Question. Would it be prohibitively expensive to use this for petty acts of personal revenge?
I find it kind of stunning that my 17-year-old son permits his parents to track him via "Find My iPhone." Heck, I'm even a bit weirded out by the fact that he applied for (and got) a part-time job that required a drug test.
Privacy isn't at all the same thing as it was when I was young, that's for sure. If my son made an issue out of it, I'd take him off the iPhone tracker, but I have to admit it's a tool I am grateful for.
Oh man. When I got my adderall rx, I told the doctor that I don't smoke pot or use drugs, because I don't think of myself as someone who smokes pot and uses drugs. Afterwards, I got sent to the secretary to set up the follow up appointment, and she handed me a pee cup, and all of a sudden I remembered that I'd literally smoked pot days earlier because we'd gone camping over MLK weekend. There was a campfire, for god's sake. Anyway, my face caught 100% on fire and I told the secretary the truth. She asked if I'd told the doc, and I said no, and she said she'd have to tell him. I honestly have not felt that ashamed in decades. What a lying druggie I am.
3: Yeah, I can't imagine that. I really wasn't up to much when I was 17, but I would not have been ok with my mom tracking me.
4: Are you in jail now? Are Texas prisons as bad as they say?
I'm in procrastination-jail, where the web access is lovely.
Or maybe I'm on parole now. This stuff is pretty good.
Yeah, that Super Bowl ad was nightmarish, not just in its panopticonism but also in its portrayal of Google as able to interpret your lifetime of personal data and answer questions about it in natural language.
My kids were good kids, and were reasonably compliant, but the idea of tracking their phones seemed nuts to me. Both more than I reasonably needed to know, and it seemed impossibly rudely intrusive. I guess it was introduced (or I became aware of it? I'm always a few years behind the times) when they were already teenagers -- it probably wouldn't have seemed bizarre to me when they were eleven, and then it would have been the status quo. But as it was, I just texted them to ask where they were and what was going on, and worried mildly when they were slow to respond.
To those who have been through this: at what age did your kids get a smart phone? Right now Hawaii (10) has a flip phone for texting and staying home by herself. Middle school? 7th grade? 2nd grade?
Phones are poison for teens. Get them an iwatch. You can track them, they can make calls, but no social media or other bullshit.
10: word.
11: quite a bit older as he resisted it for a long time (not that we were pushing from our end). he (rightly) saw it as a time sink and surveillance tool. but then he got serious about activism, so needs it to coordinate - ironically, this is also why he maintains presence on various social media platforms. i am on tw*tt*r in good part to keep mild tabs on his social media engagement, at least that is how it started, but he's an adult now so i feebly attempt to boost his issues and scan xr event photos to see if he is in them and thus should i turn on the ringer on my own phone in case i need to bail him or any friends out.
And here I thought I was going to be chastised for being too overprotective!
Ugh, haven't even thought about it yet. I don't mind the phone part at all -- but access to apps and games and the Internet just seems like so much to manage. The Calabat is very good at self-regulating screen time -- I honestly think he just doesn't find screens that interesting. Pebbles, on the other hand, would be the first line up for screens implanted in her eyeball and she's only three. (Neither get that much screen time compared to their peer group but man does she ask for it. TV? TV? TV? )
Right now Hawaii (10) has a flip phone for texting and staying home by herself
Just yesterday, I was thinking that my 10yo stepdaughter is mature enough to handle being home alone, but also that's currently impossible because she has no cell phone and we don't have a landline. I like the flip phone as a possible solution.
Our current plan is vague but basically involves trying to make it to high school before there's a smartphone. And also trying to identify the moment when having a smartphone is actually beneficial, vs. just a fun toy.
4: heebie, I related your story to a friend of mine who takes adderall, and they were thoroughly surprised at the presence of the other drug tests, or even asking. I don't know if this is a regional variation or what.
16: Just out of curiosity, how is the stepparent process going? My brother-in-law is in a similar situation, and I'm always interested (nosy) about family relationships.
17: The psychiatrist told me it was DEA being super duper strict? So I'm surprised that it varies regionally. I wonder if it's due to variations in how regional DEA clinics rank their priorities.
The psychiatrist told me it was DEA being super duper strict?
Sounds to me like pharma trying to protect its market share in the face competition from the demon weed.
Could be. I feel like weed is the opposite of Adderall, though.
18: It's gotten harder over time, but not in a bad way. Early on, I felt like I was slotted in next to Fun Uncle. Bike rides, goofball stuff, etc. I still do those things, but now I also get heavier stuff, e.g. tough conversations about racism or a mean/upsetting thing at school. And I also feel like I get tested a lot, looking for cracks in the wall.
My other observation is about shared custody: parenting is so much smoother when we're on the same page with BioDad; at times we have been notably not on the same page and it sucks.
I can't remember - one stepkid? Or siblings?
10,13,16: The way my ex and I handled web/smartphone stuff for the first years was this: Your phone is like your room, we get to say we're coming in and look around, but we won't be doing that all the time. Basically, passwords written down somewhere we can get them, but we'd always say before checking, and not snoop or pry when we checked unless we saw something clearly alarming. As the kid got older, we checked less and less often and stopped insisting. Easy with our kid, who had basically good judgement and no sketchy friends that we knew about.
20: I was acting in loco parentis for a nephew, and his psychiatrist was absolutely scandalized that the kid might be smoking pot. My (unspoken) reaction was the same as yours.
The kind of spyware apps that Heebie mentions are both horrifying in themselves and a reminder of how very much worse Google might be (and its Chinese equivalents presumably are, at least for targets of interest).
I have some friends in the privacy corner but I can't share their paranoia about [western] governments. Part of this is because I was exposed at an impressionable age (40) to full on Californian/SV libertarianism at a technology conference in Burlingame, and ran like a scalded cat. Part is that I believe that the British secret services are broadly on the side of Britain.
The real danger is the privatisation and widespread adaptation of this technology. Ubiquitous facial recognition in the hands of the mafia, or even of every local drug gang. Spyware all over the IoT. I mean, my lightbulb, as I type this, is running linux. Bent cops giving their friends access to the databases. That sort of thing.
We just got my 12-year-old a smartphone. We went to the store planning to get a flipphone, but found that it would cost $100 more than an iPhone 7, and couldn't bring ourselves to do it.
We made clear that we had the right to look at it to see what he was up to, and turned on the parental features. (When he got e-mail earlier, we also made clear that we would monitor that.) We've never monitored closely, and presented it as helping protect him against creepy things on the internet.
It has turned out that it has been great for his social development. Without a phone, he really had no way to communicate with his friends outside of school. Now there are lots of group text messages that are inane, in the same way that my phone calls with my friends when I was 12 were inane, but that keep him connected and have broadened his social group.
There was a moment early on where we noticed that he was using the phone a lot, and also spending a lot of time in his room 'reading,' where he would clearly scramble to hide something if we came by. I then checked his usage logs and saw that he was watching hours of YouTube a day. I confronted him gently about it, he broke down in tears of remorse, we agreed to use the parental controls to prohibit YouTube on his phone, Hallmark came and filmed an after-school special, and it has all been fine, I think, since then.
I am one of those parents doing phone lockdown, though the kids with phones are 13 and 12. All text messages (in and out) get sent to me as well. Ditto photos. All social media is blocked. I do spot checks of internet usage and one currently isn't allowed to use YouTube. It's balancing the repercussions of actual dumb-kid misuse with giving them the freedom to go around town etc. and I don't feel guilty right now but I think it's going to get more difficult as they get older.
22 is relevant to my interests too. Thanks, Stanley.
If they have your email, they can target ads only to you by... sending you an email.
Right, but they'll know it's from me.
17: Yeah, I've never heard of drug testing for adderall in the absence of serious past drug abuse.
My kid has this weird thing where we tell him what he's allowed and not allowed to do, and then he follows the rules. I think he gets it from his mother.
Great. Clean urine without having to deal with a stranger.
I'm kind of surprised to learn he was still alive.
33: Seen it done around here, as a way to weed out addicts and/or drug seekers doctor shopping for excessive scrips.
It's quite something that Natalie Wood is trending on twitter.
42: We have a state-wide database that doctors are supposed to check to make sure that you aren't getting a bunch of controlled substances from other doctors called MassPAT (Massachusetts Prescription Awareness Tool).
I want to cry about the fact that I woke up at 3AM. I fell asleep on the couch around 9:15 and woke up at 10:30. Ugh. I really need the rest.