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Comment by james_marks | Hacker News Reader

Once the kids realize their parents are tracking their location with the phone, the answer is easy: ditch the phone.

So now they are out in the world, in potentially dangerous situations, without a way to call for help, lookup a map, get a ride, etc.

We were always clear with our kids: We're not tracking you, we trust you, and you can call us for help without getting in trouble.

You can tell them not to do stupid things all day, but life finds a way, and I want them fully equipped when it happens.

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Kids aren't ditching their phones because they're being tracked (unfortunately).

The tracking is normalized, and they're going to grow up to be adults that both tolerate and impose oppressive surveillance that we couldn't even imagine today.

I don't have any data to back it up, but my impression it is mostly young people that are aware and opposed to Flock et al.

I think people can understand the nuance and tradeoffs between your parents knowing your locations, Big Tech tracking you to profit off your data, and companies who's raison d'etre is to sell your data to law enforcement.

Surveillance is already normalized and mostly unavoidable, but I believe tolerance for abuse of the data is higher than you think.

I do agree that surveillance in the future will be advanced. I try to imagine what Meta and Google could do with all of our data from the past 20 years with all of the compute they are building.

They are opposed to Flock, while at the same time they are constantly reporting their location to each other and monitoring where everyone they know is. Which is logically consistent: they're not ok with tracking being done to them, but they're ok with doing the tracking and opting in to being tracked.

Of course, with pervasive tracking being normalized, and the apps doing this being subject to law enforcement and the government, it kind of ends up as the same thing.

(Whether parents have access to this voluntary tracking, I don't know. My kid uses it with his friends, but I've never wanted to track him. Seems creepy and distrusting. Sure, he lies to me about some things, but I have a pretty good idea of what is and isn't a lie. Feel free to disbelieve me.)

I don't think it i s the same thing. I don't like pervasive tracking either, but it is very different from for police to subpoena google to get my data, than it is for flock to directly give law enforcement my location.

I use Find My friends on my iphone, I trust them enough they can know my location and I trust Apple enough to carry that data (I realize this is implying "nothing to hide", but I also consent to giving Apple my location). I get that it seem creepy, but its also a cool new technology if you can get over how creepy it seems. Not trying to sell you one, but give you another perspective.

I'm not a parent, but when I was teen my parents monitored me as much as they could. Personally, I think location tracking is less of an issue than parental surveillance of internet browsing. I do think if parents are going to track their kid's location, they should let their kid track the parents, too.

> I do agree that surveillance in the future will be advanced. I try to imagine what Meta and Google could do with all of our data from the past 20 years with all of the compute they are building.

Right it's not even a question of new data-- a mountain of historical privacy leaks were benign because it was a needle in a haystack. In the future everyone will be electronically stalked by a fleet of AI private detectives. To limit the damage we must substantially restrict the collection and retention of personal information.

They wouldn't even need to stalk us. I imagine they are training individualized models based on our individualized data, then use those models to A/B test the potential for advertisements or other propaganda, but they are probably already doing that. I wish my brain was big enough to know what they could be up to.

I think the issue isn't the collection, or retention (although there should still be data retention laws to protect against the liability of holding that data), but the ways the data is shared or used by third-parties. If businesses were no longer able to be shared or sold to 3rd parties, or be used for advertisements, the remainder of issues are largely ideological.

I mean, it's pretty clear it's not going anywhere or getting any less oppressive. At a certain point, attempting to subvert these makes you stick out even more.

Eh, I did this a ton when I was in high school.

> Once the kids realize their parents are tracking their location with the phone, the answer is easy: ditch the phone.

Or trust their parents. Discuss why and how they're tracked and the boundaries the parents will keep as well, and make do with it.

The article paints condescending and alarming portraits, but most people just talk it out and find some convenient balance.

There are things parents will not want teens to do that teens will want to do. They will not want to feel pressure to even explain themselves after the fact.

That sounds orthogonal to device management to me. It will happen either way, and not having GPS tracking won't stop parents from catching their kids doing stuff they don't want them to (at least if it's a recurring thing)

People here seem to completely overlook that parents have been managing the whole life of their kid for more than a decade and teenagers are really bad at hiding things in general. Perhaps it's different if the parents are working three jobs and never talk to their kid, but I don't see that as a general case.

> most people just talk it out and find some convenient balance

That is decidedly not the way I've seen most people handle the convenience/privacy tradeoffs we all face every hour of every day. So I'll put a question mark on that..

Really ? Kids in family plans will have their devices bound to an admin, and that admin has a lot of rights on their devices, purchases etc (that's the whole point)

I can't imagine every family setting up the admin features to be in psychological crisis.

> Once the kids realize their parents are tracking their location with the phone, the answer is easy: ditch the phone.

In the "One Battle After Another" movie there was a (semi)funny subplot about this, except in the other direction, the parent wanted the kid to ditch the phone, and the kid had a secret one.

> You can tell them not to do stupid things all day, but life finds a way, and I want them fully equipped when it happens.

Mine's following her uncle's footsteps: he's BJJ black belt (and instructor) and she's into her 4th year of BJJ. She already dislocated another person's arm (another teenager who wanted to "see if BJJ works").

The goal is not to overpower a 25 y/old muscular man: but to win her just enough time to be able to ring an alarm/pass a distress call, grab her pepper spray in her purse, etc.

I trust her and she can do all the crazy shit teenagers do she wants to do: it's some of the others I don't trust.

> now they are out in the world, in potentially dangerous situations, without a way to call for help, lookup a map, get a ride, etc.

Oh, the horror

So, back to the relationship we had with technology in the 90s? Perfect!

The individual might be back to the 90s, but the rest of society and the environment is not. E.g. kids in the 90s just had to carry a few quarters and they could use a payphone if they really needed to call home. Today payphones have virtually disappeared.

If you're really in an emergency, literally everyone around you has a phone.

My generation was told that all strangers are dangerous, so there's going to be some trepidation going to people on the street and asking for help.

Oddly enough when I was 9 I regularly went places without a phone. If I needed to reach my family I’d have to find a pay phone and hope someone was at home to answer.

The general backup plan was to go to the nearest friends’ house.

Yeah the difference is that kids now don't really remember phone numbers (neither do I anymore honestly), and pay phones are basically non-existent

I wish kids could go out like I used to but the world is just different and some of the failsafes I took for granted like payphones don't exist anymore

I taught my kid my phone number when she was 7, and we tell her that if she needs help she can knock on anyone's front door and ask to use their phone.

These are choices we make, we dont need to give in to what "everyone" does.

I swear I read that as "... when I was 91 ...", wow, you get some proper old gits on HN

No it just normalizes being tracked as the price of admission to using these tools. So they'll keep the phones and accept being tracked and just hold onto a certain amount of anxiety and resentment. Woo

>So now they are out in the world, in potentially dangerous situations, without a way to call for help, lookup a map, get a ride, etc.

You mean exactly how every human existed every minute before <20 years ago?

Perfect.

My family spends a large majority of our time out of cell service - downhill and back country sking, canoeing, hiking, camping and everything else.

We love it, and plan to never give our daughter a phone (I don’t have one). Hopefully our town will ban them for kids anyway.

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