cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/69844421
No one warned me, when I became a parent, about all the apps that would colonize my phone: the app for the baby monitor where I could gaze at my daughter, even when my husband and I finally had a night out. The app for the Snoo smart bassinet we rented in bleary-eyed desperation, which logged her sleep by the minute. The app where I logged her sleep manually because the Snoo was not accurate enough. And still, I remember thinking that I had been quite restrained. I mean, I didn’t buy the $299 Owlet smart sock, which would send her pulse rate and oxygen saturation directly to my phone, or the $290 Nanit monitor, which would track her every breath.
Every single capitalist venture in the digital world—at least in the US—is in one way or another, simply trying to extract as much data as humanly possible. The sale of that data comes first; the products themselves are secondary vehicles for it.
There’s no goddamn reason my electric toothbrush should have Bluetooth capabilities, but it does (and I will never pair it to anything). But because all of these capitalist parasites are focused on extracting wealth from us like meat from cattle, it requires an account tied to an email to even use whatever companion app pairs with it.
I’ve been slowly self-hosting my way to freedom. If you want to do the same and you don’t have a massive budget, eBay is filled to the brim with Dell OptiPlex towers that can easily become a home server. I have one on the way to replace my old-ass Mac Minis running Linux and it only cost me $360 USD.
When my partner and I had our first we had a close family friend which was very much a “gadget” mom. She treated parenting like an equipment sport.
At the baby shower she got us or at least recommended, quite literally, every product mentioned in this article. She loved showing off the like 4 apps on her phone monitoring every single metric about her kid.
I had a great time throwing it all out when we got home
Holy shit this article pissed me off big time. I think Children, Teens and adults should be allowed to end their parents for doing this to them. This is prison life, a fascist culture. Not every parent is Hitler, but there is a particle of Hitler in every parent. Constantly inventing danger even though violent crime and all else has been receding for decades.
The forced privacy invasion of schools (and any other government building) needs to be stopped
Or you could not buy all that shit
You are of course right, but the fear of missing an important detail about your newborn that could prevent their death in those first 6 months is quite real for first time parents. And this industry unfortunately caters to that. Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) is the specter that looms over you during those months.
We have kids and it’s borderline criminal how everyone feeds on the fear of young parents. Your kid might have down syndrome! It might have an incurable heart issue! It might be left handed! It might suffocate and die!
It wasn’t all sunshine, we had some shitty situations. But still, why not trust in biology and basic health care and the fact that billions of kids grew up just fine?
Wouldn’t a real person be better to do all that though
Especially considering that the child is a human
The real human persons need to sleep sometimes too and we did away with the village
Cavemen figured it out.
This is a ridiculous response to that statement. Of course babies have survived for the entirety of human history.
But not all babies.
And telling a parent not to worry about SIDS because most kids are fine, and the rest are just a statistic isn’t going to assuage the fear that these companies prey on.
Preaching to the choir man, I think all advertising should be banned. They have teams of scientists dedicated to learning how to best psychologically manipulate people into buying shit they don’t need, lol.
And that’s just the way the parents are using the data, imagine having all that medical data so when it becomes legal again to exclude people from health insurance for “preexisting conditions” as “Obamacare”/the Affordable Care Act is ever being whiddled away, the insurance companies will have all that evidence of all those conditions right from the data brokers. Just one of many examples of course.
Makes me glad to live in a more civilized world north of the board where we have public healthcare.
For now. They’re trying to make it as shitty as possible to justify to the morons that private healthcare would work better. Enjoy it while you can.
While yes I agree on some of that, <17 can’t be excluded for “preexisting conditions” nor submit medical tests for life insurance anyway, and I believe health insurance is that way too. It’s been a few years since I was licensed.
And as we all know fascists can’t change laws.
In the US, health insurance generally depended on the condition, but generally if you were treated for or a doctor was aware of a condition existing you then lost coverage for a period of time,say when you became and no longer qualified for your parent’s insurance, and you then for new insurance and tried to get that conditioning treated, the insurance could deny those claims and you’d be 100% liable for payment. Could be a heart condition, could be depression, could be any chronic condition they had evidence of you knowing existed prior to any gap in coverage regardless of age or how long it had been since you were last treated for that condition. I was top young for life insurance and I wonk in the healthcare industry, so I don’t know the life insurance side as well, but I know even now ADHD and Autism can disqualify you from coverage, since I have those and can’t get coverage outside of employer group coverage or some high cost types of coverage. Also disqualifying for long-term care coverage.
You got to get those kids numb to the idea that there will always be 1000’s of eyes always watching them as more survalience happens.
