A perfect example of George Orwell’s terrifying view of a society under government surveillance has arrived in the form of ankle monitors for your teens.
For parents who “need to keep track of [their] teenager at all times,” Tampa Bay Monitoring in Clearwater, Florida, is selling GPS tracking — similar to the shackles used to track those on parole — billed as a way for parents to have “peace of mind” and for so-called troubled teens to have “protection.” Never mind that these monitors function as a form of private surveillance, enabling parents and anyone else with access to shadow a teen’s every move. Besides, these devices can be uncomfortable and can cause problems at airports, hospitals and schools, and many people have concerns about where all the tracking information goes and who has access to it.
Who has access is crucial in an age where, per TechCrunch, an online zine, Facebook has been paying teenage users $20 a month since 2016 to install an app which monitors their phone and web activity. This is precisely so Facebook can gain usage information. Meanwhile, police in the U.K. have been secretly downloading data from smartphones, which Harmit Kambo, campaigns director for the London-based charity, Privacy International, calls a “digital stop and search.” In a paper entitled “’Better than Human’? Smartphones, Artificial Intelligence and Ultra-Punitive Electronic Monitoring,” Mike Nellis, a global expert in electronic monitoring, wrote that the prime beneficiaries are always “the data-hungry tech industry.”
Read the rest here: https://truthout.org/articles/big-brother-steps-closer-as-parents-shackle-teens-to-ankle-monitors/
What a horrible case of parents buyin’ what they’re sellin’.
“… this kind of intrusiveness is ‘a modern day scarlet letter’ for teenagers.”
“When the home becomes a place of incarceration for a child, they are being told that there is no hope, no place where they are safe.”
One more device in making the whole world a prison so they can continue to control us, steal from us, enslave us, experiment on us, kill us. I know if I were a teenager and this happened to me, I’d soon be an escapee, cut the chains, and on the run. This device will either turn good kids into criminals or jello. Soooooo sad and infuriating.
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