They are opposed to Flock, while at the same time they are constantly reporting their location to each other and monitoring where everyone they know is. Which is logically consistent: they're not ok with tracking being done to them, but they're ok with doing the tracking and opting in to being tracked.

Of course, with pervasive tracking being normalized, and the apps doing this being subject to law enforcement and the government, it kind of ends up as the same thing.

(Whether parents have access to this voluntary tracking, I don't know. My kid uses it with his friends, but I've never wanted to track him. Seems creepy and distrusting. Sure, he lies to me about some things, but I have a pretty good idea of what is and isn't a lie. Feel free to disbelieve me.)

I don't think it i s the same thing. I don't like pervasive tracking either, but it is very different from for police to subpoena google to get my data, than it is for flock to directly give law enforcement my location.

I use Find My friends on my iphone, I trust them enough they can know my location and I trust Apple enough to carry that data (I realize this is implying "nothing to hide", but I also consent to giving Apple my location). I get that it seem creepy, but its also a cool new technology if you can get over how creepy it seems. Not trying to sell you one, but give you another perspective.

I'm not a parent, but when I was teen my parents monitored me as much as they could. Personally, I think location tracking is less of an issue than parental surveillance of internet browsing. I do think if parents are going to track their kid's location, they should let their kid track the parents, too.

> I do agree that surveillance in the future will be advanced. I try to imagine what Meta and Google could do with all of our data from the past 20 years with all of the compute they are building.

Right it's not even a question of new data-- a mountain of historical privacy leaks were benign because it was a needle in a haystack. In the future everyone will be electronically stalked by a fleet of AI private detectives. To limit the damage we must substantially restrict the collection and retention of personal information.

They wouldn't even need to stalk us. I imagine they are training individualized models based on our individualized data, then use those models to A/B test the potential for advertisements or other propaganda, but they are probably already doing that. I wish my brain was big enough to know what they could be up to.

I think the issue isn't the collection, or retention (although there should still be data retention laws to protect against the liability of holding that data), but the ways the data is shared or used by third-parties. If businesses were no longer able to be shared or sold to 3rd parties, or be used for advertisements, the remainder of issues are largely ideological.