Speaking as GenZ (or Millennial, depends who you ask for the definition): fuuuuck that.
Speaking to the article specifically: I don’t trust a surveillance vendor to work honestly when surveying the acceptance of their surveillance tool. The article also fails to mention (if it does, it’s so brief I missed it) that the pressure some parents put on their kids to install and allow these kinds of spyware is immense. The kid having it on does not equate to the kid choosing to have it on.
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.
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
Life360 is the subject and the surveyor for this article so take it with a grain of salt. They want this to be normal. However, it does not change the fact that clearly Gen Z is more open to this than previous generations at least to some degree.
As a parent, I do plan on using the services, but definitely not daily and I want my kids to have a say in the matter. What’s important is they feel safe.
It seems really pathetic to me when parents can't offer their teens privacy. I have a child and I want him to trust me. Invading privacy feels like it would have the opposite effect and create a very one-sided relationship. You can ask my mom how much she knows about me now and its considerably less than my boxing mates.
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 actually think these apps are perfectly fine, I just think that you should have to request the location from the phone and then that request also alerts the kid.
I’ll paint a different picture for parents in this thread. Gen Z does not have adequate social spaces in which to exist. So when you say “hey I’m going to track you” it’s like oh cool, track me going where exactly? To basketball practice and back? Or to the mall so you can know which store I’m in?
Parents are gaining more and more control over their kids and I don’t think it’s good. They aren’t independent people. As a kid I hated having zero autonomy, it sucked. So all this is achieving is making kids feel like it’s less hassle to just stay at home and play video games.
Primarily it means these companies know where your kids are, and they are building a dB of locations and other info of the kid (likely including online activity via other ops on the phone, etc), starting tracking early.
Second, it’s a poor way to manage trust between parents and kids. I refuse to use it, and refuse to help anyone I know use it, and explain to them why.
If you don’t trust your kids, then work on resolving that issue. And before anyone says “I trust my kids but not other people”, well, you gonna go everywhere with them to protect them from other people, or teach them how to navigate life, and learn to develop their own independent judgement?
There are self-hostable tracking systems. One is in my queue to setup for family/friends. It’ll be configured so anyone in a circle can use it, but these people trust each other. We intend it for arrival/departure notifications more than anything.
I honestly feel like so much of the anxiety comes down to lack of stable and sufficient income + meaninful employment and also (maybe more so) bad living situations. Housing is wielded as an incredibly potent weapon against young people often by narcissistic and dysfunctional family(s) and its scary as fuck to face the spectre of homelessness or the prospect of having to adjust to the torrent of change it would entail. They shouldn’t have to worry about idiot monster parents and constantly having to deal with their housing being on the table/chopping block any time they disagree or set a boundary.
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.
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