I get the impression that many Gen Zers like 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 and people just leave it on, so their social group just knows precisely where they are all the time.
Google Latitude was doing this in 2009 and I knew millennials who used it. Much more widespread now, though.
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.
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.
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, nothing 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…
I never really understood the “I have nothing to hide” mindset.
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.
“It’s not that I have something to hide, I have nothing I want you to see”
This didn’t really resonate with me at all. Can you explain more?
When you says “resonate”, do you mean you don’t understand the sentence? Or do you mean you don’t see why you should care?
Re meaning, the sentence seems blindingly obvious to me. But maybe it isn’t… It means you don’t want privacy because you have something illegal to hide in your house, but because you don’t want to invite anybody in. I really don’t know how to explain it anymore clearly without repeating it verbatim.
If you don’t see why this is important or you think it doesn’t concern you, send me your address and I’ll come around tonite to take pictures of your furniture without your permission.
I’m a bit off-put by your tone, but no, I was being genuine. Saying it doesn’t resonate means whatever was said doesn’t seem as profound or meaningful as it does to the person who said it. So the phrase really means that you want to shut everyone out? I guess that makes sense, given the hostility in your response.
This is arguably the first generation that grew up with zero privacy. Being watched is normal to them - and absolutely horrifying for this Gen-Xer.
Horrifying for this millennial too.
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.
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.
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 being 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.
Yeah I should really have not used the term nowadays. Thing is that folks in the past could not do anything like this to mitigate it. They did not have the option. If you where in the position to need it you might find your decision to not utilize it to be endlessly horrible.
If you where in the position to need it you might find your decision to not utilize it to be endlessly horrible.
It was a choice. I chose to let them risk life and limb doing whatever stupid shit kids do behind their parents’ backs, risk being run over by a car or kidnapped as they walked to school. The risk was very small, and the benefits of letting them grow up with a normal, non-Orwellian childhood far outweighed them. Hell, my generation and those before me grew up like that and survived just fine.
But I agree: if something really bad had happened, I don’t know how I could have lived with myself. And this always weighed heavily on my mind whenever they were late to come home.
Yeah. The other thing is though that if you have a cell phone you are allowing all sorts of companies and maybe governments track you all over the place, but there is an issue with family? Sure they don’t really care so maybe thats a thing but they don’t care till they do which is really wierd. It feels sorta adult to recognize the tracking that is happening and not seeing it as a big deal for the right reasons family wise. Take the opposite. Elderly parents being tracked by adult children. It would be interesting if parents started allowing their children to track them at some age.
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.
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. Now even the social relationship between parents and children has to be extremely toxic and anxiogenic as a basic minimum requirement
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 than 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.
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
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.
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
Business Insider is straight AIDS
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
*rolls D-100* … I disbelieve!
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
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.
My parents could try to convince me to download shit like this.
There was a great Black Mirror episode about constant parental supervision.
Scariest visual novel i ever played was about kids having their privacy personally violated (that is, not generic analytic data, but someone knowing that kid specifically was doing so and so) and just not caring about it.
