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How to Track Your Kids (and Other People's Kids) with the TicTocTrack Watch
- mattrp 7y ago$209 for junk....when a perfectly good series 3 aw can be had for $199
- Someone1234 7y ago*$379. The $279 Series 3 doesn't have cellular which is core functionality for this use-case.
- rootusrootus 7y agoAnd even if you have the LTE version you still have to pair it with an iPhone. Tried to explain this to my 8-year-old last night as she was fuming about not being allowed to have my old AW. So many reasons, none of them at all valid to a child that age :)
- janpot 7y agoGood, teach children they're being tracked as early as possible. Turn them into good citizens of the surveillance state. Maybe we can share the data to some advertising companies, to improve their ads experience throughout the day. Turn them into good citizens of the consumerism state. Edit: I'm sorry for the sarcasm, these kinds of products make me very sad.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoFor one of the worst examples, the 'elf on a shelf' phenomena has now got utterly out of hand - https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&q=elf+santa+camera https://www.google.com/search?tbm=shop&q=elf+santa+camera
- madez 7y agoWho is so delusional to think they are so superior to other humans as to think that the others should be constantly tracked and watched by them? The damaging effects of that surveillance are similar to that of denied freedom of expression which heavily affects the thinking and development process of humans. It's not logically sound to support freedom of expression and surveillance at the same time.
- cmurf 7y agoHelicopter parents. And who said humans are logical? But even setting aside the delusional, the superior, and the illogical, the largest group are ignorant or apathetic.
- dqpb 7y agoI know it's cathartic to write people off as delusional, but I think it's more instructive to consider the behavioral science / game theory underlying peoples choices.
- jak92 7y agoSurveillance cameras everywhere are bad enough, now we want to bug our children? This madness needs to end. Watched people are not free people.
- veryworried 7y agoDepends who is doing the watching. Wouldn’t want to be watched by some oppressive liberal government trying to change my life by forcing me to “progress” how they want.
- madez 7y agoIf somebody doesn't want to influence you, they don't surveil you. The contraposition is more revealing; If somebody surveils you, then they do it to influence you.
- mattbk1 7y agoThank you for this. It's the natural extension of "you need to track what you want to change" at a personal level.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoWhich country has an "oppressive liberal government" at the moment?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sctb 7y agoYou've been posting a lot unsubstantive, uncivil, or flamebait comments. We've asked you already to please stop, and we'll ban the account if you won't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tcd 7y agoDoes a child have a smartphone? Congratulations, they're being tracked everywhere they go.
- paul7986 7y agoAlso teach them not to write fake reviews or any fakery on the iNet! Let's work to make the Internet great again....
- rootusrootus 7y agoWhy such a low opinion of children? A lot of us grew up in public schools, taught to conform, etc, and ... well, look how well we are conforming? No dissent here, not one bit ;-)
- ravenstine 7y agoFunny how most of us who grew up on the internet that included crap like Ogrish, Bumfights, hardcore porn ads, Newgrounds, hentai, etc., turned into everyday citizens rather than low-lifes and criminals.
- brlewis 7y agoThere's survivorship bias since low-lifes and criminals are less likely to be active here.
- skizm 7y agoOr you could just use it occasionally when you want to give your kids a bit more freedom than normal, but you're still a bit of a worrier. There is a state between complete lack of oversight and Black Mirror's Arkangel.
- hindsightbias 7y agoFrom the time they get on the school bus and return home, they’re under surveillance. The majority of current-gen parents would expect this when their kids use public institutions. HN view of privacy is quaint. The first cadre of post-911 and FB users must be 35-40 now, and they didn’t care.
- ngngngng 7y agoI've got to be missing something. How difficult is it to implement secure authentication to the server that has access to the database? Am I just doing it wrong? Because it doesn't seem overly difficult to me to secure my web services.
- corecoder 7y agoSeems like the people who would be able to implement this stuff securely is also mostly the people who would not want to. [Edit: spelling]
- Jach 7y agoThere are many so-called software engineers who respond with some variant of "no one knows about it but us, so it's fine". It's not even security-through-obscurity, as no particular efforts are made to obscure the resource, just that no particular efforts are made to publicize or document it and thus "that's good enough security for MVP".
- welcome_dragon 7y agoI once worked with a solutions architect who said things like "so? There are laws against people accessing this illegally. We don't need SSL"
- MagicPropmaker 7y agoPeople who go through the Ruby on Rails tutorial, where you make a simple microblog and each post is identified by a sequential number get a job making software for a little 2-bit company and this happens.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y agoIt really saddens me to see a culture where parents feel like they have ownership over their children. Children are people. They ought to be given autonomy over themselves, their proprerty, and their privacy. Helicopter parenting is profoundly psychologically damaging and should be illegal. It's child abuse.
- leokennis 7y agoI totally get your point. However, losing track of young (1-4 years) kids in IKEA or an amusement park is a very real thing. Not using “new technology” to mitigate this issue seems like a waste.
- jak92 7y agoI remember getting lost in a department store as a child. Sure, it was "scary" for a few minutes, but ultimately 99.9999% will be reunited. No need to keep a permanent record of every movement.
- icebraining 7y agoI'm betting not all parents even consider these things might be making a permanent record. They just want something to find the kids if and when they're lost.
- barbecue_sauce 7y agoI remember purposefully hiding in the hollow center of the circular racks of clothing at the department store as a small child.
- LeifCarrotson 7y agoI do, too. I also remember a few times (both as a young, scared small child, and as an older embarrased teenager) losing track of my parents and having the employees call "Will Mrs. Carrotson please come to the service counter" over the intercom...and I hear similar messages when shopping now as an adult. That said, I'm a lot more fearful of what could happen if my toddler was found by someone other than me in the center of the clothing rack. To be clear, I have little fear of a criminal harming or absconding with my child, I'm much more afraid of what happens when a well-meaning bystander thinks they need to call CPS to make sure that my kid is taken care of.
- markovbot 7y agoWhat frustrates me is that the people built, marketed and sold this thing will likely face zero consequences, or at best maybe some minor monetary loss. There's literally no reason not to keep doing this.
- tcd 7y agoYup. These days the law doesn't really factor in the consequences of code/programming as it's almost impossible to legislate that. For example, you could run NPM update that installs a malicious package that is somehow able to connect to your MySQLD and access all the tables (that contain geolocation information on children) and execute a cronjob to perform a query to backup the .sql data and upload it to a remote server. There would be 0 consequences legally for such an action (or development would cease to function entirely). Besides, how is knowingly storing GPS information on children acceptable? They can't consent, so maybe it's time to apply that to things like geolocation as well. Code has no consequences, because law makers likely don't "get" what that means. You may think it's just $GPSOfALLChildrenInTheDatabase but that variable can cause actual, real harm to humans. There's totally a disconnect.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago> They can't consent The parents consented and the majority of states in the United States consider children property of the parents before they turn 18. It's sad, but normal.
- ChrisCinelli 7y agoOr a malicius packages just updating Linux. It is a lot easier to hide than in NPM.
- dcbadacd 7y agoWhy can't we legislate that getting owned by npm is your own fault? Driving a car that hasn't passed minimal safety and status checks in many European countries is forbidden, why not forbid the use of stupid package managers?
- wobbly99 7y agoThere is an application for these devices if they are implemented securely: Adults with dementia or significant cognitive decline who wander and get lost.
- aoro 7y agoBy that logic pets and livestock as well, but I'm sure this exists already.
- ceejayoz 7y agoPets frequently have implanted microchips, but for identification purposes, not live tracking. I suspect folks offer GPS trackers for pets already. Lifestock you can typically afford to lose a couple of.
- samatman 7y ago"afford" is relative. If a tracker is cheaper than the expected loss value (replacement value X percent chance of losing an animal), it makes sense to track.
- coreymatyas 7y agoThere are a handful of products for pets at least. I'm personally familiar with Whistle. It's collar-mounted, works fairly well for a large dog in a rural area despite spotty cell coverage (which the software doesn't handle terribly gracefully). Amusingly, the monthly subscription is only a third the price of the product in the OP. For livestock to be a viable market, the monthly subscription would have to go down substantially. In the US, your large market segments are poultry, pork, and cattle. Chickens just aren't worth enough. Hogs are $75-150 live (with thin profit margins) and are a pain to catch, though I'm not familiar with escape rates in commercial operations. Cattle are worth 10x that and do escape occasionally, but they're not terribly difficult to find nor catch. Perhaps there's a market for tracking hogs for small farms and cattle for commercial grazing operations, but I'd be surprised if tech could do much to disrupt the existing low-cost solution: ear tagging and a phone call when your neighbors/police find a cow on the road.
- SamuelAdams 7y agoWe need a new board for certifying IoT things. Something like the NTSB but for non-phone / laptop / desktop (non-standard?) technical gadgets. Otherwise these incredibly insecure devices will continue to be manufactured and sold.
- snaky 7y agoThey will continue to be manufactured and sold uncertified then.
- tcd 7y agoYup, people are cheap. Just go on Amazon and look at the cheap Smartwatches. I actually tore down an APK of one "WearHealth_v1.0.55_apkpure.com_source_from_JADX" and it contained some really dodgy URLs to Chinese servers. Nothing you can do really, the platform (Android) should be responsible for protecting the individual to be honest.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoNah, make it required like FCC certification, and make the uncertified mark be a poison sign.
- snaky 7y agoHow many cheap electronic devices at Amazon have a non-fake FCC certification, what do you think?
- SamuelAdams 7y agoOk, how about another example: the FDA. I'm sure there are plenty of drugs that failed the trial phase: they might fix a headache, but could introduce far more severe side-effects. Consumers have no way of knowing if an over-the-counter drug they are buying will complicate their health further: they trust the manufacturer and the FDA to do those checks for them. Why not have a similar structure for technology? What prevents risky / dangerous over-the-counter medication from being sold, and can we apply those same measures to IoT devices?
- Someone1234 7y agoThis is a political article. If you're interested in the technicals read this linked one instead (far shorter, and actually talks about the technical problems in detail): https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/tic-toc-pwned/ https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/tic-toc-pwned/ I think the mods should leave it pointed to the Hunt article since seems people want to discuss the politics more anyway.
- esilver 7y agoWe’re living in a moment in which the Shenzhen industrial complex can give us technical wonders at very low material cost. The total social cost, however, is still being measured.
- angel_j 7y agoThis is a perfect example of how our implementation of the basic web is incomplete. Any informed person, given the choice, would absolutely want that data going directly from child to parent, with no web service, accounts, analytics, cloud, nothing. And when such a thing finally does hit the market, it's going to be through a vendor/device lock-in, or a supposedly secure silo'd infrastructure, instead of a simple protocol that let's us develop actual P2P applications. It's really a simple fix, it would kill off a ton of bad companies, or change their economics, and would open up web development to a whole new paradigm. Somebody please...! https://medium.com/@blancax/fix-the-internet-with-this-one-weird-trick-b982f76761a0 https://medium.com/@blancax/fix-the-internet-with-this-one-w...
- djsumdog 7y agoI'm half way through The Coddling of the American Mind and just got through the chapters on children and free play. When I was a kid I had to take the school bus, but there were many kids who were close enough to our elementary school that they could just walk. One year my homeroom class was next to the back gate and a teacher forgot to unlock it, so we got to laugh at like the 15~20 standing there who couldn't get in (an announcement was made to let the walkers in without a later slip). I wonder if that would even be allowed today. There was an article on here a few months back where a Canadian got into trouble for letting his kids ride the city bus alone (there were three of them; they always rode together and they were carefully taught the routes and how to backtrack if they missed their stop). Although I disagree with some of the stuff in his book (he likes to blame iGen and play the fake generational gap game), the free-play time stuff is alarming. There is value to handing out with your friends, without parental supervision, without a phone or tracking device, and building that trust that you will come home by x pm. This tracking of kids and not letting them out; is it mostly an American/Canadian thing? The article mentioned Germans and these tracking watches, but I remember even as late as 2013, I'd often see heaps of school kids waiting for a tram or a city bus in Melbourne on their own. In New Zealand I'd often see primary school kids walking home or taking a city bus if they missed a school bus (which were just city buses with a "school" sign attached to them). It'd be interesting to see freeplay by country. I kinda do agree with people like Hadith and Sam Harris who suggest kids should only have flip phones until they start high school.
- jeppebemad 7y agoIMO it’s definitely not a European thing. My son is currently sleeping outside my apartment in his stroller, in a shared back yard. As a kid I rode my bike a mile though many intersections to get to school. It doesn’t seem to have changed. I find it ridiculous that people can be arrested/get in trouble in the states for letting their kid sleep in a stroller on the other side of a café window. But that happened recently to a Dane on vacation. As a side note, I recall watching a documentary about Japanese norms, where the kids are literally taught to be traveling alone in public from a very early age. So this is not just a European thing either.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
- jordanpg 7y agoThere's an entire episode of Black Mirror devoted to exploring a dark potential future of this sort of thing: https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/29/16791518/black-mirror-arkangel-recap-season-4-review https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/29/16791518/black-mirror...
- raehik 7y ago"UK agent for Gator said that they didn’t have the money for security, as otherwise they couldn’t afford a staff Xmas party" I love this.
- pseudolus 7y agoTechnology sure has changed. I remember when I was a kid, if my parents wanted to keep track of me they would just tie me to a radiator. Happiest day of my life was when they bought a 50 foot extension cord - opened up entirely new vistas. Good times.
- sagebird 7y agoIf this is sarcasm it’s a bit dark and that is fine, otherwise I want to give you a hug because this makes me very sad.
- gh12EEw 7y agoSo we'll all Mark Zuckerberg now are we? Except he has an army of guards, giant walls around his mansion and of course he covers his webcam with tape. Some pigs are more equal and all of that.
- mcintyre1994 7y agoSeriously, read this article - it's way way worse than tracking. You can forge where the kid is on their parent's view, you can take over the SOS button (that it sounds like should call their parent's phone), you can send a text or voice call with zero interaction that claims to be from their parent.
- k2enemy 7y agoNever mind that far less kids go missing today than 20 years ago and there's much less chance of them being hit by a car, circumstances are such today that parents are more paranoid than ever. One could easily take those statistics as evidence that parents' paranoia is effective, not that the dangers have decreased.
- djsumdog 7y agoHadith wrote a book called The Coddling of the American Mind that shows this is really not the case. Crime and abductions were going down long before the Internet era and the era of modern helicopter parents. Most of the fear around these very uncommon events have made parents tether their children today and restrict their free play. This in turn can affect how they form bonds, make friends and view the world. He makes the argument this is why college campuses today are a bit mad, with students unable to deal with speech and ideas they don't like, labeling it as hate speak and calling on condemnation and suppression of free though.
- k2enemy 7y agoThanks for the pointer to the book. For others interested, the authors are Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. For what its worth, I agree that parents are overprotective to the point that it hurts children's development. I let my kids roam more than most (from what I can gather) but I do live in a fairly safe area.
- EugeneOZ 7y agoAs a parent, I don't need any statistics. If there is a device that can help me to find my daughter if she get lost accidentally - I don't see reasons to don't use it. She can't talk yet but she loves to run to some forbidden place if she has any chance to do this.
- jwr 7y agoI looked at these devices a while back, and decided that they are a security risk that I can't accept. In a way, I am glad to have been proven right, but that doesn't make me happy. I plan to build my own device of this kind for my child, using components I control to a reasonable extent and software that I write and understand. No external services. I find it somewhat sad that entire categories of devices are off-limits because I don't trust the companies (for good reasons): I have similar plans for home lighting and other home automation, because every commercial device I see is a disaster in terms of security, trust, longevity and reliability.
- ChrisCinelli 7y agoReverse Engineer them, create a secure software for them could be a fun project for a hacksaw :-)