Judith Shulevitz shudders at how easy it’s become to be a one-mother NSA:
For the iPhone I will soon be buying [my son], I can get an iPhone Spy Stick, to be plugged into a USB port while he sleeps; it downloads Web histories, e-mails, and text messages, even the deleted ones. Or I can get Mobile Spy, software that would let me follow, in real time, his online activity and geographical location. Also available are an innocent-looking iPhone Dock Camera that would recharge his battery while surreptitiously recording video in his room, and a voice-activated audio monitor, presumably for the wild parties he’s going to throw when his father and I go out of town.
Had such science-fiction-worthy products somehow become acceptable while I wasn’t watching? Apparently they had.
When ZDNet conducted an online debate about parental espionage a few weeks ago, 82 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that parents “should be able to observe the full data feeds of what their children post and receive via Facebook, text, email, and any other application or service used on their devices. It is a parent’s right to ‘violate’ their child’s notion of ‘privacy.’” When a media researcher interviewed 21 parents in three Canadian cities in 2011, only three said that they had faith in their children and that they found such hypervigilance “harmful.”
Nora Caplan-Brickler wonders if teenagers might be better at monitoring each other than adults ever could be:
There’s already good evidence that letting teenagers police themselves can work. An organization called Students for Sensible Drug Policy has long advocated “Good Samaritan Policies” (or “amnesty” policies), which can encourage kids to report their own and their friends’ binge drinking and drug abuse by pledging that they won’t get in trouble for calling 911. Good sex-ed policies can create a similar environment around reporting harassment and assault (though offering anonymity or amnesty in those cases is more ethically jumbled). A study at Cornell in 2006 showed that amnesty policies had increased the number of 911 calls—some life-saving—while the level of drinking and debauchery stayed constant. When it counts, asking kids to play NSA on one another can work.
The Dish 