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.
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.
You read me wrong my friend. It was nothing more than an honest-to-goodness reply to you. No hostility. Be careful with written discussions, because you don’t see the face of whoever is writing and you tend to slap the state of mind you yourself are in when you read it. Imagine I’m writing this with a smile and that’s pretty much how I wrote it.
You don’t find the quote profound and that’s fair enough. To each his own opinion. Me, I think it’s a perfect description of the core issue of privacy: having the choice not to expose what I don’t want to expose for no other reason that I don’t want to. I don’t want to shut everybody out, I want to freedom to do it if I so choose and not have to justify myself or suffer consequences.
Maybe I’m easily impressed :)
The “have nothing to hide” crew still close the toilet door
The reason I close the toilet door is mainly because I know others don’t want to witness me peeing. If they didn’t care, I wouldn’t care tbh. Everyone’s priorities regarding privacy are different, but I think for every person at least something feels private.
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I don’t know, it’s not like it’s a secret what I’m doing in there. Going to the toilet looks very similar for most people I assume, so it’s not like someone with decent imagination couldn’t know what it looks like anyway. I don’t see the huge difference in whether the door is open or not other than politeness.
To be fair, arguably that is more of a sanitary issue that you don’t want your poo poo particles spreading all over your house each time you flush.
ain’t no one closing the door for that reason
I think you need to find a happy medium. I’ve accepted that I can’t control ALL the data I generate, so I instead aggressively block ads and any other marketing attempts towards me.
Yeah, it all boils down to your threat model. Not everyone has the time, resources, or know-how to self-host everything, so it’s about balancing convenience with privacy, which unfortunately is almost one or the other now.
This is kind of my point. I don’t feel there’s a happy middle right now and unless you go tinfoil hat information is going to get out.
My threat model is basically “do my best to be as private as possible”. But there is limits. I can spend $100 cash on gas or I can spend $100 on my credit card and get 2% back. Obviously I’m going to use my credit card. I still email people who use Gmail, People who have the facebook, instagram, X, etc on their phone has me as a contact, likely with my full name, email address, physical mailing address.
So why do I bother keeping my contacts in a selfhosted NextCloud? Why do I avoid the Google Maps app, or anything google when the wife uses all this stuff and I’m with her 90% of the time? I’m starting to think they have my information already anyway so why not welcome google into my life? I have to keep talking myself into the fact that self hosting is worth the extra work I’m causing myself.
Unfortunately it depends on the individual, so no one can really answer your question but yourself. For me, I draw the line when it personally becomes burdensome to maintain something. For example, I use Bitwarden to manage all my passwords, but I don’t trust myself enough to host and maintain a server and keep it online/secure, so I use their hosted service. I use google drive to store some miscellaneous stuff because of the free 15GB storage, but I don’t store any private files (personal photos, documents, etc.). I use ProtonDrive for more important stuff, and for very confidential files, I encrypt them first. I use google maps for navigation because of reliability and accuracy, but I use a separate google account for it. I know that doesn’t do much, but it keeps some level of separation for me personally. I still maintain a facebook account (although I barely use it) because of family, but I still use a facebook container on firefox and don’t use the mobile app. That plus all the privacy extensions.
The main thing is that it doesn’t have to be black or white. You don’t have to go full hermit, and at the same time you don’t need to fully embed yourself into the google ecosystem. Just do what you can and what you are comfortable with. As they say, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Yeah I think the bigger problem here is that it’s this hard to have reasonable privacy and governments like it that way. They don’t need a warrant to buy info, just to force release. I don’t like google knowing everything about me. I hate the cops being a check away from it.
For me it boils down to principles. You’re totally right and many companies I hate will have alot of my info due to others, but I’ll be damned if I cooperate with them.
Yeah maybe it’s growing up in the closet, but yeah. My wife knows where I am in general all the time, but only because I give her heads up. Nobody else knows more than they need.
It’s not even that I have anything to hide. Aside from not letting my in laws know we’re poly or other such things I’m not really hiding anything. I just don’t see why anyone should know. If someone insists on knowing for no reason then that’s weird and not cool.
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.
Seems a perfect tool for organized bullying. What could go wrong.
Google Latitude was doing this in 2009 and I knew millennials who used it. Much more widespread now, though.
Hey now, don’t assume we all do that. I don’t need the people I talk to knowing that the only places I go are work, my house, and the Chinese food place every other Tuesday. They might think I don’t have anything to do with my life. They would be right, but I don’t want them thinking it!
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.
Yeah. I’m Gen Z. I was really taken aback when my high school friends had apps on their phones that showed their real time locations to each other. I was like “WHY?” and they responded along the lines of “Well why not?”… I have no words…
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.
Aren’t Gen Z kids being raised by Gen X’ers? So wouldn’t it stand to reason that their parents are enabling and pushing this?
Yes. Strange isn’t it?
Gen-Xers are also guilty of letting corporate surveillance happen, thereby letting their children grow under the watchful eye of big data.
I never said my generation was virtuous. In fact, I blame people my age for not affording the next generation what they themselves got to enjoy. Just like we blamed our boomer parents for enjoying the good life after the war and leaving us the crumbs. Little did we know the ones after us would have it even harder.
Mostly, but also younger boomers and older millennials. It’s not as straightforward as it seems when it comes to generations.
Yeah, the whole idea is that kids would be raised by the generation immediately previous by definition, but nowadays that seems Boebert-esque.
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.
You’re trading your own feelings for your kid’s long-term well-being and learning. Many people would take the easy approach because your way is “scary”. Bravery is doing what needs to be done even if you’re afraid.
I’d call that right and proper. It’s what we adults are supposed to do. The number of times I’ve carried a crying infant to get them settled down while I could barely walk from excruciating back pain… It’s our job to take that on.
It’s funny, many of those parents who are tracking their kids would probably say “I sacrifice every day by working long hours so my kids have a warm, safe home” without realizing that giving them a long leash is also a sacrifice of parent’s (willingly take on worry) so kids grow up well.
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.
Nowadays the risk really is compounded, though: not by any of the actual dangers being worse, but instead by adding the new risk of busybodies calling CPS to report you for “neglect” for anything short of extreme helicopter-parenting.
My 21yo soon wants to build out a van and take a chunk of time (6 months?) in between jobs and drive around the States. We’re talking over a year from now, but as the idea has come up in discussion I told him that I’d like to have some form of tracker set up. He’s good with it.
Garmin sell these beacon devices, which can be used to either check in with relatives, or to summon help to their location.
They’re expensive, and intended more for people heading into remote areas, but might give you both some peace of mind, without tracking his every move.
My sister had trackers in the trunk of all of her kids cars. She told them it was there, they never had a problem with it. The clear signal wasn’t mom and dad are watching you… it was “don’t get into mischief in your own car” lol
Pretty good advice really 🤷🏻♂️
GenZ here. I don’t think so.
My family tried to make me install the Spy360 crap last year.
My GPS spoofer made them regret that 🙂. A few check ins all around the world later (and other chaos) and they basically asked me to uninstall it. Lmao.
It pays to be more tech literate than your parents.
Back on topic, I don’t know very many people who have this thing who actually like it, so idk where the hell this article gets it’s sources…
Please tell me you’re educating your family in privacy issues. This tracking circumstance is an excellent opportunity to approach it with a education mindset instead of the stereotypical kids/parents conflict.
Check out www.theprivacydad.com it’s a great starting point for parents who don’t know tech enough to realize what’s going on.
They don’t care. We have ring doorbells and everything, no matter how many times I point to examples of these things being used for evil, they just brush it off.
They’re the “I have nothing to hide” and “I don’t care” type. And there’s no convincing them.
I’ll check out this link, though
EDIT: To clarify, I had resisted it and argued against it for a few months before it was actually installed. Using a Pinephone during that time stopped the stupidly invasive thing from working and I wasn’t using my S10e as my main phone for that reason 🤣
Install cameras in their bedroom that streams to YouTube or Twitch 24/7. See if they really have nothing to hide.
Holy based. I always thought it’d be funny to get into a little cyber war with someone, so thanks for the laugh.
No, you love it.
?
He is making a joke out of the article saying that GenZ like being tracked
How old are you if you dont mind? Gen Z seems to be mid-late 90s, no?
- GenZ are who born between 1995 - 2010
Thx
OP this post is just outrage bait. Business insider? Really?
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I say let them cook.
We’ve had twenty years of bullshit Gen X-written Millennials vs Boomers, it’s past time Gen Z gets some attention.
Business Insider? Hardly knew 'er.
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.
That sounds far more (and acceptably so in my view) stochastic tho, like, do they have on-demand “lets see where lol is right now even though I have zero need to know currently” or is it just like u verbally check-in when they Signal u?
We just verbally check in and I’m totally fine with saying where I am. I believe the important thing here is trust. If, hypothetically, we were able to set up something privacy-respecting that communicated my GPS location to my parents 24/7, I wouldn’t be a fan of it. It’d feel like my parents are monitoring me because they don’t trust me to be truthful about my whereabouts.
If you actually need to, u can “share” as like a thing to attach your actual GPS location in Signal, no different from sharing a pic or file or dictation
True but most of the time I don’t have GPS enabled anyway lol
Samesies! Just wish there was a quicker toggle than Settings > Privacy > Location etc
I am Gen Z and I’m not fine with that. I chose to go to college far from where I grew up so that I would be independent and free and do stuff on my own accord, like buying a motorcycle.
The plural of anecdotes isn’t data. You not being fine with that doesn’t mean the majority aren’t.
They never said the majority wasn’t.
Exactly! I appreciate hearing about a different point of view.
Are Gen Z pro organ donation?
I have an organ donor on my license. But I’m not trying to kill myself, I’m just following my heart.
It seems like fewer people in my generation have motorcycles because 1) we have less money (although you can save by replacing a car with one) than previous generations, and 2) the older generations constantly push the narrative that having a motorcycle is equivalent to having a death wish, which circles back to the point that they shouldn’t be spying on us all the time.
You’re taking a line and putting it on the road against planes.
Follow your heart all you want, my math teacher in high-school had a motorcycle. Broke his collar bone, fractured his skull, broke his leg and had road rash. Much like smoking cigarettes, you’re allowed to take your life into your own hands. Don’t convince yourself that you’re somehow doing otherwise.
I’m being as safe as I can. I’m ATGATT and I started on a beginner bike without much power.
Listen, again, you can do whatever you want.
Do not pretend it isn’t dangerous. This behavior will be what turns you into someone like my math teacher.
You sound so paranoid about safety I get the feeling you literally live in a suit of bubble-wrap. If they wanted your finger wagging they’d have asked you for it
Sure buddy, you’ll never die.
The plural of anecdote isnt data. I’ve been riding for 45 years and I’m still here.
Data shows the vast majority of 2 vehicle motorcycle accidents are the fault of the other vehicle
Jesus christ, I don’t care what you risk your life doing.
Claiming that, somehow, riding isn’t dangerous or risky when it’s the other drivers on the road that are at fault is fucking brain damaged.
All it takes is one, and the rest of your life is fucked. I don’t give a shit what you decide is right for you. Genuinely.
There’s significantly less chance of getting fucked for life if yiu actually wear proper safety gear. Doesn’t stop the danger of others, though. But it can lower damage.
That’s great, I’m glad you make these choices for yourself.
Is that an argument against motorcycles?
Is what?
What?
I know it’s just some rag bait nonsense, but I know as a fact most teens would never want their parents to constantly know where they are and monitor them constantly.
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
That cant be real—holy shit. Thats worse than picking on kids that dont have an iPhone™️ or any phone or don’t have “the blue bubbles” from using iMessage (which nobody should ever use honestly)
Fight the system, if someone laughs at you for having a green bubble, just counter by saying you are special and they are just normies like everyone else with blue bubble.
I go even further and say “if you want the real and sick blue bubbles, get Signal”.
Otherwise, enjoy getting spied on and having all your data handed over from Apple and also iMessage is dogshit. Half the time it doesnt even get delivered/received and you have to literally call or message the person through some real stable means of communication to troubleshoot
Imma not even get started on iMessage --> skeleton key/zero-day purpose (this is conjecture but I vehemently reject any argument to the contrary)
Yeah, those people are delusional, but that’s what you get when you raise kids in a world where having expensive shit is more important than teaching them frugality, money saving, and being nice to each other.
Blue bubbles go brrrr, doesn’t matter the kid doesn’t have attention span due to watching TikTok all day, or eating junk food cuz parents order fast food and have frozen pizza every day for dinner.
…expensive shit…eating junk food…fast food…frozen pizza…
You’re hitting dangerously close to home here, lol
I mean, I do it because I want to, not because I have to.
Okay, sometimes I am just lazy and not doing it might make me regret it later on.
do it
Err—could you clarify what you mean?
See the thing is I’m fine with it because I know my parents wouldn’t have spied on me 24/7. If they were helicopter parents and DID check where I was every hour of the day I wouldn’t be fine with it.
My parents have always been VERY restrictive about anything but computers (just because they don’t understand them). However, I asked them if they would do it and they told me that’s damn outrageous
Used to share my location with my dad until he kept sending me a McDonald’s order everytime I was at McDonald’s. Then turned it off, lol. My mum still has it.
Wow, the survey conducted by the company and spokesperson for the company all agree!
In this thread: people not understanding sampling bias. Of course everyone here likes privacy, and had friends who think similarly. It’s a privacy themed community on a niche tech forum.
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
This comes off like those articles about how office workers “actually hate working from home - can’t wait to return to office!”
Absolute bullshit.
hate
Business Insider is straight AIDS
Hey, thats not very nice to AIDS, at least AIDS might be cureable someday and isn’t—I dunno, like—BusinessInsider.
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
This makes me sad. My brother and his wife always tracked my niece and nephew, and I feel like it did more harm than good. I remember agreeing to drive my nephew to buy fireworks, and on the way home I swung by Target to pick up my best friend a gift for his wedding, and my sister in law called my nephew and threatened to take his phone away because he wasn’t where he said he was going. Granted, I could have called, but it was a quick stop, and I didn’t know at the time they were watching him 24/7.
It is important to differentiate between able to know and contact tracking to enable controlling behavior. Knowing to help with communication and transportation arrangements is great, but nitpicking an extra stop on the way home to Target? Sheesh.
This is really what it comes down to, I think. When my newborn daughter gets old enough to have a phone and go out on your own, you bet I’m going to make sure I am able to know where she is at all times.
But I’m going to trust her to do the right thing and make good decisions, so I won’t be demanding she go only where I designate. Kids need to be able to do their own thing and learn through experience. The better lesson is to have them check in with a text every now and then, because it’s the respectful thing to do with family.
Phone-as-EPIRB is truly one of the biggest benefits.
I would suggest only having instantaneous location history or very short like 10min to avoid the temptation to pry.
“Wait, you mean you’re going to take away my phone so you’ll have no idea where I am, ever, you stupid fucking dink? Yeah, that’s fucking brilliant. Shut up and make me a pie.”
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.
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
Omg, i really, really don’t like that. It took a little while before i began noticing it but now i can’t ignore it anytime it’s happening. I simply won’t watch those videos because i won’t be able to focus for very long. It can be especially jarring how they’ll cut from one sentence into the next one and the editing makes it seem like their head glitched into another spot. I won’t follow any YouTubers that do this stuff, I’ll find something else to watch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
the first time I saw someone watching youtube videos on like double speed was eye opening haha
Not gonna lie, I do this for podcasts more to save data and I def am not allergic to silence, per se but I definitely dislike having pure quiet around me.
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
