In my life as a security professional, I have had exactly three IT friends / colleagues come up to me bragging about the secret digital surveillance they constructed to monitor their kids.

Every single one of them ultimately destroyed and lost their relationship with their kid.

It took so long to happen that despite my extreme discomfort with surreptitious monitoring and privacy invasions I chose to not question a parent as a non-parent. But over the course of a decade, every one of those kids either wrecked their life, or left home and never came back.

They always had this elaborate-sounding, techy panopticon. Some mix of cell location monitoring, fake social media accounts, web usage monitoring. I’ll never know how much the kids ever found out about in the end. The end result, however, was always the same.

And these are otherwise smart people my age with lots of IT credentials and ostensible common sense. It was just like, this weird blind spot where they were “doing it for the kids good”, just like shotgun dads threatening their teen daughters’ boyfriends.

I’m not a parent and I never will be, so this isn’t something I talk about a lot, but reading about this increasingly creepy and intrusive child surveillance I keep putting myself back in those rooms with them and shaking sense into them instead of politely cringing.

I’ll never know if secretly spying on their kids’ every digital action was a cause, a symptom, or both. Anyway, I think about that a lot. -fin-