
It's 2012 and your kids have an iPhone - Do you know where they are? I do. - hodgesmr
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Its2012AndYourKidsHaveAnIPhoneDoYouKnowWhereTheyAreIDo.aspx
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sachingulaya
This seems pretty alarmist. More than ever parents know where their children
are(I don't think its a good thing). I also don't particularly care if anyone
knows where my daughter is. There are plenty of children just like her that a
predator could kidnap. If someone was specifically targeting her this wouldn't
help them at all. Nor would a location services policy be a deterrent.

There are only so many things a parent can worry about. This isn't one of
them. I can imagine the kind of parent that would implement a family "location
services policy". It's the same kind that installs NetNanny for their 16 year
old, reads their kids' emails, checks their cell phone logs, records their
mileage every night to make sure they go where they say they're going, doesn't
let them go outside alone, etc. The world is not such a frightening place.
Let's not make it one.

~~~
amirmc
I concur with your sentiment but I think informing people/kids about how much
information they're leaking is A Good Thing.

Unfortunately, most folks (including the kid in the story) have some
expectation of privacy even though they've unwittingly given it up. Especially
when fragments are given up in seeemingly separate places, yet reconstructing
them is as trivial as a Google search.

That kid in the OP is probably going to get quite a surprise when _his Dad_
asks him about the message he sent.

~~~
shanselman
I talked to the Dad earlier this evening and the kid had NO IDEA that this
info was leaking out. This issue isn't about being a helicopter parent or
about being paranoid. It's simply about being aware. You tell a teen to put
their wallet in their front pocket and you should tell them to click off on
location services. This is just one of a thousand life lessons.

------
jaminguy
I'm the Dad from the story and I'm really grateful to Scott for pointing this
out to me. It's less about being _alarmist_ and more about having a chance to
educate young people about the realities of modern technology. (and re-educate
myself from a parent's perspective) I don't read my kid's emails or check cell
phone logs and don't plan on starting. I believe giving kids freedom, and the
opportunity to wield it, is what turns them into responsible adults. However,
it's easy to take things like location services for granted. Conversation had.
Lesson learned.

~~~
nsfmc
It probably would have been more helpful if this article had been titled after
one of its bullet points: "Location Services Policies for Families."

If it seems alarmist, it's because scott spends so much time on the (frankly
creepy) exposition and leaves his actual thesis as fairly shallow itemized
points.

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X-Istence
I am an adult, at age 23 and I have realized for years how much data leakage
there is.

None of the apps on my phone get access to Location services save for 1,
Google Maps. There is no reason why my status update to ANY service should
require my location, and luckily at the moment you can opt-out from ever
having to send a location. I am very happy that Apple required the App to ask
for permissions first (on an API level) and wish they would implement this
further for a few more of the API's (such as Contacts which was brought up
here recently).

I still find it funny when even adults don't seem to realize that they are
advertising their current location to anyone and everyone all around the
globe. People continue to use Foursquare to let the world know they are on
vacation making them simpler targets for thieves that want to burglar their
homes, they make themselves easy to follow around. For some people the FBI
need not plant a GPS tracker, the subject themselves accurately documents
everything and everything they do.

~~~
Swizec
I use foursquare a lot to advertise my location. It's awesome.

Sometimes a tweet is more complete when a location is attached - I can just
comment on something, rather than having to specify why the comment is
relevant. Less typing, less fuss, cleaner words.

Often taking a picture makes it more relevant/meaningful when location data is
attached.

When posting a Runkeeper update, it is often much better with the whole map
visible to people (like when I cycled from SF to Palo Alto. Without a map,
it's just a 56km cycling trip, with the map it's an adventure)

What I _don't_ do, however, is make it possible to discern where exactly I
live. Doing cluster analysis on all my location-aware updates everywhere will
only get you to about a ~500m radius of my building. At least 300 people live
in this radius.

Even if you pinpoint my building, you don't know my name. That leaves you with
about 10 apartments to check. Without eyes-on-the-ground surveillance you
aren't getting anything.

And if you're going to the trouble of eyes-on-the-ground surveillance none of
my location-aware updates matter. You can _see_ where I am.

~~~
aneth
> Even if you pinpoint my building, you don't know my name.

Is your name not Swizec Teller, as it says on your website and supposedly real
name policy following G+?

~~~
ttitus
Damn, Internet! You scary! ;)

~~~
drostie
Another source of information leakage is his DNS records. Either he hasn't
been keeping up to date or you just found out the riverside street in Slovenia
where his parents live. ^_^

That one's more pernicious; top-level registrars usually demand that it be
accurate and might threaten to take your domain away if someone reports that
it isn't. There are whole companies which specialize in the service, "we'll be
your official DNS contact so that your personal data isn't leaked through the
WHOIS database," but the last time I checked was I think two years ago, and at
the time the service-providers for this were either (a) really shady or (b)
really expensive. It looks like the prices have come down a good deal from
where they used to be, though.

~~~
icebraining
Namecheap offered me one year of WhoisGuard with my domain, and now it only
costs $2.88/year. Gandi seems to offer it for free, and so does Google Apps if
you get a domain from them.

------
highace
"It's 2012 and your kids have an iPhone".

That was sensational enough for me!

------
weekendlogic
Too bad this is never going to be heard or understood by the majority of
people, until it is too late. (Leave Facebook?! but how will I keep in touch
with everyone?)

But don't worry, I have a tinfoil hat for this exact problem.

------
Jakob
cached version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Its2012AndYourKidsHaveAnIPhoneDoYouKnowWhereTheyAreIDo.aspx&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&strip=1)

~~~
switz
Readability'd <http://www.readability.com/articles/ofwyqmdp>

~~~
shanselman
Damn. 3am on the East Coast and it's the day my ISP is expanding the virtual
disk of my blog's dedicated server. Hacker News traffic has never taken me
down before, but today it's scheduled maintenance. There's some kind of irony
there somewhere.

~~~
shanselman
Site's back up. My ISP _so rocks_ for being responsive.

------
mgkimsal
Wow.... did no one take away from this that that's one rude little kid?
Texting/sending a teasing "ha ha" message to someone they don't even know?

Yes, location services have privacy/security problems. We get that. I guess I
would have expected someone to point out that this kid's rude. I'd prefer they
get a lecture on manners and social etiquette vs location/services/privacy.

In the next few years, I've got faith that technology will make location data
control easier to deal with. I don't have any faith that this kid will get
less obnoxious (and if they do, it won't be because of technology/privacy
filter software).

~~~
limmeau
The author notified the rude little kid's dad, who may have sent the kid to
bed without dessert.

------
achristoffersen
This is another reason I so wish cyanogenmod / google / apple will hurry up
and 1) Create a guest account for my phone 2) make it possible to disable all
background data sharing /synching save for a whitelist. This would both
conserve battery and it would be so much easier to decide what applications
gets acces to what. E.g. my antivirus wants finegrained location data, but
works fine with coarse... (I should really uninstall that antivirus program).

------
wisty
One problem is that a lot of programs don't make it obvious how much they plan
on sharing.

I usually figure that any information they get from me will just be used to
get higher-rate advertising, and maybe set the time on my homepage (yawn). It
doesn't even occur to me that they might want to use my location as a
"feature", and not to deliver advertising.

------
ecaradec
These days, I'm worrying more about lobbies and gov trying to pass laws to
give them larger inspection power about what citizens do, than about apps and
services leaking random data. At worse companies will treat me as a product,
gov can treat me as a criminal.

------
ap22213
I think this article is a bit alarmist, because most kids are probably safe.
BUT, there is so much 'leaked' data about most of us that it's a little bit
scary about the long term consequences.

I'm not worried about the random individual who can look me up, correlate all
my identities, look at where I've been in the past, etc. I'm more concerned
about the institutions and governments who are building sophisticated dossiers
on every person and correlating it with 'suspicious behavior'. We all know
that this is happening right now, and the technology is getting more
sophisticated, because we're partly building it. Oracle and IBM aren't selling
their petabyte clusters to the creepy guy down the street, they're selling
them to government agencies and mega-corps.

This is all going to continue to get more scary until we wise up and pass
regulations and personal-data ownership laws. (Yes, I said the big 'R' and 'L'
words. Sorry, I'm not as libertarian as is considered cool these days.)

------
iso8859-1
13 year olds can't get on Google Plus. I think all these accounts where fake,
and make to catch his attention, possibly an covert smear campaign by Google's
enemies. The attack is faux-childish too, children don't read Brother's Grimm
these days.

~~~
lazugod
Google Plus can't boot pre-teens who don't disclose their age.

------
VBprogrammer
I think the lesson in this case should be teaching your kids not to be a twerp
to people they do not know. Not teaching them that they could accidentally be
caught by information leakage while acting like a twerp.

------
bwarp
My kids can have an iPhone when they pay for one themselves.

Until then, they have a PAYG $10 Nokia.

Perhaps that was a good move after all.

~~~
dripton
Hell, I'm a grownup with a job, and I don't have a smartphone. They're very
expensive toys.

------
datadon
Scott knows where my kids are?! Creepy.

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nirvana
FWIW, on iOS, the you're asked for each app that wants access to location
services. Further, you can turn this off globally for all apps, or
individually for apps in the Settings app. Even further, you can lock down the
settings app with a passcode required to make changes.

So, parents can lock down the settings for location services so that their
kids... (whom I assume just say "yes" when running an app that asks for access
to it) can't leak their location.

