Most parents of high schoolers spend hours checking their kids' every move, but I didn't want a smartphone when my children were teens. Instead, I insisted they tell me their destination when they went out at night. I'd sometimes follow up with another parent for confirmation, and I'm sure my kids weren't always where they said they'd be. But they usually came home by curfew and always paid their cell bills on time.
If you track your children's location using tech, you're not alone. A 2024 survey by Pew Research Center found that one in four parents monitor their kids' whereabouts using GPS. But is that private data safe? Consumer Reports evaluated 15 popular kid-tracking devices, and here's what they found. Overall, Apple's AirTags and Apple Watches, eufy's SmartTrack Link, and Garmin's Bounce performed well when it came to privacy and data security.
Amazon Ring's Super Bowl ad offered a vision of our streets that should leave every person unsettled about the company's goals for disintegrating our privacy in public. In the ad, disguised as a heartfelt effort to reunite the lost dogs of the country with their innocent owners, the company previewed future surveillance of our streets: a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything - human, pet, and otherwise.
Earlier this month, Joseph Thacker's neighbor mentioned to him that she'd preordered a couple of stuffed dinosaur toys for her children. She'd chosen the toys, called Bondus, because they offered an AI chat feature that lets children talk to the toy like a kind of machine-learning-enabled imaginary friend. But she knew Thacker, a security researcher, had done work on AI risks for kids, and she was curious about his thoughts.
