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< | DRAFT 2 CAN BE FOUND HERE |
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> | Mother is Always Watching: Psychological, Sociological, and Privacy Concerns of Surveillance Helicoptering |
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< | Baby Monitors: Sacrificing Security for "Safety" |
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> | Even before I enter the apartment where I’m babysitting the family watches. They’re out but see me on the “Ring” and text, “glad the nanny let you in.” Suddenly they appear on their video Alexa without warning or me answering to explain bedtime procedures for their 3-year-old. At bedtime she wants to listen to “Uncle Moishe.” Instantaneously her parents press play on their phones. While at a concert 60 blocks south they watch and listen to their daughter and me. |
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< | -- By AyeletBentley - 08 Oct 2019 |
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> | Some techno-parenting surveillance feels like natural tendencies (phones have trackers and why not make sure your trust is well-founded), some feel like logical outgrowths of the past (baby monitors linked to phones), others feel almost science-fictiony (a device that reports whenever the teen’s car exceeds the speed limit). For concerned parents today’s gadgets allow for revolutionary helicoptering. Parents are told they must use a slew of spy devices to protect their kids, but to what result? This paper argues this surveillance harms child development, hurts the family, and exposes children’s data. |
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< | Even before I walk into the apartment where I am babysitting the family is watching me. They’re not home but they see me on the “Ring” and text, “I see the nanny let you in.” Suddenly they appear on their video Alexa without warning and without me answering to explain the bedtime procedures for their 3-year-old. At bedtime she wants to listen to “Uncle Moishe.” Almost immediately her parents have turned it on from their phones. While sitting at a concert 60 blocks south they ignore Billy Joel, instead watching and listening to their daughter and me. |
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< | Constant parent surveillance started in my generation. Friends got busted for lying about their whereabouts when their parents tracked their phones. Sneak in after curfew? Good luck. Your phone, the “Ring,” the cameras inside are the nosiest neighbors. For concerned parents the gadgets of the internet age allow for a type of helicoptering like never before. |
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< | What if we told these concerned parents that with a few lines of python anyone can watch? Or that there are websites listing webcams that are set to the default passwords (or without passwords) that anyone on the internet can access? |
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< | Hacking is Easy
Accessing someone’s unsecured webcam isn’t difficult and sites like Shodan and Insecam make this easier. Bots randomly scan for unsecured devices, something that can be done across the entire internet in a matter of hours. If one runs a quick search on Shodan she can find a slew of web servers that use the username and password admin/admin or that can be accessed through a password found by googling “manufacturer default credentials.” These default credentials are conveniently assembled on ispyconnect.com’s “user guide.” Still other cameras can be accessed through known vulnerabilities such as Boa webcams. Boa has a vulnerability that allows you to reset the admin password. In 2015, security firm Rapid tested nine popular baby monitors for security. Eight of the nine got an F, the ninth a D minus. Despite the reporting on this in 2015, nothing has changed. |
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> | SURVEILLANCE AND HELICOPTERING |
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< | There have been accounts of mothers catching hackers hijacking the cameras. One mother noticed her baby monitor moving without anyone controlling it. She realized it was scanning the room and landing on her bed. Everyone who was supposed to have control was in the same room not moving the device. Others reported their baby monitors talking. One particularly disturbing case involves a hacker yelling at babies on baby cams. |
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< | If peeping Toms on the internet are watching through baby monitors, what comes next? Surely those who lived in Stalin’s Soviet Union would find bringing a device into your home that anyone can access foolish. Even if you aren’t worried about your own government, there is nothing stopping other countries from peeping too. This can allow for more targeted advertising, election campaigning, perfect price discrimination. Even if governments or companies aren’t themselves watching, the dangers of commodification of personal information are real. |
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< | The dangers of these insecure devices goes beyond concerns of creeps or the hypothetical 1984 sounding concerns of the government or companies watching, they can bring down the internet. In 2016 DNS provider Dyn was attacked by Mirai botnets which took down sites including Netflix, Twitter, and Spotify largely using IoT? devices (such as baby monitors) infected with malware. Hackers took complete control of the monitor. Further, baby monitors can grant a hacker access to the home network to get information from computers. |
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> | Helicopter parenting took flight simultaneously with the rise of commercial internet providers. The early correlation is likely simply correlation (many trace helicoptering to the 1980s-news coverage of abductions), but overbearing parenting and technology have interacted surveilling children for over a decade. While child trackers existed 10 years ago, today they are built-in the phones teens can’t go anywhere without. T-Mobile has subscriptions to track family members that have over 100,000 subscribers paying $9.99/month. iPhones have this feature for free, decreasing the buy-in cost, and making not tracking more of an opt-out than opt-in. Helicoptering is pervasive and dangerous. |
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< | The Law
As is common with the law and the internet, the law hasn’t caught up with the baby monitors. Some have noted the right to privacy should apply here. What is more of a violation of privacy than someone watching you in your bedroom? Seeming natural applications of existing laws don’t go far enough to solve the problem. While applying peeping Tom laws to those watching over baby monitors could prosecute some people and give some justice to victims, avoiding prosecution wouldn’t be hard and it wouldn’t solve the problem. Security experts have proposed other solutions including regulation of baby monitors, allowing victims to sue the baby monitor companies, and hacking back. |
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> | [[https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-actions-and-decisions/research/explore-privacy-research/2012/opc_201210/
][Researchers of parent surveillance technology have concluded]] that surveillance devices such as baby monitors and internet trackers decrease autonomy and stunt development, the same risks seen in helicoptering generally. Helicopter parenting is linked to prolonged adolescence, anxiety, dependence, and other poor outcomes. Children with helicopter parents become terrified of making mistakes. It is easy to see how that anxiety would arise with items like the Alltrack USA’s speed detector that sends alerts to parents every time the teen exceeds the speed limit: a mile an hour over and your parents are on your case. The same goes for baby monitors, particularly when used with older children. Any small mistake or childhood mischief is seen (and ideally to many parents, stopped before it occurs). This undermines independence because an adult is always right there. Parents can hear children’s requests from miles away, they can intervene in arguments, and children don’t learn to cope. Children are stunted because the normal experimentations of childhood and adolescence are unavailable. |
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< | Security experts have called on the government to get involved by regulating IoT? devices. Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for F-Secure, for example, compared leaking WiFi? passwords to devices catching on fire: it shouldn’t happen and the government should make sure it doesn’t. Experts have proposed civil and criminal penalties for creating unsecure devices and laws requiring buyers to change the default password before the device can be used. Others, however, believe regulation would be useless because U.S. regulations won’t affect other countries. |
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> | HARM ON THE FAMILY |
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< | Some have proposed allowing victims of baby monitor hacks to sue manufacturers or sellers of the monitors. The Mirai attack shows the widespread hacking of these devices and suggests the possibility of a class action suit. If companies are hit with hefty fines they would be incentivized to send shoddy security for IoT? devices the way of lead paint. |
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> | Surveillance within the family can also harm the family structure, destroying trust and promoting secrecy. Teens who know their parents are tracking their phones will leave their phones at an approved place if they are going somewhere illicit. Trust is undermined when parents confront children about things they discover through spying. Studies show surveillance signals a lack of trust of the surveilled and in turn, the surveilled see those surveilling as untrustworthy. |
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< | Still others have proposed a more radical solution: hacking back. Rob Graham, security researcher and hacker, suggested the NSA launch a proactive strike to knock compromised IoT? devices offline. Graham sees this as a solution to U.S. legislation being useless overseas. While that may be true, there are likely other Constitutional concerns with the NSA hacking into people’s devices to knock them offline. |
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> | When parents replace trust with surveillance, parent-child communication is undermined. Children feel constantly persecuted by parents who see their every (mis)step. Further, parents are not encouraged to build open lines of communication with children to gather information because they can get this information through spying. Children feel constantly watched and are discouraged from sharing any more of their lives with nosy parents. |
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< | Conclusion
This paper discussed the security concerns of hackers accessing baby monitors and what this could mean for commodification of personal data and access by companies and governments as well as widespread attacks. Other concerns with baby monitors go beyond the scope of this paper: children growing up constantly surveilled and the ethics of spying on your babysitter, to name a couple. Parents have begun to worry about sharing about their children on Instagram. A class action suit is currently going against Disney for scraping data from children’s video games. It is time parents become concerned about the safety devices they bring into their homes. |
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> | PRIVACY CONCERNS |
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> | Even parents who believe they don’t helicopter should be concerned about the privacy risks. Parents are exposing their children’s every move on baby monitors to peeping Toms, governments, and companies. There is potential harm in installing a device that tracks speed limits if it is hacked by insurance companies, or highway patrol. Further, commodification of where teens go at all times helps companies with ideas like perfect price discrimination. |
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> | As a case study, this paper discusses the ease of hacking baby monitors. Accessing someone’s unsecured monitor isn’t difficult. Bots randomly scan for unsecured devices, which can be done across the entire internet in mere hours. In 2015, security firm Rapid tested nine popular baby monitors for security. Eight of the nine got an F, the ninth a D minus. Nothing has changed. |
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< | I think this draft is uncertain of its subject: is it baby monitors
or the security of the Internet of Things, known among security
professionals as the Internet of Shit? Most of your paragraphs are
about the social context of child surveillance technology, but in
the final paragraphs you say that only security (or rather, the
insecurity of product design deliberately intended to compromise
security for ease-of-setup in order to save manufacturers the cost
of real after-sale support) is your subject. As to that, baby
monitors are not much different from all the other IoS? gear; a
discussion of the political economy of insecurity would better
address the problem than a focus on a particular product category.
The technology of child- and home-surveillance, on the other hand,
raises questions about the intra- and interpersonal-psychology,
sociology, economics etc. of family life in the "developed" world
that far exceed issues of device and network security in their
breadth and potential importance. The next draft should choose. I
can see good reasons to pursue either path, and good results that
can follow from it; my own bias in favor of the latter topic should
not be relevant to your choice. |
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> | Mothers have caught hackers hijacking cameras. One mother noticed her baby monitor scanning the room and landing on her bed without anyone controlling it. Others reported their baby monitors talking.
If peeping Toms on the internet are watching through baby monitors, what comes next? Surely those who lived in Stalin’s Soviet Union would find bringing a camera into your home that anyone can access foolish. This can allow for more targeted advertising, election campaigning, perfect price discrimination. Children’s personal data is commodified. |
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< | If you are, in the end, writing about the issue of Io[ST] security,
you should read Bruce Schnier's
Click Here to Kill Everybody (2018), the essential study, which Columbia
University appears not to possess in its decaying libraries. |
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> | LAW |
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> | Child monitoring devices should concern all parents. An often-extreme form of helicoptering, it stunts child development leading to anxiety, decreased autonomy, and possibly other adverse outcomes yet unstudied. Spying harms family communication and trust. Beyond the family, it leaves children open to observation by strangers, companies, and governments. Yet parents still use them. Can law do anything?
Beyond banning spy devices for personal use, probably little can be done through law for the interpersonal, psychological, and sociological issues of spying within a family. Children are entitled to a certain level of privacy under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, but the U.S. hasn’t ratified it. Even if they had it grants only a small amount of privacy that doesn’t cover parent snooping. It is hard to imagine the passage of a law abridging the parent’s “right” to invade their children’s privacy.
In terms of peeping Toms or peeping companies/governments, the law can punish peeping on baby monitors and the like as well as further outlawing the use of children’s data from phone tracking, baby monitors, etc. For some spy devices, regulation of IoT devices would help. The ability to sue companies for leaking might help as well. |
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You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. |