Of all the hills to die on w.r.t. how the world is screwed up, this seems like the silliest.
Different folks parent differently, culture evolves. You're free to have your "old school" thoughts as are people who use services like this.
Its not like they're publishing it in public. The service in discussion especially just stores it in the server only temporarily to use ML to detect things such as sleeping or crying. Sounds innocuous to me.
Many of us can do the math ourselves and choose to make choices based on our own beliefs. That's true freedom.
Oh, I’ve got many, many hills to die on. But at some level this is to me symptomatic of two broad things - maybe these are bigger hills:
1) a business making (seemingly) huge profits from the fears of others; more specifically from the fears of young parents who are quite often vulnerable. And, I’d suggest, offering a “solution” with no problem attached to it apart from that fear. Not to mention the issues around privacy, the fact that however many “it’s safe and encrypted” services get hacked, or sold on when the IPO comes around.
2) As another commenter says below - this is symptomatic of a type of parenting which ultimately creates fearful, anxious, badly adjusted children. Study after study shows that “free roam” children end up as better balanced humans. I’m not saying that watching and monitoring and stat-ifying your newborn is immediately going to make them anxious, but it says something about parenting which to me is unhealthy, obsessive, and ultimately not about freedom for the most important beings here: the kids.
I’m extrapolating of course, but hopefully my drift is somewhat clear..
You're definitely extrapolating, and honestly in my opinion in the worst possible direction. At a fundamental level, I personally believe that the generations raised in the previous half century (50s till 90s) are the most coddled, selfish, populations in the history of humanity: no major calamity or war, or pandemic, or anything really. Kids did enjoy insane freedoms and dangers but in retrospect doesnt look like they became responsible adults, in my opinion, electing autocrats around the world and destroying the planets future with warming all because their mollycoddled statistical anomalies of time periods didnt prepare them for any real consequences of their actions.
So I do think people from these generations should just focus on retiring, stop voting evil people into positions, and looking up latest alzheimers research, which btw was derailed by the same type of free range kid turned scientists from the greatest generation or whatever.
Its a baby monitor. Not some clockwork orange contraption.
> Different folks parent differently, culture evolves.
You are framing it as if every change is in a positive direction, which it clearly isn't. Risking at sounding like an old man yelling at clouds, look at the kids these days. They are so dependent, and so sensitive to negative stimuli or emotions.
Parents need to realise that they need to grow adults, not perpetual kids.
> look at the kids these days. They are so dependent, and so sensitive to negative stimuli or emotions.
I think many of us have found people writing comments like this are not interacting with children very much. More just reading the takes of others who also don't interact with children.
And if this was a legitimate problem to address, you would not address it by taking away baby monitors.
The topic of the conversation widened a bit from baby monitors. I of course do not advocate that taking away baby monitors will fix our dilapidated societies.
And while it is certainly true that I don't interact with young children a lot, the case is different for older ones or "young adults".
Id take the sensitive kids these days over whatever child rearing practices created the adults of today who vote evil people in and destroy the planet due to wanton selfishness.
Different folks parent differently, culture evolves. You're free to have your "old school" thoughts as are people who use services like this.
Its not like they're publishing it in public. The service in discussion especially just stores it in the server only temporarily to use ML to detect things such as sleeping or crying. Sounds innocuous to me.
Many of us can do the math ourselves and choose to make choices based on our own beliefs. That's true freedom.