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Google releases smart watch for kids

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Re: Google releases smart watch for kids

#521

Post by altacc »

gofreddygo wrote: post #426
khazhoux wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This constant tracking of kids is unnecessary and dangerous. Generations of kids survived without their parents needing to know their location at all times. This topic is always so alarmist. I have kids and a spouse. We all have Find My and Location Sharing on our phones. I don't FrEaK oUt that my kids are going to die if I'm not tracking their every movement. But it's nice to glance at Find My app and see if the k…

Oh jeez. I'm so glad i had none of this goofy tracking gump growing up. If teenage me had something that tracked every location, and I knew it, and my friends had them on too, I'd probably miss out on a lot of stuff I cherish. I had time limits, and a hard immovable low budget that made a lot of the bad stuff impossible. The rest was up to us to figure out and learn and improvise as we go. I'm better for those learni…

I agree with you that tracking as a teenager is not ideal, although teenagers track each other's locations incessantly at least they should be free from their parents tracking. However this watch is aimed at younger children than teenagers.

My kids started walking to school and friends houses at 7 and are still preteen. After school they can be anywhere as they'll go to a friend's house or just hang out somewhere for a while on the way home. Neither of my kids has a device that I can track, only one of them as a dumb Nokia phone, which end up being left at home most of the time.

If I want to know where they are to reduce worry then either I have to call them, which feels intrusive to what they're doing; or it relies on their friend's parent letting me know where they are. I know people who worry a lot more than us, so a non-intrusive location finding of a 10 year old would reduce parental worry without making the child feel like they were being hassled. Currently these parents are giving their young kids smart phones, often without any parental controls, and I think that's a lot worse than a watch option. My main worry with these watches is about how good the security & controls are on them to prevent unauthorized messages or calls.

Re: Google releases smart watch for kids

#522

Post by musha68k »

broeng wrote: post #504
gofreddygo wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh jeez. I'm so glad i had none of this goofy tracking gump growing up. If teenage me had something that tracked every location, and I knew it, and my friends had them on too, I'd probably miss out on a lot of stuff I cherish. I had time limits, and a hard immovable low budget that made a lot of the bad stuff impossible. The rest was up to us to figure out and learn and improvise as we go. I'm better for those learni…

I have a toddler, and that has changed my view on it a bit, from the same starting point you are expressing. With the social pressure going on, I expect she'll get a smartphone earlier that I'd honestly prefer (not that we are there any time soon), and quite a bit before she's a teenager. So I honestly expect we'll be location sharing for a while, but I don't expect it to continue into the teenage years. By then it'l…

This trend is about to reverse.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and other books and investigations on the topic of childhood smartphone usage are only starting to get traction.

Try to hold out as long as you can.

Re: Google releases smart watch for kids

#523

Post by silisili »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #106

Ugh, I threw up a little in my mouth just from the headline. This constant tracking of kids is unnecessary and dangerous. Generations of kids survived without their parents needing to know their location at all times. And yes, I totally admit, some kids (very few actually depending on the locale) didn't survive. But we've traded this false sense of "safety" for kids that are so risk averse it is seriously negatively…

Absolutely agreed. Google is by far the worst offender in my house, so I've blocked it completely outside of search and email. But those are next.

YouTube is where the real sinister stuff lay. I walked in one day to see my kid watching childish cartoons, but talking about abortion, child death, foster homes and divorce, etc. And not in like an educational way, but in a 'mommy doesn't love daddy anymore so got an abortion and now is going to send me to a foster home.'

Obviously I was mortified and angry, and asked why she searched this weird shit and she said it was recommended so just watched it. And she was right, it was recommended. It's completely full of garbage topics pretending to be child stuff. There's even one huge channel that appears to be Russian softcore porn making dubbed child content.

Sorry for the rant, but do not trust your children to Google or any other big tech company.

Re: Google releases smart watch for kids

#524

Post by [deleted] »

khazhoux wrote: post #316
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #106

Ugh, I threw up a little in my mouth just from the headline. This constant tracking of kids is unnecessary and dangerous. Generations of kids survived without their parents needing to know their location at all times. And yes, I totally admit, some kids (very few actually depending on the locale) didn't survive. But we've traded this false sense of "safety" for kids that are so risk averse it is seriously negatively…

> This constant tracking of kids is unnecessary and dangerous. Generations of kids survived without their parents needing to know their location at all times. This topic is always so alarmist. I have kids and a spouse. We all have Find My and Location Sharing on our phones. I don't FrEaK oUt that my kids are going to die if I'm not tracking their every movement. But it's nice to glance at Find My app and see if the k…

[deleted]

Re: Google releases smart watch for kids

#525

Post by kelnos »

prpl wrote: post #436
BenFranklin100 wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good lord. As I recall, a big part of growing up was spending time and doing things my parents didn’t want me to do. The idea of them tracking me is super creepy, as is tracking one’s spouse for that matter.

It’s also possible to be more liberal than your parents were with respect to expecting teenage experimentation but still want to know why your kid/spouse isn’t home within an hour of when you expected them and they aren’t responding to texts. Parents are still adults with lives and have better things to do than sit around watching a dot on a map. “huh, I guess they went to get some boba, we’ll just go get dinner with…

If the main reason seems to be that you want to know where they are when they've decided not to answer the phone... maybe that's fine that you don't know. If you're expecting them for dinner, and they decide to do something else instead, they should learn that consequence: if they don't come home when they're expected for dinner, they don't get dinner with the family.

I don't have kids, so of course my opinion is irrelevant. But I do remember decently well what it was like to be a teenager in the 90s. I was a "good kid" and didn't get up to much that my parents didn't want me to do, but a) I did do some things my parents didn't want me to do, things that they would figure out real-time if they'd been able to track me, and b) despite me doing things they didn't want me to do, everything turned out fine. The idea that I wouldn't have been able to do those things, and the feeling of being trapped and constantly surveilled... that's gross.

And... you mention spouse, too? I would never let my spouse track me 24/7, and would never ask her or expect her to allow me to track her. To me, that would be creepy and an invasion of privacy. I get that some people do this (and know some of them), but I just think it's weird.

Re: Google releases smart watch for kids

#526

Post by asp_hornet »

wmf wrote: post #3

Smartwatches may be an overlooked answer to the kid phone conundrum. Watches have the communication and location tracking that parents demand without the distraction of phones.

Overlooked answer? Aren't you are literally describing a mobile phone. You know, before they were smart phones with distractions. The nice thing about this solution is its less likely to be forgotten because its on the wrist.

Re: Google releases smart watch for kids

#527

Post by kelnos »

donw wrote: post #443
gofreddygo wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh jeez. I'm so glad i had none of this goofy tracking gump growing up. If teenage me had something that tracked every location, and I knew it, and my friends had them on too, I'd probably miss out on a lot of stuff I cherish. I had time limits, and a hard immovable low budget that made a lot of the bad stuff impossible. The rest was up to us to figure out and learn and improvise as we go. I'm better for those learni…

To be fair: the only reason I want trackers for my kids is so that I can find them if (a) they run off and get lost; or, (b) they get nabbed. The average small child can't say what Dad's phone number is, or even his full name. Young kids have really limited awareness of their surroundings, and can get lost very easily. Add multiple kids into the mix and it can be a real challenge to keep them all together when you're…

> The average small child can't say what Dad's phone number is, or even his full name

Is that really true? I guess I'm not sure what the age cutoff for "small child" is. I was at Disneyland with my seven-year-old nephew recently, and he was able to immediately and without hesitation recite both his mother's and father's phone numbers. Incidentally, I still remember the phone number of the house my family moved out of when I was five years old, nearly 40 years ago.

Admittedly, I don't think my four-year-old niece knows her parents' phone numbers, and my other nephew, who is two, certainly does not. But that's why their parents don't let them out of sight in public.

And yes, there's the possibility that someone screws up, and they get lost. But I'm not convinced that assuaging fear of that is worth the trade-off of getting kids used to being tracked 24/7. (Regarding kidnapping, nowadays only the dumbest of kidnappers won't know to spot a smartwatch or smartphone on a kid and ditch them immediately. And regardless, the risk of a kid getting kidnapped is likely orders of magnitude lower than their parents might believe it to be.)

Re: Google releases smart watch for kids

#528

Post by Dylan16807 »

vel0city wrote: post #422
Dylan16807 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will note that a way to reach out does not need to involve location tracking capabilities.

No, but it becomes a lot more useful when your kid calls scared and barely able to talk and have generally no idea where they are.

Even in that situation, at most you need some way to get a location at that moment when they chose to reach out to you, not tracking.

Re: Google releases smart watch for kids

#529

Post by kelnos »

kaba0 wrote: post #465
1oooqooq wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

kids today will also remember in 30yrs from now how's they had so much freedom... they just had to leave their watch (btw, apple have had kid mode on their watches for a while now) in the school locker and they could roam around, heck maybe even get an uber to some place

If you worry about your parent knowing your exact location, then maybe it’s not a healthy parent-child relationship to begin with. They don’t have to sit at school, and they can wander around, without telling me — but if there is a serious trouble then it’s in everyone’s interest to have a up to date location data.

> If you worry about your parent knowing your exact location, then maybe it’s not a healthy parent-child relationship to begin with.

Are you kidding me? I remember being a teenager in the 90s. I had a great relationship with my parents (not perfect, of course, but who does?), and I absolutely would not have wanted them to have my exact location on-demand. I didn't get up to all that much that they didn't want me to do, but being tracked would mean I would not have done those things, and would have missed out on valuable experiences, because I would have been afraid that they'd randomly check up on me when I was in a place I wasn't supposed to be. (And no, I'm not talking about drinking or drugs or anything like that.)

Re: Google releases smart watch for kids

#530

Post by yurishimo »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #359
pohuing wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simply called using the landline back in the day, but I grew up in a small village in Germany where roaming the fields unsupervised was the norm.

Thank you to share. My experience (different countries) was similar to yours. Do you know anyone who grew up in a big city in the same era? I do. They didn't experience the same type of freedoms. Their parents were much more concerned about crime/kidnapping/"the boogey man".

Anecdotally, where I live in a more rural area now, it's common to see kids out riding bikes during the day. Contrast that, I work in the city and unless it's right after when school lets out, I don't see nearly as many kids just riding around. Perhaps it's because they really stay inside the neighborhood or culdasac, but the city is small enough and well connected (Netherlands) with bike infrastructure, that I would expect to see more kids around.

Perhaps this is also influenced by the number of expats in the larger cities and those people are unsure of the safety/normalcy aspect and tend to lean towards caution? I'd be interested to see some data!

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