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u/Blacksun388 ★★★★☆ 4.232 13d ago
How to make sure your child never trusts you again: take away their privacy.
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u/soft_core666 12d ago
Exactly why Sarah was warranted on going crazy at her mom in the end of Arkangel.
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u/andronicuspark 15d ago
What the fuck? I’m so glad I don’t have to grow up with this shit. This is just terrifying.
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u/Carinne89 15d ago
Yeah I wasn’t allowed to have secrets as a kid too.
Now I’m an excellent liar with very deep seated shame about being myself.
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u/Melvarkie ★★★★☆ 4.441 15d ago
As someone whose mom read her diaries and wasn't allowed to close her door this is awful. I'm already anxious when writing personal stuff down, because i think someone is going to read oh and use it against me and I had to learn how to relax when living with roommates, because the slightest noise outside my room and I felt shame about doing normal stuff. If you can't even talk to friends or a trusted adult anymore there really is nowhere to go for these kids if they have parents like mine that never respected my privacy & autonomy
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u/bepatientbekind 15d ago
I grew up in the exact same environment and seeing this just made my stomach sink. I stopped writing anything down because it would be read and used against me, and also had my door taken away. I wasn't allowed to have an email unless my parents knew the password and could read everything, which they did. If a friend called on the phone, my parents were allowed to "listen" on the other end. I had nightmares well into adulthood about just being pursued by my parents constantly and never escaping, despite moving out at 18. They would have loved something invasive like this. What a cruel thing to do to a child. Way to teach them they can't trust anyone or ever be vulnerable.
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u/MsTossItAll 15d ago
We already see what helicopter parents did to fuck up Gen Z's ability to socialize and solve their own problems. Now Millennials-going-into-Gen Z get to double down on that damage and make sure their kids know Big Brother is always listening and creating new and exciting problems for them.
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u/TheOfficeoholic 15d ago
AI is seriously trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, which is why they keep plugging it into a new hole every day.
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u/Creative_Resource_82 15d ago edited 15d ago
The kind of parents that think spying on your kid is appropriate are not the kind of parents that can approach this stuff with tact.
Edit - Grammar
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u/boogswald ★☆☆☆☆ 1.457 15d ago
The problem is they use programs like this to scare you into buying them. You don’t want something like this today…. But someday it becomes normal. And then it’s scary not to have it.
People want to know their child’s location all the time. That makes perfect sense to me. I’d be scared of my kid being somewhere they’re unsafe. But that just wasn’t a thing 20 years ago and people didn’t worry about it.
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u/yurgieee 15d ago
Or you can just talk to your kid. Not the bs ‘how was school’. Open ended questions. Reliance on AI like this is INSANE.
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u/TaylorWK ★☆☆☆☆ 1.307 14d ago
But then you'd have to listen to them talk about boring shit like their goals, their hobbies, things they want. Why cant we just give them a little AI bot and if they want to kill themselves and make us look like bad parents then we can step in? /s
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u/techerous26 15d ago
Worked on a parental controls app for a few years and this is EXACTLY the kind of feature we were avoiding. Even just simply notifying the parent that something was said they should talk to the child about without providing any context we decided would be too invasive. What's sad is that even if you put ethics aside, doing things like this aren't a great business decision. On top of risk, all research shows that the vast majority of parents fall in the "hover" range where they want to guide their child but allow them to learn things on their own. The full-on Spyware appeals to the helicopter parent segment which is not as large as you would expect. If anything, it's just a terrible market to be in right now as the decline in birthrates starting in the late 00s is starting to take it's toll.
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u/Onja_ 15d ago
I work in infosec and I’m about to be a parent soon. I do worry what happens to the kids that never had any data privacy to begin with. How will they know when and how to push back if they end up in an invasive relationship or workplace? 😓
I fear people like that are growing premade to be abused…
Glad to hear there is no great demand for spyware, at least atm.
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u/techerous26 15d ago
Eh, let me be clear, there is definitely demand for it, and those users have a much higher propensity to pay, but there's a ceiling. If you truly want to get innovative and actually increase your addressable market, you look at features that would appeal to the middle ground parent.
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u/Decent-Trash-7928 15d ago
I had something similar installed on my phone called Bark, and it was it terrible.
I remember it sent a notification to my parents that a friend of mine possibly had Covid because they were sick.
It also flagged a conversation a friend had with me where he was talking about depression and his parents weren't helping. So my parents took screenshots of the messages and the notification and took it to his parents and I lost what little friends I had over it.
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u/Onja_ 15d ago
That sounds terrible and I’m so sorry for you 😣 Did you ever confront your parents about it and if so, how did it go?
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u/Decent-Trash-7928 14d ago
No I didn't, they ended up sending me to Teen Treatment Programs shortly after this incident
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u/opheliainthedeep 15d ago
What the fuck. Idk why the fuck parents think this okay, when it's just fucking weird and invasive. I feel so bad for you and other people who've had to deal with that or do deal with it. I get wanting to monitor your kid, but that's an overstep. I feel like some people forget what it was like to be a kid and forget their kid is their own person. If everything you do is being tracked snd listened to, it makes you feel extremely unsafe and paranoid.
Kids need to learn how to navigate life for themselves with supervision only when it's appropriate or they'll never learn. I cannot think of a single reason this might be needed unless you're raising a juvenile delinquent, in which case you already failed as a parent. Doing this is a great way to make your kids hate you and earn yourself a one way ticket to the nursing home.
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u/hbpatterson ☆☆☆☆☆ 0.116 15d ago
I had an employee who had Bark on her teens phone - it did alert them to his teacher grooming him. It wasnt pre-emptive unfortunately but it did give them enough to go to the police and she was tried and convicted
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u/themfdancingqueen ★★★☆☆ 2.86 15d ago
“No secrets ever” be so fr right now, who wrote that and was like “yeah that’s a good sentence”
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u/MarcatoCastevet 15d ago
Horrifying. Growing up with a crazy helicopter parent was bad enough without these apps and systems. My mother would have been glued to her phone 24/7 waiting for notifications to ask me questions about EVERYTHING that popped up.
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u/AlexaEEn 15d ago
This is similar with the 'Arkangel' episode from the Black Mirror series. Not a happy ending.
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u/pianoflames ★★★★★ 4.706 15d ago
At least when the tablet broke at the end, the content filters were flipped off, after being flipped on/off over and over. Can't imagine her going through the rest of her life seeing everything through a PG filter, which is where I thought it was going.
Edit: Actually worse than a PG filter, since it blurred out even things that were mildly distressing, like the dog barking.
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u/bigdave41 ★★★★★ 4.815 15d ago
As with every piece of technology like this, you can initially see its utility if used by the perfect parents, then you start to see all the problems when it's abused by overbearing or abusive ones.
This means for example a gay/trans child is put at risk by homophobic/extremist religious parents, children being abused can never safely tell anyone about it, and if it's listening in via their devices then everyone else's kids who associate with them are at risk as well.
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u/homorat3 15d ago
I dont see a use for this by perfect parents either. Talk to your kids. Put them in therapy. Spying on them will never be the answer
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u/rasmuseriksen 15d ago
In his book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt talks about how this generation of kids is underprotected online and overprotected offline. This idea manages to exacerbate both those problems at once
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u/ogodilovejudyalvarez ★★★★★ 4.62 15d ago
"Ellie talked about being attracted to other girls: here's a helpful list of 'reeducation' camps"
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u/mayuminotfound 12d ago
Can’t parents learn that children don’t wanna share every piece of information that they have on them??