Three-Quarters of Parents Now Track Their Teens' Every Move
What Constant Surveillance Is Doing to Children
Sarah Zhang traces how parenting became a panopticon: smart bassinets, breathing monitors, day-care livestreams, and above all GPS. AirTags tucked into backpacks and shoes, phones and smartwatches that report location by default. One study finds three-quarters of parents of 14-to-17-year-olds have access to their kids' location data, and the tracking often continues into adolescence and beyond.
The panopticon doesn't end with babies and toddlers.
- 28304283409234
Kids now teens. We never had a tv. Only let them watch dvd on laptop. Never allowed them on tiktok. Never gave them surveillance watches (kiddyzoom). I also did not have whatsapp, or even carried my phone half of the time.
They hated us for it. Other parents called us crazy. “They should learn how to handle social media!” And now their kids are unmanageable and ours thank us for shielding them.
- asveikau
Some of that baby phase and younger kid stuff in the article sounds pretty insane.
My daughter is a teenager and I appreciate being able to look at her phone's location when I pick her up from a place. I don't tend to monitor her phone use, occasionally I will check it out but the "deal" I have with her makes sure she understands she is an individual and I respect her individuality. I have a few apps blocked.
- trashb
Privacy is dead and it started in the cradle.
The thing is the parents normalizing this kind of intrusion of privacy think they are in the right while creating a very dangerous world. Even things like going through your kids rooms (yes even when they live at home) is a huge privacy violation.
No wonder the "but think of the kids" argument is so effective, we all grew up being propagandized by or own parents and environment.
- hoherd
There was a time when I liked having intricate data about things because it was interesting for me to learn about my own world. That rosy-eyed picture was polluted by surveillance capitalism, and it's gotten to the point where I'd often rather write things down on paper or in a markdown or yaml doc rather than use an tracker app, just because I know that my own hand-written data isn't one profile in a global data set used to squeeze value out of me.
Also, after reading the free part of the article, I propose the word "pramopticon".
- RataNova
Modern marketing just preys on parental guilt. If you don't buy a $300 sensor or track your kid's location every second, they subtly make you feel like an irresponsible parent.
It's actually sad for kids. In childhood being able to stay out a bit longer, solve sudden problems without calling mom, or just sit alone taught you how to cope with the world. But if someone monitors a child all the way to their college dorm door, it's unclear how they're supposed to develop personal autonomy at all
- childofhedgehog
- motionlessveloc
https://wallhop.io/https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026...
- tavavex
Childhood surveillance may become a very lucrative proving ground for new tech. The usual outrage about privacy doesn't apply here because of a combination of a very helicopter parenting-friendly society and a common understanding the even older children have zero latitude in making any choices for themselves and are owned by their parents and institutions, who can at any point choose to force them into any new schemes.
I think the next direction these surveillance companies are going to head into is even more invasive aggregation and processing. Instead of just giving parents a basic rundown of what's happening now, have phones record every spoken word and then mine it for sentiment analysis to reveal hidden thoughts and opinions. Schools could deploy software onto all students that tracks everything they say to each other on school property, which then could be used to build social graphs, identify misbehavior, rank social cohesion and obedience to understand which groups are good and bad influences - with all this data immediately provided to teachers and parents so they can take action. Once this is normalized, it will come for us all, just a bit more covertly.