Ann Marie Luft, who lives with her husband and two daughters near Orlando, Fla., used a camera to check in on her older daughter, Hannah, now 15, when she first started coming home from school alone four years ago. Ms. Luft, a registered nurse, would check the camera, scanning the room for her daughter and talking to her through the smartphone app. The camera helped ease the transition to independence, Ms. Luft said.
Eventually, it no longer felt necessary. Now, Hannah texts her mother when she gets on or off the bus, although she sometimes forgets. Ms. Luft said she tolerated the flakiness as part of the price of adolescence. “When we were kids, we never had our parents spying on us,” she said.
I think back to my own adolescence and mostly remember hours spent hanging out with friends, calling my mother once and then making it home by dinnertime. I was no angel, but I somehow muddled through. If my son were to know that a camera was pointed at him, he might feel the need to find ways around it. Or, perhaps worse, not bother to step outside at all.
“These technologies and their use have a potential to erode that gray area zone where we actually do a lot of learning about ourselves and our family and friends, where we learn how to deal with questions about what should I do? When it is right for me to break the rules?” said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney and the Adams Chair for Internet Rights at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Those are important parts of growing up.”
As smart home technology improves, we’ll get more novel ways to manage our homes, and the people inside them. Sensors could soon monitor a lack of activity in your house.
So, if your teen doesn’t leave the couch all afternoon, “you could get an alert that there’s been no alert,” Mr. Stohrer, of Canary, said. And with that, you’d get something new to worry about.
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