What Constant Surveillance Is Doing to Children
No one warned me, when I became a parent, about all the apps that would colonize my phone: the app for the baby monitor where I could gaze at my daughter, even when my husband and I finally had a night out. The app for the Snoo smart bassinet we rented in bleary-eyed desperation, which logged her sleep by the minute. The app where I logged her sleep manually because the Snoo was not accurate enough. And still, I remember thinking that I had been quite restrained. I mean, I didn’t buy the $299 Owlet smart sock, which would send her pulse rate and oxygen saturation directly to my phone, or the $290 Nanit monitor, which would track her every breath.
Our day care did not have a livestream—see? restraint—but that is indeed a service some now offer. Preschool required its own app, though, as did summer camp. Soon my phone began pinging with messages about playground spats and injuries as minor as paper cuts. As I write this, I’ve learned that my daughter woke from her nap at 2:17 p.m.
The panopticon doesn’t end with babies and toddlers. Parents with children older than mine tell me they obsess over grades, which are updated instantly with each new assignment or quiz. They watch their kids via the camera on their Ring doorbell; they monitor text messages. They scrutinize daily photos from sleepaway camp—once a time of complete disconnection—for evidence of sunburns or social ostracism. Why is he standing apart from everyone else? Why isn’t he smiling?
But most of all, parents track their kids everywhere they go. Location tracking might start, for younger kids, with an AirTag slipped into a backpack, jacket, or shoe. (Skechers now makes shoes with a dedicated compartment in the sole.) For kids old enough to have their own smartwatch or phone, the GPS is built right in—and so parents keep tracking them into adolescence and even beyond. Three-quarters of parents with teenagers ages 14 to 17 had access to their kids’ location data, according to one study.
