Modern day kids are hard to supervise because they spend most of their time on their digital gadgets. This makes it difficult for parents to actually know what’s happening in their kids’ lives.
To bridge this gap, many parents turn to parental control apps. These apps enable them to keep tabs on each and every activity being performed by their children on their smartphones and computers.
This practice has raised numerous concerns as some people have called this measure “an invasion of privacy”, while some have said that this practice is solely done to protect kids from myriad digital threats. In this article, we will be looking at both perspectives in detail.
Privacy Invasion Perspective
Parents are looking into their kids’ social lives so it is definitely invasion of privacy by definition. The people who oppose the use of parental control apps are pretty adamant that parents should keep away from their children’s lives as they have no right to snoop on them no matter the reason. Moreover, people with this perspective want parents to give full freedom to their children and let them live their lives the way they want to. They believe that parents or anyone else does not have any right to control the life of an individual.
Kids Protection Perspective
People sharing this opinion believe that parents should take any steps necessary to ensure the safe upbringing and future of kids. Kids nowadays are restricted to their digital gadgets, which has made monitoring apps a necessity for the parents.
They simply cannot know what their children are going through without the help of monitoring software and apps. The purpose in parents’ mind is simple and clear.
They just want to know if everything is fine, and if it’s not, they want to be able to help. They realize that by installing a monitoring app on their kids’ smartphone, they are invading their privacy. However, they are more concerned with their children’s future.
So Which Perspective is Right?
Now that we have understood how people with two different perspectives see the same situation, we can somewhat analyze these perspectives.
Both parties are right in what they believe, to an extent at least. Installing a monitoring app on children’s phone to keep tabs on them is snooping, and is quite unethical if you do it without informing them first.
However, with kids now addicted to their smartphones, monitoring apps are the only way for parents to actually know what their children are doing, who they are talking to, who their friends are, what’s happening in their lives, etc. This helps them in carrying out their parenting responsibilities effectively and efficiently.
From the two given perspective, we would side with the proponents of parental controls because parents just want to ensure that nothing affects the upbringing of their kids.
If they start to feel that something’s wrong in their children’s lives, and only way to find out what’s wrong is through monitoring apps, then they will gladly install one on their kids’ phones.
Ensuring kids’ future is the first and foremost priority of the parents, and they should do everything in their power to make that happen.
this is real invasion of privacy, nowadays we are in computer age and any kids are free to do anything on their social media account