed our boomer parents for enjoying the good life after the war and leaving us the crumbs. Little did we know the ones after us would have it even harder.
this gen x'er isn't keen on the idea, either. before the days of cell phones, the street lights coming on was the cue it was time to go home--and we could go pretty much anywhere in our (small) town. and later as a teen when we lived close to a city, all mom wanted to know was whether i'd be home for supper. there was no worry because every 'horrible' thing to happen to a kid wasn't published or broadcast for the world to see.
Yeah but if you were a parent or if you are one. Would you do it? I could see doing it and just trying not to use it but man with some of the crazy kidnappings nowadays I would like to be able to find out where they are or at least have a last time and location for the police to work off of.
My 21yo soon wants to build out a van and take a chunk of time (6 months?) in between jobs and drive around the States. We’re talking over a year from now, but as the idea has come up in discussion I told him that I’d like to have some form of tracker set up. He’s good with it.
Garmin sell these beacon devices, which can be used to either check in with relatives, or to summon help to their location.
They’re expensive, and intended more for people heading into remote areas, but might give you both some peace of mind, without tracking his every move.
Yeah but if you were a parent or if you are one. Would you do it?
I am and I did not. Kids need to grow up without feeling they are being watched all the time. Or rather more accurately: kids need to grow up without being watched so they can sense when they are and take measures. Kids who grow up without any personal space don’t even realize they’re not free, and that’s a perfect recipe to create adults that accept tyrannical governments without question.
My kids grew up doing stuff they didn’t tell me about, and I didn’t know where they were half of the time. And yes, at times, I worried. But it was important to let them be.
the crazy kidnappings nowadays
I’ve heard people of all ages say that all my life. This is a well-know cognitive bias (i.e. “things were better in the past”) and it’s simply not true. I’m fairly certain our society is much safer today than it was in the past.
Yeah I should really have not used the term nowadays. Thing is that folks in the past could not do anything like this to mitigate it. They did not have the option. If you where in the position to need it you might find your decision to not utilize it to be endlessly horrible.
If you where in the position to need it you might find your decision to not utilize it to be endlessly horrible.
It was a choice. I chose to let them risk life and limb doing whatever stupid shit kids do behind their parents’ backs, risk being run over by a car or kidnapped as they walked to school. The risk was very small, and the benefits of letting them grow up with a normal, non-Orwellian childhood far outweighed them. Hell, my generation and those before me grew up like that and survived just fine.
But I agree: if something really bad had happened, I don’t know how I could have lived with myself. And this always weighed heavily on my mind whenever they were late to come home.
Yeah. The other thing is though that if you have a cell phone you are allowing all sorts of companies and maybe governments track you all over the place, but there is an issue with family? Sure they don't really care so maybe thats a thing but they don't care till they do which is really wierd. It feels sorta adult to recognize the tracking that is happening and not seeing it as a big deal for the right reasons family wise. Take the opposite. Elderly parents being tracked by adult children. It would be interesting if parents started allowing their children to track them at some age.
Nowadays the risk really is compounded, though: not by any of the actual dangers being worse, but instead by adding the new risk of busybodies calling CPS to report you for “neglect” for anything short of extreme helicopter-parenting.
You’re trading your own feelings for your kid’s long-term well-being and learning. Many people would take the easy approach because your way is “scary”. Bravery is doing what needs to be done even if you’re afraid.
I’d call that right and proper. It’s what we adults are supposed to do. The number of times I’ve carried a crying infant to get them settled down while I could barely walk from excruciating back pain… It’s our job to take that on.
It’s funny, many of those parents who are tracking their kids would probably say “I sacrifice every day by working long hours so my kids have a warm, safe home” without realizing that giving them a long leash is also a sacrifice of parent’s (willingly take on worry) so kids grow up well.
My sister had trackers in the trunk of all of her kids cars. She told them it was there, they never had a problem with it. The clear signal wasn’t mom and dad are watching you… it was “don’t get into mischief in your own car” lol
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’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
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 know it’s just some rag bait nonsense, but I know as a fact most teens would never want their parents to constantly know where they are and monitor them constantly.
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.
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
In this thread: people not understanding sampling bias. Of course everyone here likes privacy, and had friends who think similarly. It’s a privacy themed community on a niche tech forum.
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