They’re all less cost-effective than talking to your kids and listening to what’s going on, but we guess that’s too hard to package and sell that.
[via The Morning Show with Mike and Juilet]
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@Buran:
Sorry, but kids dont have an expectation of privacy. As a parent or guardian YOU are responsible for everything they do so if they are being sneaky and or untrustworthy it may be time to resort to something like this. This is how you find out when they are doing things they have no business doing like going to parties/drinking, having sex, dating people you dont approve of, drag racing in their cars, and doing drugs. Otherwise itll all come back on you and YOU can pay the consequences. If more parents used things like these you wouldnt see the little punks out speeding around and sucking face at the mall.
@King of the Wild Frontier:
Sure, you can talk to them till you’re blue in the face about what is right and wrong, the question is do they give a shit and are they going to listen to you. Since people are too worried about being their kid’s friend instead of their parent, they are scared to lay the hammer down and even more scared of getting out the wooden spoon or belt like my parents did. I never did any one bad thing more than once!!
@XianZomby: You can’t impart on a ten-year-old girl the kind of s*it that goes on outside her grade school.
Sure you can. I understood it at eleven when I started regularly using the internet. “Be careful who you talk to online, don’t give out identifying information about yourself, and don’t agree to meet people.” It’s not really any different than the talk you give kindergarteners about not talking to strangers. When it comes to MySpace/Facebook, just make sure they set their profile to private and only friend people they know in real life. It is not that hard to keep your kids safe online, especially if you treat them like creatures capable of actual thought rather than miscreants whose every move must be monitored.
i find beating mine to be effective. i have a camera in each of their rooms hooked up to recorded monitors to make sure they don’t do any self-abuse. i home school them because they may try those things in the toilets at school too. being a parent means having complete control over their lives and if they step out of line at all, well pain is the consequence. even though they won’t love us when they are older, they are sure to respect our tough love.
@skrom: Sure but then you only make $42K a year, so something didn’t turn out quite right there. and also i see it taught you compassion too, [consumerist.com]
@mconfoy:
Seems like some people may try to resort to that (I assume that you’re joking). The US has become such a nanny state, I’m left wondering how these kids will be adults when they grow up. It’s sort of sad that, even in Canada, you can vote to decide the leader of your country, you can die for your country in the military, you can even get married and drive a car, etc … but you can’t drink alcohol until you’re older. WTF? Seriously.
Hoooooo-boy. This is interesting.
I can see a way to use this and not make your kid feel like your inappropriately monitoring them. Keylogging… what are the restrictions. My restriction for my younger cousins is no pornographic sites. Any cousin over 14. Fuck it, I just warn them not to trust anyone who wants to meet you.
GPS is tough. I don’t like the idea of someone being able to monitor me from anywhere I am. If I did put a GPS in my kids shoes; I would only use it if I feared for their lives, and I would let them know I have this for that purpose only.
Cell phone tracker. No, the government does this already. Plus anyone under my responsibility knows I’m very fair.
@mconfoy:
What does making $42,000 a year have anything to do with how well my parents raised me. Perhaps I have a job doing something I ENJOY instead of taking a job I HATE just to make more unnecessary money. See unlike most people I dont have to have the best of everything on the block. I dont live my life to make other people happy, I live my life to make ME happy. I could give 2 shits what someone else thinks of me!
The GPS tracker could come in handy if it data logs to google earth so that I can see speed and location of myself over a given time after the fact.
With the long distance driving that I often do, I am sometimes curious to see where I have been, for how long, and how quickly I moved from one point to the next.
And GPS that can do the above?
This is horrible! i am outraged! parents shouldn’t treat their children like criminals! WTF???
Why track the Kids? Why not track the parents?
Where is the website for this?
Well, I think we have indisputable visual evidence that this Mike fella’s the biggest tool on TV. If only he could be overturned.
But as for the whole topic of the video… yeah, I’m in the “what happened to just talking to your kids?” camp. They aren’t exactly reaching out to you, so that’s in the hands of the parents.
“You can’t explain that people will lie to them online for months at a time to gain their trust, set up a rendezvous with them at the shopping mall or the 7-11, take them home and chain them up in the basement and sell access to their bodies to their sicko pedophile friends and then slit their throat and bury them in the woods when they get “too old” to be attractive.”
Hmm… sounds a bit extreme to me. Or are you speaking from first hand experience here?
If you seriously can’t trust your kids enough that you have to be monitoring them via GPS you have quite serious problems. Do you want your kids to still be calling you when they’re thirty asking if it’s okay for them to go out for dinner with some friends?
Just make sure you only use these to spy on your own kids.
@Jesse in Japan:
Great point! These could be used to help child molesters! Won’t someone please, Think of the Children!
@skrom: Since people are too worried about being their kid’s friend instead of their parent
And there’s the crux of the problem; well put.
@rhombopteryx: there doesn’t need to be an exception. legally, financial & morally, a parent is responsible for their children until they reach the “age of reason”. a parent doesn’t need a child’s permission b/c they have the right to grant their child’s permission for them.
i don’t think it’s wise to start employing these devices from the get-go, but when the normal stuff isn’t working, sometimes you have to up the ante. kids are being exposed to more dangerous situations today at a younger age & they are simply not mentally prepared for it.
a few local news articles i’ve read over the past week:
-pre-teen busted for prostitution in sting
-two teens arrested for torching $2mil home – twice
-heroin use up among area high schoolers
-high school coach arrested for sexual assault
brave new world, indeed.
@bookling:
Yeah, even when I was ten (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and there was no internet), my mother would caution me when I was going to the movies:
“Don’t go to the bathroom by yourself! There may be some bad man hanging around who *specializes* in 10-year-old girls.”
Every year, she would change the age in her admonishment to match my age. She never elaborated on what she meant by *specializes*, but I got the message and obeyed her instruction. I even found out that some of my friends had been similarly cautioned by their own parents.
@GitEmSteveDave:
and
@MacPhisto:
Maybe this whole illegal thing isn’t connecting… I’ll try it again. IT IS ILLEGAL.
There is no “it’s my own kid” or “my own spouse” or “my own computer” exception to federal wiretapping & interception law, and similarly, most states don’t have an exception either. As the links in my first post indicate, when people assert that in court, the court says “no, you’re wrong, it’s a violation of the law.” State attorneys general spell it out on their own websites.
You’re welcome to feel the way you do – and it’s a great sign that you care about kids and recognize how parents are responsible for them – but that doesn’t make surreptitious interceptions legal. Go ask a lawyer or look it up.
@rhombopteryx: & we’ll try this again – a parent (or legal guardian) provides legal consent for the child until they are 18.
now, let’s go back to one of those laws you’re talking about (electronic communications privacy act): It shall not be unlawful under this chapter for a person not acting under color of law to intercept a wire, oral, or electronic communication where such person is a party to the communication or where one of the parties to the communication has given prior consent to such interception…
the state laws are very similar. as long as you have consent, you have a right to record. b/c a parent legally can provide consent for their child, they legally have a right to record.
search lexus-nexus for some court records dealing with parental consent for a child & you’ll see that this concept is well supported in law.
@mac-phisto: that’s lexis-nexis
Sounds like my mother’s wet dream. There was a reason I didn’t tell her anything. Mainly that she’d disagree with all of it. I believe my father once called her a Puritan. He wasn’t lying.
Am I the only one here that thinks that some of this is just fun and kewl….
I have no use for any of this.. and see both good and bad from “big brother” parents, but overall.. I just see having alot of fun playing with these devices!
@mac-phisto:
@ this point we’ve kinda gotten away from the general rule that tapping or taping someone without their consent is illegal, and onto the little exception of a legal issue of who can consent for kids to maybe make it legal. I’m sure there are exceptions to speeding laws, too, but no one says “speeding” isn’t illegal. I understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t think even this exception applies in most cases like you think. You’re right that parents can often consent for kids, but that’s not absolute. Saying in general parents can consent for most things (like medical treatment, permission to ride carnival rides) isn’t the same as saying they can consent “on the kids behalf” to tapping the kid without his or her knowledge. Don’t take my word for it, listen to the courts of Washington and Michigan, as just two examples. They already disagree with you. They both say that under Washington, and federal and Michigan law, respectively, that parents can’t consent on their kids’ behalf to covert wiretapping of the kid by the parent.
What’s more, parental consent might not even matter. Some states require both parties to consent to tapping or taping, others are ok with just one party consenting. All the parental consent in the world doesn’t allow a California mother to tap her California daughter’s phone call or email to her California boyfriend, for example, as both parties have to consent in California.
There’s probably some state that may say a parent can consent on their kids behalf to covert wiretapping, and if that state is also a one-party consent state, and if the call stays in that state, and if the feds. in that circuit don’t already think the other way and decide to adopt the state court’s reasoning for the federal laws there, then it might not be illegal in that case. All in all that’s an awful narrow exception. I think you can safely say that its illegal to tap your kids.
@rhombopteryx: listen, an excerpt from that first case says everything you need to know:
it’s not a violation of federal law. period. it may be a violation of state law if your particular state requires dual-consent. even so, some dual-consent laws are written expressly for the purpose of defining whether the evidence is admissible in court. & even if it is illegal, is it enforced? i live in connecticut & although it is a dual-consent state, parents are encouraged to monitor their kids’ electronic activities.
Let’s look at it this way, if a parent cannot keep tabs on their children without the use of these tools, the children are obviously more tech saavy than their parents. What makes you think that the kids can’t just circumvent these steps? So the parents are alienating their children, and still cannot keep tabs on them. Let me give you a bit of an example here:
I got my first computer when I was 12. This was back in the days of DOS 5 and Windows 3.1. Back when the computers had security locks on them to prevent powering on the computer. Well, I used to stay up all night playing video games, so my parents decided to lock the computer. Well, first I figured out how to pick those round locks with two paper clips. Then, after fiddling around with the internals on the computer, I found out how to bypass the lock by simply unplugging the jumpers from the mainboard. When my parents found this out (probably by realizing that the lock no longer worked), they installed a start up application manager (remember, computers used to boot into DOS, not Windows) that was password protected. So, I realized that if I booted the computer with the DOS disk, I would bypass the app and get right into DOS to play my video games. Then they decided to remove the power cord at night. I bought my own. It was a cold war, and guess what, unless you as a parent are a sys admin, the kids are always going to win. And if you are, just get a CFS enabled firewall, etc… Otherwise, why bother?
On a side note, that may have been the reason why I got into technology and now have a good job as a systems architect. So who knows, maybe pressing your kids to find ways around snooping will lead to lucrative careers?
@mac-phisto:
My point is that it is illegal, including under the federal law, with some exceptions. I think you are over-focusing on the exceptions, and I’m sure lawyers could find even more cases to support them too. I don’t disagree that there are exceptions, but I’m trying to say that finding whether the combination of jurisdictions, statutes, and cases leave you in the “exceptions” category is tricky and narrow, and that’s before you even think about the person on the other end of the call or email. You may like the logic of the exceptions, they fit neatly with your ideas of “implied” consent, but I’m saying they still are exceptions.
So we obviously disagree on whether your exceptions swallow my general rule
You’re also reading the first case far too wide – just because one court says it has (in some cases, and read those cases for their own limitations, too) been interpreted one way, doesn’t mean other courts haven’t said exactly the opposite. It’s a long jump from that half-sentence acknowledgement in a case that ultimately disagreed with you to your assertion that “it’s not a violation of federal law. period.”
The second case, for example, says it is a violation of federal law. period. The court says:
I’ll leave it to a lawyer to find out if you have some exception that may make your case special, the plain words of the law notwithstanding, but I think its a very big risk to operate under the assumption that you might fall under the exceptions and might not be breaking state and federal laws, when people in roughly your situation have been found to be breaking the law.