Big Brother Isn't Hiding
I have a rant, my dear friends.
While I was home at Thanksgiving, we often had the TV running in the background, for football or the news or what-have-you. And I saw a particular commercial perhaps a dozen times, and every single time, it made me acid-spittingly angry.
The commercial is for the Verizon Hum, which is apparently a little widget one plugs into one's car that will them bean information to one's smartphone. There was one commercial for it that was fine; it was basically selling the Hum as a variation on OnStar, where it can tell you if you need to call a mechanic or will phone help if you are in a car crash, etc. This is a usage that is reasonable.
However.
The commercial I saw a dozen times was promoting it as a means of letting parents track their newly-minted teenage drivers. Hum apparently also lets you set a maximum speed for your teenager to drive, set boundaries of where she (and yes, naturally, the teenager in the commercial presents as female) is allowed to be, and notifies the parent, via their cell phone, if their child has decided to swan off to the beach/the club/their date's house instead of being at school/at a study party/etc.
I am having difficulty distilling into actual words (vs. incoherent frothing) how furious and unsettled I am by this.
Part of it is the possibility for abuse: the first thing I thought when I saw this was "Jesus, this gives an abusive partner SO MUCH control." Want to know if your partner has gone to the doctor, to a shelter, to see her friends, is she really at work when she says she is? Well, just plug this widget in and have at! You'll never wonder where your partner is again! You'll know EVERY STEP SHE TAKES. Reproductive coercion becomes much simpler: did she go to Planned Parenthood? Oh, hey, she said she was going out with friends but she's at the house of That Guy From Work! Now you can PROVE she's lying to you!
(NB: Obviously not only women are subject to abusive partners.)
Even more than the possibility for abusive partners to exploit this, what kills me is what we're teaching our teenagers by having this thing exist. Expect to be spied on. Mom is watching you. She knows where you're going and how fast you're driving. Are you a teenager who wants to go to Planned Parenthood for contraceptives but didn't want to tell your mom? Up the creek without a paddle. Are you an LGBT teen in a family that doesn't respect you? I sure hope you didn't drive your mom's car to the local community center. Or your boyfriend/girlfriend's house. Or the rally for a political cause that is not popular with your parents. (Obviously this doesn't only apply to teens. Want to make sure your kid is behaving on campus? Make sure he didn't go on a road trip the night before the big exam!)
Maybe my perspective on this is skewed. I grew up in the 80s/90s, and my parents were strict but fair. I told them where I was going, and I went there. (In fairness I would not have dreamed of going somewhere other than where I said I was, because I did not want the consequences, and I knew my mom would find out, because for one thing I'm awful at lying and for another, you know, Mom. Very good at finding things out.) I was not often forbidden from going places I wanted to go, but I also wanted to go places that were reasonably safe: school, my job, a friend's house, the library, the mall. Because I was allowed to go the places I actually wanted to go, I didn't have a reason to rebel. But at the same time, I doubt my parents would have put such a thing on my car, even had it been available at the time. It's just not their style.
I had friends in high school whose parents absolutely would have put this garbage on their cars, had they even been allowed to drive a car on their own. I had one friend whose parents followed us everywhere, including buying passes to the skating rink in order to stand at the side and stare at us while we skated in not very interesting circles, to make sure she didn't go somewhere else or talk to boys or I don't even know what. That friend, as I recall, hit the road as soon as she had the option. Other friends did things like put lies in their diaries because they suspected their parents were reading them, and then when confronted, responded with "why are you reading my diary?" I, on the other hand, have had the specific conversation with my mom about how she did not read my diary and would not have, because that was mine. And it's worth noting that, had this technology existed in high school, I absolutely would have helped any of my friends whose parents were using it on them to evade it, because oh my god. (I remember my mom commenting unfavorably on such parenting repeatedly, both when I was in high school and still now.)
I am very troubled, to put it mildly, that this is how this item is being marketed. Although I guess there's something to be said for yelling at the top of one's lungs HEY WE'RE BUILDING SPYWARE DO YOU WANT SPYWARE FOR YOUR KIDS TO FORCE THEM TO DECIDE BETWEEN PRIVACY AND MOBILITY rather than just sneaking all of these features into the OnStar-esque service and not talking about them. But the fact that it's supposed to be a selling point horrifies me.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1163042.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.
While I was home at Thanksgiving, we often had the TV running in the background, for football or the news or what-have-you. And I saw a particular commercial perhaps a dozen times, and every single time, it made me acid-spittingly angry.
The commercial is for the Verizon Hum, which is apparently a little widget one plugs into one's car that will them bean information to one's smartphone. There was one commercial for it that was fine; it was basically selling the Hum as a variation on OnStar, where it can tell you if you need to call a mechanic or will phone help if you are in a car crash, etc. This is a usage that is reasonable.
However.
The commercial I saw a dozen times was promoting it as a means of letting parents track their newly-minted teenage drivers. Hum apparently also lets you set a maximum speed for your teenager to drive, set boundaries of where she (and yes, naturally, the teenager in the commercial presents as female) is allowed to be, and notifies the parent, via their cell phone, if their child has decided to swan off to the beach/the club/their date's house instead of being at school/at a study party/etc.
I am having difficulty distilling into actual words (vs. incoherent frothing) how furious and unsettled I am by this.
Part of it is the possibility for abuse: the first thing I thought when I saw this was "Jesus, this gives an abusive partner SO MUCH control." Want to know if your partner has gone to the doctor, to a shelter, to see her friends, is she really at work when she says she is? Well, just plug this widget in and have at! You'll never wonder where your partner is again! You'll know EVERY STEP SHE TAKES. Reproductive coercion becomes much simpler: did she go to Planned Parenthood? Oh, hey, she said she was going out with friends but she's at the house of That Guy From Work! Now you can PROVE she's lying to you!
(NB: Obviously not only women are subject to abusive partners.)
Even more than the possibility for abusive partners to exploit this, what kills me is what we're teaching our teenagers by having this thing exist. Expect to be spied on. Mom is watching you. She knows where you're going and how fast you're driving. Are you a teenager who wants to go to Planned Parenthood for contraceptives but didn't want to tell your mom? Up the creek without a paddle. Are you an LGBT teen in a family that doesn't respect you? I sure hope you didn't drive your mom's car to the local community center. Or your boyfriend/girlfriend's house. Or the rally for a political cause that is not popular with your parents. (Obviously this doesn't only apply to teens. Want to make sure your kid is behaving on campus? Make sure he didn't go on a road trip the night before the big exam!)
Maybe my perspective on this is skewed. I grew up in the 80s/90s, and my parents were strict but fair. I told them where I was going, and I went there. (In fairness I would not have dreamed of going somewhere other than where I said I was, because I did not want the consequences, and I knew my mom would find out, because for one thing I'm awful at lying and for another, you know, Mom. Very good at finding things out.) I was not often forbidden from going places I wanted to go, but I also wanted to go places that were reasonably safe: school, my job, a friend's house, the library, the mall. Because I was allowed to go the places I actually wanted to go, I didn't have a reason to rebel. But at the same time, I doubt my parents would have put such a thing on my car, even had it been available at the time. It's just not their style.
I had friends in high school whose parents absolutely would have put this garbage on their cars, had they even been allowed to drive a car on their own. I had one friend whose parents followed us everywhere, including buying passes to the skating rink in order to stand at the side and stare at us while we skated in not very interesting circles, to make sure she didn't go somewhere else or talk to boys or I don't even know what. That friend, as I recall, hit the road as soon as she had the option. Other friends did things like put lies in their diaries because they suspected their parents were reading them, and then when confronted, responded with "why are you reading my diary?" I, on the other hand, have had the specific conversation with my mom about how she did not read my diary and would not have, because that was mine. And it's worth noting that, had this technology existed in high school, I absolutely would have helped any of my friends whose parents were using it on them to evade it, because oh my god. (I remember my mom commenting unfavorably on such parenting repeatedly, both when I was in high school and still now.)
I am very troubled, to put it mildly, that this is how this item is being marketed. Although I guess there's something to be said for yelling at the top of one's lungs HEY WE'RE BUILDING SPYWARE DO YOU WANT SPYWARE FOR YOUR KIDS TO FORCE THEM TO DECIDE BETWEEN PRIVACY AND MOBILITY rather than just sneaking all of these features into the OnStar-esque service and not talking about them. But the fact that it's supposed to be a selling point horrifies me.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1163042.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.