This is arguably the first generation that grew up with zero privacy. Being watched is normal to them - and absolutely horrifying to this Gen-Xer.
It seems Gen Z is just fine with parents knowing where they are all the time
Submitted 1 year ago by throws_lemy@lemmy.nz to privacyguides@lemmy.one
https://www.businessinsider.com/gen-z-happy-parents-tracking-location-apps-life360-2023-10
Comments
ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Onii-Chan@kbin.social 1 year ago
Horrifying for this millennial too.
ares35@kbin.social 1 year ago
this gen x'er isn't keen on the idea, either. before the days of cell phones, the street lights coming on was the cue it was time to go home--and we could go pretty much anywhere in our (small) town. and later as a teen when we lived close to a city, all mom wanted to know was whether i'd be home for supper. there was no worry because every 'horrible' thing to happen to a kid wasn't published or broadcast for the world to see.
ramble81@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Aren’t Gen Z kids being raised by Gen X’ers? So wouldn’t it stand to reason that their parents are enabling and pushing this?
ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Yes. Strange isn’t it?
Gen-Xers are also guilty of letting corporate surveillance happen, thereby letting their children grow under the watchful eye of big data.
I never said my generation was virtuous. In fact, I blame people my age for not affording the next generation what they themselves got to enjoy. Just like we blamed our boomer parents for enjoying the good life after the war and leaving us the crumbs. Little did we know the ones after us would have it even harder.
ickplant@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Mostly, but also younger boomers and older millennials. It’s not as straightforward as it seems when it comes to generations.
HubertManne@kbin.social 1 year ago
Yeah but if you were a parent or if you are one. Would you do it? I could see doing it and just trying not to use it but man with some of the crazy kidnappings nowadays I would like to be able to find out where they are or at least have a last time and location for the police to work off of.
ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Yeah but if you were a parent or if you are one. Would you do it?
I am and I did not. Kids need to grow up without feeling they are watched all the time. Or rather more accurately: kids need to grow up without being watched so they can sense when they are and take measures. Kids who grow up without any personal space don’t even realize they’re not free, and that’s a perfect recipe to create adults that accept tyrannical governments without question.
My kids grew up doing stuff they didn’t tell me about, and I didn’t know where they were half of the time. And yes, at times, I worried. But it was important to let them be.
the crazy kidnappings nowadays
I’ve heard people of all ages say that all my life. This is a well-know cognitive bias (i.e. “things were better in the past”) and it’s simply not true. I’m fairly certain our society is much safer today than it was in the past.
Duranie@midwest.social 1 year ago
My 21yo soon wants to build out a van and take a chunk of time (6 months?) in between jobs and drive around the States. We’re talking over a year from now, but as the idea has come up in discussion I told him that I’d like to have some form of tracker set up. He’s good with it.
MightyWeaksauce@lemmy.world 1 year ago
My sister had trackers in the trunk of all of her kids cars. She told them it was there, they never had a problem with it. The clear signal wasn’t mom and dad are watching you… it was “don’t get into mischief in your own car” lol
Pretty good advice really 🤷🏻♂️
neurospice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Article reads as propaganda. No way that zoomers are into this. This just sounds like justification for abusive parents to spy on their children. As a GenZ, I don’t recall having a single friend with this kind of arrangement with their parents, but then again I mostly hung around the more questionable crowd where you actually needed privacy. Would really hope we stop bickering among generations and actually fight for privacy together
sigmaklimgrindset@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
For real, how are Millennials falling for the same headlines that were used to spread stupid assumptions about their own generation a decade ago, but this time about Gen Z?
Contrast to you, I hang out with a pretty straight laced crowd, and we don’t “track each other on Snapchat” like the article or the top comment here is saying.
What’s gonna be the Gen Z avocado toast headline, I wonder…
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Just because a headline was published doesn’t mean people agree with it. You can literally publish whatever the fuck you want as long as you don’t cross a threshold that your core reader base stops trusting the publication. Fluff pieces like this are primetime space for just going off on bullshit with minimal repurcussions.
Beyond that clickbait/ragebait are absolutely a thing, and so is manufactured consent style propaganda.
Life360 just needs to have this article published in enough places that it seems like a ton of people are saying it. Gets the ball rolling for the appearance of people sharing this opinion when the reality is that they just got a dozen news sites to reword their press packet.
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Media literacy classes should be compulsory and deal with all this crap. Its pretty irresponsible as a society that we leave so much to people to figure it all out or be so vulnerable to exploitation and scams. So damn preventable and beneficial when people can help self-curate out the bullshit but echo chambers are also always gonna echo chamber, so there’s that too
Cracks_InTheWalls@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
So I live with a member of Gen Z, and it must vary from group to group, but the kids I come into contact with are always able to see exactly where their friends, including randoms they briefly interacted with on Snapchat once, are.
I agree that It’s fucking weird. Location sharing on an adhoc basis to coordinate meetups makes sense, but they seem to have this open and broadcasting literally all of the time.
I also get a lot of chuffing and “You’re being ridiculous” when I try to point out how fucking insane, unsafe and dystopian that is.
duncesplayed@lemmy.one 1 year ago
Article reads as propaganda
More like advertising. I’d put down a pretty big bet that Life360 sponsored this article and probably wrote a fair chunk of the copy, too.
SinAdjetivos@beehaw.org 1 year ago
Advertising is just propaganda where the politick is centered around consumerism.
However, even if you consider that “not a real politic” this article skips past the consumerism and straight into police state normalization.
Umbrias@beehaw.org 1 year ago
While more on the parent side of the age gap of things now, I know at least five offspring personally who do this willingly. It is a nightmare to me, moreso the fact that it’s basically impossible or was the last time I looked to find ways to do it that are foss.
But the point is, probably more people do it than you expect. This place is a selection bias, most people genuinely give no rats ass about their privacy, and, to the shock of many, trust their parents and like the safety net.
There are certainly secure privacy focused approaches they retain the agency of both parties which could exist. It’s a very real niche.
sag@lemm.ee 1 year ago
GenZ here. I don’t think so.
Adanisi@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
My family tried to make me install the Spy360 crap.
My GPS spoofer made them regret that 🙂
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 1 year ago
Please tell me you’re educating your family in privacy issues. This tracking circumstance is an excellent opportunity to approach it with a education mindset instead of the stereotypical kids/parents conflict.
Check out www.theprivacydad.com it’s a great starting point for parents who don’t know tech enough to realize what’s going on.
vector_zero@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Holy based. I always thought it’d be funny to get into a little cyber war with someone, so thanks for the laugh.
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 1 year ago
How old are you if you dont mind? Gen Z seems to be mid-late 90s, no?
Franzia@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 year ago
OP this post is just outrage bait. Business insider? Really?
whale@lemm.ee 1 year ago
[deleted]DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe 1 year ago
I say let them cook.
We’ve had twenty years of bullshit Gen X-written Millennials vs Boomers, it’s past time Gen Z gets some attention.
MadBob@feddit.nl 1 year ago
Business Insider? Hardly knew 'er.
lol@lemy.lol 1 year ago
I’m 18 and fine with my parents knowing where I am so we can coordinate mealtimes and stuff. I really don’t care for having a third party spy on me 24/7 though. We just Signal each other “I’m at xyz location, be back soon” and that’s plenty enough.
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That sounds more stochastic tho, like, do they have on-demand “lets see where lol is right now even though I have zero need to know currently” or is it just like u verbally check-in
lol@lemy.lol 1 year ago
We just verbally check in and I’m totally fine with saying where I am. I believe the important thing here is trust. If, hypothetically, we were able to set up something privacy-respecting that communicated my GPS location to my parents 24/7, I wouldn’t be a fan of it. It’d feel like my parents are monitoring me because they don’t trust me to be truthful about my whereabouts.
AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I know it’s just some rag bait nonsense, but I know as a fact most teens would never want their parents to constantly know where they are and monitor them constantly.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 1 year ago
Used to share my location with my dad until he kept sending me a McDonald’s order everytime I was at McDonald’s. Then turned it off, lol. My mum still has it.
Whelks_chance@lemmy.world 1 year ago
In this thread: people not understanding sampling bias. Of course everyone here likes privacy, and had friends who think similarly. It’s a privacy themed community on a niche tech forum.
neurospice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Conversely, the sampling done in the GenZ survey was by the tracking company (who you can probably wager have a bias towards anti-privacy…)
Grebes@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Wow, the survey conducted by the company and spokesperson for the company all agree!
super_user_do@feddit.it 1 year ago
I’m a gen zer and I would absolutely freak out. I’d rather not going out rather than being spied 24/7 by my parents. Seriously, this is the best way to kill trust between children and their parents
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That cant be real—holy shit. Thats worse than picking on kids that dont have an iPhone or any phone or don’t have “the blue bubbles” from using iMessage (which nobody should ever use honestly)
derpgon@programming.dev 1 year ago
Fight the system, if someone laughs at you for having a green bubble, just counter by saying you are special and they are just normies like everyone else with blue bubble.
Stumblinbear@pawb.social 1 year ago
See the thing is I’m fine with it because I know my parents wouldn’t have spied on me 24/7. If they were helicopter parents and DID check where I was every hour of the day I wouldn’t be fine with it.
super_user_do@feddit.it 1 year ago
My parents have always been VERY restrictive about anything but computers (just because they don’t understand them). However, I asked them if they would do it and they told me that’s damn outrageous
Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This comes off like those articles about how office workers “actually hate working from home - can’t wait to return to office!”
Absolute bullshit.
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 1 year ago
hate
sounddrill@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 1 year ago
I’m ok with my parents knowing where I am at all times(frankly, they don’t care much about that which is good)
I’m not ok with meta knowing about it
variants@possumpat.io 1 year ago
I mean their parents have probably been tracking them since they were kids so they just grew up thinking it’s normal, I also recently learned kids in school feel awkward if they aren’t walking to class while on their phone because then they feel like people will think they aren’t cool enough to have people to talk to at all times
Chariotwheel@kbin.social 1 year ago
I recently saw a video clip by Josh Strife Hayes. He was talking about MMORPG culture, but it can be extended beyond that. It's about the inability of people to be bored and impatience. Old people can manage with being bored. They can spend an hour not doing much of anything. But the further you go in time, the less patience people have. And that's not because they are better or worse humans inherently, it's because they grew up in an society where things increasingly got busy. So it also isn't a binary old people/young people, but a progressing state of people getting blasted more and more with stuff.
This is to the point where there are YouTube videos where people cut away little bits of space between sentences just so there isn't even a second of calm. Social media plattforms just bury you under content and new content suggestions. A lot of games don't even want to risk downtime and just throw all kinds of random content at you for you to work through., quick travel so you won't have a few minutes of calm walking somewhere. Just content back to back with more content.
And this ultimately leads to way more stuff for you than you can consume and an inreasing fear of missing out on something if you're not constantly on the ball.
frunch@lemmy.world 1 year ago
This is to the point where there are YouTube videos where people cut away little bits of space between sentences just so there isn’t even a second of calm
Omg, i really, really don’t like that. It took a little while before i began noticing it but now i can’t ignore it anytime it’s happening. I simply won’t watch those videos because i won’t be able to focus for very long. It can be especially jarring how they’ll cut from one sentence into the next one and the editing makes it seem like their head glitched into another spot. I won’t follow any YouTubers that do this stuff, I’ll find something else to watch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not gonna lie, I do this for podcasts more to save data and I def am not allergic to silence, per se but I definitely dislike having pure quiet around me.
variants@possumpat.io 1 year ago
yeah I feel hobbies are really important and boredom is important for your hobbies, thats one reason I had uninstalled reddit in the past because I felt it was just too easy to open up reddit and not touch my hobbies in my free time. Also my younger cousin was once telling me about some kid and how he was an ipad kid, and I asked what that meant and he explained it about how it was a kid who the parents gave them an ipad when they were little to keep them calm. it was kind of funny the first time he told me but now that I notice it it feels pretty sad when I see it
LinkOpensChest_wav@beehaw.org 1 year ago
This makes me sad. My brother and his wife always tracked my niece and nephew, and I feel like it did more harm than good. I remember agreeing to drive my nephew to buy fireworks, and on the way home I swung by Target to pick up my best friend a gift for his wedding, and my sister in law called my nephew and threatened to take his phone away because he wasn’t where he said he was going. Granted, I could have called, but it was a quick stop, and I didn’t know at the time they were watching him 24/7.
snooggums@kbin.social 1 year ago
It is important to differentiate between able to know and contact tracking to enable controlling behavior. Knowing to help with communication and transportation arrangements is great, but nitpicking an extra stop on the way home to Target? Sheesh.
hiddengoat@kbin.social 1 year ago
"Wait, you mean you're going to take away my phone so you'll have no idea where I am, ever, you stupid fucking dink? Yeah, that's fucking brilliant. Shut up and make me a pie."
nightdice@feddit.de 1 year ago
Speaking as GenZ (or Millennial, depends who you ask for the definition): fuuuuck that.
Speaking to the article specifically: I don’t trust a surveillance vendor to work honestly when surveying the acceptance of their surveillance tool. The article also fails to mention (if it does, it’s so brief I missed it) that the pressure some parents put on their kids to install and allow these kinds of spyware is immense. The kid having it on does not equate to the kid choosing to have it on.
FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 1 year ago
Business Insider is straight AIDS
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Hey, thats not very nice to AIDS, at least AIDS isn’t—I dunno, like—BusinessInsider.
AI_toothbrush@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
Im fine with my parents knowing where i am the only problem is that i would also share my location with big daddy google and im not fine with that. And my parents are divorced so i wouldnt share it with my dad… Also it would drain my battery
Gruntyfish@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The rest of Gen Z can speak for themselves.
CmdrShepard@lemmy.one 1 year ago
I think if anyone is qualified to speak for Gen Z, it’s most certainly Business Insider.
BolexForSoup@kbin.social 1 year ago
Life360 is the subject and the surveyor for this article so take it with a grain of salt. They want this to be normal. However, it does not change the fact that clearly Gen Z is more open to this then previous generations at least to some degree.
As a parent, I do plan on using the services, but definitely not daily and I want my kids to have a say in the matter. What’s important is they feel safe.
noodlejetski@lemm.ee 1 year ago
friendly reminder that Life360 sells your precise location data themarkup.org/…/the-popular-family-safety-app-lif…
BolexForSoup@kbin.social 1 year ago
Oh trust me, not using them.
Blackout@kbin.social 1 year ago
It seems really pathetic to me when parents can't offer their teens privacy. I have a child and I want him to trust me. Invading privacy feels like it would have the opposite effect and create a very one-sided relationship. You can ask my mom how much she knows about me now and its considerably less than my boxing mates.
Beefytootz@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Parents also aren’t able to offer their kids safety. Seems those two go hand in hand with each other
MasterBuilder@lemmy.one 1 year ago
*rolls D-100* … I disbelieve!
echodot@feddit.uk 1 year ago
I never cared that my parents knew where he was because I was never trying to do anything particularly nefarious and my parents weren’t completely buttheads.
But this was pre mobile phone days (my first phone was a Nokia Ngage), so if I went out they wouldn’t be able to contact me in an emergency so it made sense to say oh I’m going to x house here is ther phone number. Now that mobile phones exist maybe that requirement no longer exists.
MasterBuilder@lemmy.one 1 year ago
That is a trust based transaction when parent asks where their child is going as well.
Putting tracking malware and using surveillance all the time is invasion of privacy, teaching the child that surveillance is okay, and completely lacking a trust relationship, which is bad within a family.
TheInsane42@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah, everybody with a phone can be followed… unless the leave the phone at home, forgeg toncharge it, …
For every high-tech problem there is a low-tech solution.
CleoTheWizard@beehaw.org 1 year ago
I actually think these apps are perfectly fine, I just think that you should have to request the location from the phone and then that request also alerts the kid.
I’ll paint a different picture for parents in this thread. Gen Z does not have adequate social spaces in which to exist. So when you say “hey I’m going to track you” it’s like oh cool, track me going where exactly? To basketball practice and back? Or to the mall so you can know which store I’m in?
Parents are gaining more and more control over their kids and I don’t think it’s good. They aren’t independent people. As a kid I hated having zero autonomy, it sucked. So all this is achieving is making kids feel like it’s less hassle to just stay at home and play video games.
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 1 year ago
My problem with these apps is twofold:
Primarily it means these companies know where your kids are, and they are building a dB of locations and other info of the kid (likely including online activity via other ops on the phone, etc), starting tracking early.
Second, it’s a poor way to manage trust between parents and kids. I refuse to use it, and refuse to help anyone I know use it, and explain to them why.
If you don’t trust your kids, then work on resolving that issue. And before anyone says “I trust my kids but not other people”, well, you gonna go everywhere with them to protect them from other people, or teach them how to navigate life, and learn to develop their own independent judgement?
There are self-hostable tracking systems. One is in my queue to setup for family/friends. It’ll be configured so anyone in a circle can use it, but these people trust each other. We intend it for arrival/departure notifications more than anything.
TrojanHam@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Not my kid. She only had it on for a specific reason and she only accepts she had to put up with it for now.
She’s more than happy to bring it up as an issue from time to time.
trash80@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 year ago
Rising levels of anxiety among young people may be driving the embrace of location apps.
I’m not sure it isn’t the other way around.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 1 year ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The rising popularity of location tracking apps such as Life360 suggests that young people are increasingly happy for their parents to be able to see where they are all the time.
Other apps such as Google’s Family Link and Apple’s Find My are also being used by Gen Z to share their location with parents and friends while they travel to school, drive – or even during dates.
Location tracking can be turned off and on so that a user can maintain privacy when they want it, but according to a 2022 survey carried out by The Harris Poll, 16% of US adults have the setting activated all the time.
“The turbulence of Gen Z’s adolescence spawned a mental health crisis that was only amplified by the pandemic, social media, and the 24-hour news cycle,” said Dr Michele Borba, a educational psychologist and spokesperson for Life360.
Seventy-two percent of GenZ female respondents said they believed their physical wellbeing benefits from location sharing, per the survey.
“There’s an intimacy that’s intertwined with that act,” Michael Sake, a senior lecturer in digital sociology at City, University of London, told The New York Times.
The original article contains 419 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 54%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I just text my parents if I feel like they need to know where I’m at, worked for me from middle school all the way to me living independently today.
Like a phone’s location services can be turned on remotely if an emergency calls for it, but as long as I’m good with my family then the vast majority of the likelihood I’ll ever need to know where my kid is while they can’t communicate with me is null since like 80% of kidnappings are over custody battles or other related family disputes.
LastoftheDinosaurs@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Aren’t they like 30 now?
Blizzard@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
There was a great Black Mirror episode about constant parental supervision.
stepanzak@iusearchlinux.fyi 1 year ago
My parents could try to convince me to download shit like this.
ADHDefy@kbin.social 1 year ago
Gen Z likes to know where everyone is all the time. It's totally normal for them to have each other's GPS locations. Snapchat has a built-in map feature where you can watch your friends move around in real time, and there are other apps that offer this, too. I was blown away when I learned this was so commonly used.
skankhunt42@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
I never really understood the “I have nothing to hide” mindset. I’ve always been for privacy. I self host everything I use, and when I don’t (e-mail) I PAY someone to do it for me. No Google services in my life, no apple, etc, etc.
However, more and more I’m wondering if what I’m doing is worth it. Really, the people who “have nothing to hide” seem fine, not bad has happened, and it seems far more likely my information was leaked from a hack (credit carma I’m looking at you). Credit cards know where I am, what I buy… Its endless. Plus now I have stress about my self hosted services going down.
So these guys who share their location and just live in blissful ignorance, are they on to something? I think life would be ‘easier’ for me on their side…
ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
This subject is best summed up by the Girl in Andrew Niccol’s vastly underrated movie Anon:
“It’s not that I have something to hide, I have nothing I want you to see”
This is the most intelligent, best articulated commentary on privacy I’ve ever seen and it fits in 17 words.
Pregnenolone@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The “have nothing to hide” crew still close the toilet door
vlad76@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
I think you need to find a happy medium. I’ve accepted that I can’t control ALL the data I generate, so I instead aggressively block ads and any other marketing attempts towards me.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah maybe it’s growing up in the closet, but yeah. My wife knows where I am in general all the time, but only because I give her heads up. Nobody else knows more than they need.
It’s not even that I have anything to hide. Aside from not letting my in laws know we’re poly or other such things I’m not really hiding anything. I just don’t see why anyone should know. If someone insists on knowing for no reason then that’s weird and not cool.
smeg@feddit.uk 1 year ago
They’ll learn the hard way. Hopefully the hard way is something serious to them but ultimately inconsequential like finding out a partner is cheating, and not like… being murdered.
devfuuu@lemmy.world [bot] 1 year ago
Seems a perfect tool for organized bullyin. What could go wrong.
Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
Google Latitude was doing this in 2009 and I knew millennials who used it. Much more widespread now, though.
hyper@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
Gen Z here. I have Apple’s Find My location setup with my closest friends only (and my mom). I don’t have a reason to hide my locations to my friends, it helps with casually meeting up actually. “Oh XY is nearby, let’s meet and hang for a bit” And my mom has my location for emergencies and vice versa.
I disabled the snap map though as I have people on there that don’t need to know my location.
Bread@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Hey now, don’t assume we all do that. I don’t need the people I talk to knowing that the only places I go are work, my house, and the Chinese food place every other Tuesday. They might think I don’t have anything to do with my life. They would be right, but I don’t want them thinking it!
jacktherippah@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yeah. I’m Gen Z. I was really taken aback when my high school friends had apps on their phones that showed their real time locations. I was like “WHY?” and they responded along the lines of “Well why not?”… I have no words…