Which parent are you facing the digital surveillance of your child?
While some parents rely on trust, others carry out regular checks
From time to time, should you take a look at the smartphone given to your offspring or not? The first months of using the device, parents generally have the code that they themselves defined with their children and which allows them to unlock the screen.
Do they allow themselves, subsequently, to introduce these few figures which allow the doors to an intimate world to be opened? The question divides.
Some parents rely on trust. “I would never allow myself to check messages from my 13-year-old daughter. I would have the impression of reading his diary,” explains Isabelle, who is approaching fifty
Others turn a blind eye, often overwhelmed by technology. They no longer have the code – which has since changed – and have never been interested in Instagram or Musical.ly. “I never check his smartphone. I would also be too afraid of being shocked by what I might discover there,” admits a father. Or a mother of 16-year-old twins who would like to have access to her children's phones but who simply cannot do so because "they sleep with it since it acts as an alarm clock."
“I can’t stop reading his messages”
Conversely, there is a whole population of stricter parents.
“I made my 12-year-old son leave his phone in the living room from 8 p.m. But it lights up continuously in the evening, showing notifications of multiple messages on WhatsApp. I can't help but read some of them, his mother admits half-heartedly. However, I am very annoyed when the conversation gets out of hand.
These curious, controlling or just worried parents are apparently not isolated cases. “I forced my 13-year-old daughter to give me her access codes. I don't want to verify what she writes, but I just want her to know that there is a safeguard. I hope that she is more careful about what she publishes,” explains Sophie.
On the other hand, Stéphane, father of two teenagers, wants to know everything: access codes, user names, passwords. “I put filters in and I control everything they do. I follow them on Facebook and Twitter. And I definitely don't want to find out that they created an account that I don't have access to. Otherwise, things might go badly.”
Ditto for a mother of a 14-year-old girl who checks everything that is published and who selects friends “I do a regular check once a week. On the other hand, I did not use a filter because I myself am much more effective than a filter.
Like any good parent, I delivered the first phone with warnings, advice and hard-earned life lessons about the dangers of misuse. But most of the time there were rules. There would be no devices at mealtimes, ever, so as not to become one of those families who sit in speechless silence as each member stares at their own screen. Adult content restrictions would be implemented as I intended. Later, after discovering that my daughter had secreted a contraband Chromebook into her room to watch friends of end of the night , all devices would be sequestered in the master bedroom overnight.
And that rule was above all: the devices all belong to me and my wife, and we have the right to see anything and everything on them.
Until WIRED asked me to write this story, it didn't occur to me that there was an ethical debate surrounding all of this. I have always been of the opinion that not only are parents justified in monitoring what their children are doing online, but that it is in fact their moral obligation to do so. Not monitoring your children's digital footprints is irresponsible parental behavior. Most parents agree. Pew says that 61% of parents checked their children's web history .
There are a number of reasons why monitoring your child's phone makes sense. These range from the relatively mild (they might neglect their homework) to the severe (they might talk to drug dealers).
Cyberbullying is a particular concern, and it is a true epidemic; 42% of children say they have been bullied online, according to i-Safe, and 35% have been actively threatened. Among these children, 58% never talk to their parents about it.
Likewise, child predators are probably a bigger problem online than off.
An even worse opposite scenario: in October, a mother entrusted his son to police because she found videos of school shootings on her phone, potentially avoiding a copycat crime. The parents of a murderer must surely be haunted by the idea that they could have avoided disaster by simply scrolling through their child's phone every now and then. And when something bad happens, parents are taken care of: you can be legally accused of your children's criminal behavior, like after a shooting incident in 2018 at a college in Indiana.
Still, am I a bad person for being suspicious? Am I guilty of having invaded my children's privacy?
In truth, few people seem to think so, to the point that it's barely a point of discussion. Much of the legal conversation about children's rights to privacy today revolves around " sharing ", when a child is exploited for profit, for example, in an embarrassing YouTube video posted by a parent. When it comes to digital surveillance, the law is clear and absolute: children have no expectation or right to privacy from their parents. There's even a bit of science behind it. Linda Charmaraman, director of the Wellesley Centers for Women's Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab, states: “There is evidence that parental monitoring of online and mobile content is associated with less problematic Internet behaviors, such as Internet addiction and being the perpetrator of cyberbullying. "
It took some work to find someone who would support the counterargument, and it was Shoshanna Zuboff , the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism . She argues that monitoring your children is a step down a slippery slope toward paranoia and authoritarianism, and that as parents we allow companies to profit by selling us products. Ring Doorbell cameras and GPS trackers.
“Everyone loves their children, right?” Zuboff said. “We want them to be safe, and fear is a big motivator. Amazon wants you to have a monitoring device because it's such a dangerous world. But where does this dangerous world come from?
Zuboff argues during a lengthy phone call that we need to stand up to political rhetoric and learn to build trust with our children rather than monitor them. Otherwise, she says, we're essentially teaching them that privacy violations are OK and encouraging them to cover their tracks. “We need to give our children the opportunity to make promises and keep them.”
It's a wonderful sentiment, but my rebuttal is that children simply don't have the life experience or wisdom to know what behaviors are acceptable, and it's just too easy for them to take bad online decisions, promises or not. My daughter can't even make her bed reliably.
The problem is that it's difficult to monitor your children with any level of consistency. Teenage girls send more than 4,000 SMS per month (as of 2015), and that's a lot of emojis and 'kk's to sift through. Most of it is harmless nonsense, and it's easy to get lulled into ambivalence. As my children have gotten older, my diligence has fallen. Not out of confidence, but out of laziness .
The best protection: It remains to be pushed back the age of the first smartphone for a young child who does not yet have the maturity to be able to avoid all its pitfalls
An alternative solution to today's very fashionable smartphones exists, the connected watch for children , it allows you to contact your child at any time, know where they are... and much more
And which parent are you facing the digital surveillance of your child?
Tell us in the comments, your opinion interests us
