$500 Billion Industry That Causes Not Only The Loss Of Freedom But Also Increases Anxiety

Blender Dumbass
December 31, 2024

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#privacy #surveillance #freedom #philosophy #kids #letgrow #freerangekids #paternalism #MentalHealth

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It is estimated that by 2030 the child-surveillance industry will grow to $500 billion. An industry that capitalizes on bogus fears and causes anxiety in parents and children ( for different reasons ). And an industry that is both directly and indirectly causing the privacy nightmare that we are experiencing. On many levels the industry itself is causing much more damage than good. Here is a short summary of the damages it is causing and how to deal with them.

There is no problem to begin with.

As observed by Lenore Skenazy in the article I linked above, crime rates in the world right now are at ultimate lows while anxiety towards those crimes is at the ultimate high. Tracking a child for the entirety of the childhood ( taking along the way any resemblance of freedom or privacy ) is extreme over-reaction to any possible potential bad thing that can happen to that child.

I made a calculation where I compared impacts of surveillance to potential goods that it can provide and the conclusion was that surveillance is apocalyptically terrible even in the worst countries with insane crime rates. So tracking your child's movements all the time not only makes no sense. It causes a net loss to the overall freedom, both of the child, and of the nation, and the world as a whole.

Being surveyed causes anxiety.

I was privileged enough to have a Punk Mother and a GNU / Linux user Father to have little to know surveillance growing up. But I knew people who had helicopter parents. And this annoyed the hell out of us.

There are people who grew up, having helicopter parents as kids and all of them unanimously hated the experience. More than that, studies show that this over-protection makes the child delay maturing. The child grows up being anxious about absolutely everything because there was no time in the childhood when the child could simply explore and understand things. And therefor this adult is now thrown into the world, afraid to the bones form everything, because this was the thing that was learned from the childhood.

And not only that. When you are under constant surveillance you understand you don't have any freedom. This is a sad, depression inducing, painful existence, that no wander causes hell of a lot of mental health issues in people that go through it. So why the hell are we putting our kids through North Korean regime, just because we are scared of things that will not happen?

Growing up under surveillance normalizes surveillance.

It is nearly impossible to make the youth of today to start caring for their privacy. And a big part of why is that they were born into mass surveillance with surveillance devices in their pockets from the very beginning. And parents used those surveillance devices for imaginary "safety", which probably caused those children to regard surveillance as something "good" for them. Even though a lot of them are annoyed by it.

If a slightly older person would migrate to GNU / Linux from a suggestion that it is more private. A young person, who underwent surveillance parenting, will most likely not give a damn. And those young people become adults that vote. Adults that choose policies. Adults that develop our new tech. And if non of them understands privacy because they never had it, what kind of future will this bring?

Privacy saves your kids more than surveillance.

People afraid of various unlikely things when activating surveillance technology upon their kids. Some afraid of killers or rapists, or other people who would kidnap the kid and either do something bad, or request a huge ransom. In either way, those people, even though unlikely, still exist. And they aren't stupid.

People that do this kind of stuff plan ahead of the time. They survey the area. They get as much private information about the targets as possible. And having surveillance technology on your children only helps them.

Most companies that do surveillance sell this data to data brokers. When a parent is anxious about the child enough to install a bloody tracking app. The parents is giving the data about the child to the criminals. And now those criminals could plan an attack on the child.

There is a movie that I very like by Steven Soderbergh called Kimi that is exploring this very idea for the suspenseful sequences. The movie didn't really touch upon the whole data brokers thing, which would probably make it unnecessary complex. But it shows how criminals can use people's devices to attack them more successfully.

So what can a parent do instead?

Vilifying phones, or vilifying social media isn't going to help anyone. The choices should be made by the child. But as a parent you can provide the child with abilities to make the choices.

Give the child a phone from Purism or something similar. On the child's computer ( with the permission of the child ) install the GNU / Linux operating system. If the child doesn't want it, you can always give per a separate GNU / Linux machine. And make sure that the child has the privacy and security on the devices first. Make sure that child has security against you.

As a parent give yourself paternalism therapy, to learn to respect the time when the child is not under you.

And then let the child be. Let the child grow!

Happy Hacking!!!