Spying on your kids

Your son is privileged to have such a committed Father. Good on you!

 

I don't have an issue with kids spending a lot of time online per se. It's them spending a lot of time unsupervised in an unmoderated medium... but then this is just parenting in general and doesn't apply only to the internet. It's just the internet is a rather poor place to leave your kids unattended.

There's also the whole yadda yadda short attention span thing that is cultivated by blinking videos and the instant gratification that the internet provides, and all the false reinforcements and dopamine/endorphin triggers.

 

It was earlier than that for us, early 70s. I'm not sure where it originated. Before that one was "box". I haven't thought about that term in ages.

That Bark app seems like a horrible idea. Nobody likes to be spied upon. Teens seem to particularly value privacy. I just see Bark backfiring.

 

WTF!

... is the only one I knew. and most I wouldn't have been able to even work out. WTF is, I think, quite old. Maybe even dates back to the all original social networking, USENET?

But hey, I'm sixty-something, and, more importantly, there are currently no teens around me. Oh, wait, my wife and I had a day out with a friend of hers and 13-yr-old daughter only last week, but she is really shy to try talking English, and I'm a linguistic dumbo monoglot.I think I lost touch with western youth culture around the time of OMG, Ponies!

And stuff here can be way different anyway. I encountered a guy who doesn't want his young children seeing films with people cuddling. Which I think is just weird. Internet: kids don't have to spend years wondering wondering what opposite-sex bits even look like! And that, according to me, is good. But it is also a shallow view, because once they start looking, they are going to go on looking, and how and where to draw the line. Maybe I'm actually glad not to be a parent in the internet age! But serious talk is certainly necessary. If I had a young daughter, I would want her to think that any nude pic will end up on the internet, and how would she feel about that in years to come, so just don't. And that's just one risk of our times.

Actually, in this [Indian] culture, what I hate is the fully-clothed pseudo-porn everybody is allowed by the censors to watch in the movies. I think it is disgusting, whereas real nudity and sex isn't.

I used to administer, among other machines, a firewall. The logs were incredibly boring, and usually I would only look on request from a manager with concerns as to whether their staff were actually working or not. But one thing I noticed was the hypocrisy: the difference between what people said, and what they actually accessed on their PCs outside hours. In those days, we didn't much lock stuff down.

 

Ah man, if only I was born in the right age and could blame all my trust issues on an app, instead of a forced lack of privacy by my parents.

Knew most of them, felt a bit better about inevitably growing old.

 

Cartoon (Six Chix): "Mum, you have way too much access to my life already, without being my facebook friend as well."

(Paraphrased from memory)

(And WTF, it occurs to me, is probably well pre-internet. WW2? Like SNAFU, etc?)

(Young people, these days. Think they invented abbreviations and acronyms. And hey, most don't know the difference: WTF is an abbreviation, SNAFU is an acronym. WTF is not an acronym, at least not until people start saying wuttuff. /rant)

 

I don't think most kids would react well to finding out their parents were doing this. The students I met at university who were super helicoptered were either difficult to relate to or tended to act out against their restricted lives in unpredictable ways (not making smart choices, let's say).

I've always thought it best to just be frank with kids. They're not dumb. They're going to figure it out anyway. I've given my much younger relatives talks about online peer pressure, Snapchat, and the dangers of what those combinations can lead to. I try to pitch it this way: anything you do online should be considered public domain, including any non-encrypted communications like most emails, so don't do or post anything you wouldn't want everyone to attribute to you and your real name.

Content online is cached forever nowadays, and you never know where you may want to take your life later (say, public service). It behooves us to knowingly select the information and media we publish about ourselves. And when we send it to someone else, we should ask, "would I be comfortable if they shared it with someone else?" Because as soon as it is in their hands, it's out of your control. I know people who go so far as to only share sensitive information or photos late at night so the recipient is guaranteed to be alone when they open it (presumably when waking up). These topics are worth thinking about. And if you're doing anything salacious, use an encrypted app like Signal. The kids I know have been receptive to these discussions and some brief concept explanations of how digital tech works (like the security risks of using cloud networks).

 

If I had to talk to a young person, I would say that isn't good enough. Even if the recipient is, and remains, 100% trustworthy, phones get lost, stolen, picked up and looked at. Even encryption... pics are going to be stored unencrypted aren't they?

So when it comes to sexting and the like, no I'm not prudish. But first, she (or he, I suppose) should do a quick google, and decide if she wants her image to turn up in somebody else's quick google.

When it comes to other stuff, traps like potential child abuse, I haven't a clue. Unless it happened to you (and it didn't to me) I don't think my generation knows anything about it. But I suppose parents today need to know, need to advise.

And the other side of that coin, at least in UK these days, is... say hello to a child and you're a paedophile; look weird and you're a terrorist. It really is time to stop the world I want to get off.

 

Having spent half my working life around teenagers, I can confidently say that they will find a way around Bark and other apps like it. We all value privacy, and apps like this will result in teens not telling you anything. Even when it's something dangerous. And helicopter parents. They need to stop. I am worried that with cheap drones available they will "follow" their kids to school, park the drone on the roof, wait for passing period and then follow them to 2nd period.
I am concerned that too many people are becoming addicted to their phones. I see it every day. Sometimes they can't go more than 3 minutes or less between looks. Several studies have shown the average attention span has shortened from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds today. One second less than a goldfish, and, oh look a spider!

Best thing in my opinion is to talk to your kids openly, and do stuff with them, and then, oh look, the cat is chasing.....

 

Wow tough conversation, I'm 24 and my step father used to Key Log my brother and I, he also used to monitor are traffic via ... Tomato I think? Some kind of custom firmware for his router that made it easier to see what sites we were accessing, this was after we got our own laptops and key logging those didn't work any more

Really though, the stricter you are and the more you try to force your kids to... function in the box you assign them. The more they will work to avoid your controls. That's what we did, as others have said conversation is best. My mum was never... really strict. We talked about everything, and I kept out of a lot of trouble just by talking openly with her about what was going on in my life. She gave me the freedom to make some stupid mistakes, and learn from them.

As far as kids not being able to focus, that does fall squarely on the parents I think. Even when I was young, I had a SNES and a GBA, I played them 24/7! ALL THE TIME, my parents worked hard to... force me into alternatives. It did back fire, I would hide in my room and skip school to play an mmo, but eventually I did branch out into other interests. I started the whole headphone thing in my 10th grade year, after my step father banned me from using speakers, and rebuilt and OLD Panasonic headphone with me. He also helped get me into music, bought me an amp for my Bass Guitar and would often jam with me.

So, being open and honest works with kids... or at least it did with me. An personally, I wouldn't want my child having anything other than a Flip Phone with basic talk an Text. Yes their friends have smart phones, and yes they get tablets in school. But I'd like to think just as my wife and I take the time to play board games and do other fun analog things, your children will appreciate and benefit from less online time at home sharing in activities with their parents. We make it a habit to get out an walk daily, we cook together and thankfully have a lot of local festivals we can enjoy together. But it takes works, sitting and watching 8 hours of NetFlix is easy, but going for a hike in the national park, or driving up to one of the bigger cities to see their state/national parks is more fun and rewarding. Takes more effort, but it's always worth it

 

I'm certainly not an expert on having kids, or raising one, but I do remember my parents tried to stop me from doing stuff like reading random crap on the internet at first. Then they encouraged it (albeit in more productive ways). Turns out reading was one of the things I was stupidly good at, and it got me out of having to take English classes more or less until highschool because I was "so advanced" for my age.

Admittedly, I could have probably played less Runescape when I was younger.

By the time I was in highschool though, everybody was getting iPod touches, smartphones, etc. I joined in on that bandwagon, started using my phone for all my internet related stuff, and my parents just simply could not keep up with monitoring and trying to guide me (because for the first time in my life, I really realized that I knew more about something than my parents).

They trusted me, told me not to do anything to make the cops show up, any money that got spent I would have to pay back to them, and that was it.

Internet never stopped me from reading books under the covers at night though.

Parents still get mad at me for doing that.

 

I wonder if my father ever realised that I had found his secret collection of Playboy magazines!

Maybe there were tiny pieces of paper, hairs between copies... and stuff like in the old-fashioned spy stories.

 

I think the best thing here is for the parents to take initiative and proactively take embarrassing videos of their kids and share them online. This will instill the tried and true deterrents of fear and shame into your kids*, and make them adverse to sharing anything online ever again.



*This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek; please don't terrorize and shame your kids, but teach them the dangers of social media and how easily information is scraped online. I work with a lot of teens, and while I am mostly in a math/science capacity, I do try to instill some common wisdom along the lines of "don't do something that will wind up on a fail compilation or cringe dump... if you're gonna screw up, it's gotta be worth more than 3 seconds of internet fame"



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I always tell teens that trust is something you can't buy. And once someone betrays a trust, it is very difficult to get it back. Spying on kids is telling them " I don't trust you." Parents often expect their kids to do things they did when they were a teen, which isn't fair. Just because you made bad choices in your youth doesn't mean your kids will.
Just my two cents.