Cyd Harrell reports:
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I got a text from a parent friend. “It’s so sweet,” she wrote, “your daughter is sad about her project and mine is being so great comforting her.” Both 11-year-olds were in their respective after-school programs at different schools at the time, so I was puzzled.
When I asked how she knew this, she said, “Oh, I clone my daughter’s texts to my iPad and I read them all.” As if this was a perfectly ordinary thing to do. My child hadn’t consented to have a third party read her private texts (although she knew that her school monitored her school-based email and messaging accounts), and I wasn’t sure if her friend had consented either.
Read more at Wired.
Harrell’s article raises some of the same issues and concerns I raised with the FTC a number of years ago about a firm that offered parents a “dashboard” so they could monitor all their child’s activities and contacts. I had looked at their demo and realized that the child’s friends and the friends’ parents likely had no idea that they were showing up on the monitor/dashboard and had not consented to anything. The firm disputed my claims, and the FTC never went further with the issue. I wish they had. You might want to revisit my post about the complaint from March 2016, here.
h/t, Joe Cadillic