Do you know what kid’s doing on that device?
CHICAGO — Ayrial Miller is clearly annoyed. Her mother is sitting with her on the couch in their Chicago apartment, scrolling through the teen’s contacts on social media.
“Who’s this?” asks Jennea Bivens, aka Mom.
It’s a friend of a friend, Ayrial says, and they haven’t talked in a while.
“Delete it,” her mom says.
The 13-year-old’s eyes narrow to a surly squint. “I hate this! I hate this! I hate this!” she shouts.
Yes, Bivens is one of “those moms,” she says. The type who walks into her daughter’s bedroom without knocking; the kind who tightly monitors her daughter’s phone. She makes no apology.
Nor should she, says a retired cybercrimes detective who spoke to her and other parents in early June at Nathan Hale Elementary School in Chicago.
“There is no such thing as privacy for children,” Rich Wistocki told them.
Other tech experts might disagree. But even they worry about the secret digital lives many teens are leading, and the dreadful array of consequences — including harassment and occasional suicides — that can result.
Today’s kids are meeting strangers, some of them adults, on a variety of apps. They range from the seemingly innocuous Musical.ly — which lets users share lip-syncing videos — to Whatsapp and, more recently, Houseparty, a group video chat service. Teens are storing risque photos in disguised vault apps, and then trading those photos like baseball cards.
Some even have secret “burner” phones to avoid parental monitoring, or share passwords with friends who can post on their accounts when privileges are taken away.
David Coffey, a dad and tech expert from Cadillac, Michigan, said he was floored when his two teens told him about some of the sneaky things their peers are doing, even in their small, rural town.
“I gotta hand it to their creativity, but it’s only enabled through technology,” says Coffey, chief digital officer at Idshield, a company that helps customers fend off identity theft.
It’s difficult to say how many kids are pushing digital boundaries this way, not least because the whole point is to escape adult detection. Social media accounts are easy to establish and discard. Particular apps also rise and fall out of favor among teens with lightning speed, making them a moving target for researchers.
But academics, experts like Wistocki and Coffey, and many teens themselves say it’s surprisingly common for kids to live online lives that are all but invisible to most parents — for better or worse.
Parents are clearly outmatched. Exposed to tablets and smartphones at an increasingly early age, kids are correspondingly savvier about using them and easily share tips with friends. Parents, by contrast, are both overwhelmed and often naive about what kids can do with sophisticated devices, says Wistocki, whose packed schedule has him crisscrossing the country to speak to parents and young people.
He often holds up a mobile phone and tells wideeyed parents that giving a kid this “ominous device” — and allowing them to have it any time, including charging in their rooms at night — is like handing over the keys to a new Mercedes and saying, “Sweetheart you can go to Vegas. You can drive to Texas, Florida, New York, wherever you want to go.”
And kids are more than happy to oblige. At a separate talk for students at Nathan Hale, a large K-8 public school near Chicago’s Midway airport, Wistocki asked who had accounts on Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and other apps and games with social components. Most of the kids in attendance, many younger than 13, raised their hands.
Afterward, one girl, all frizzy hair and braces, approached a reporter with desperation. “Please, please, pleeeeease, don’t use my picture or a video of me raising my hand,” the 13-year-old begged repeatedly, despite assurances that she wasn’t caught on camera.
“Don’t use mine either,” a friend quickly piped in. Throughout the day, kids said their parents either don’t know they’re on social media or have little idea what they do with their accounts.
That exasperates Dawn Iles-gomez, the school’s principal, whose days are increasingly filled with drama that begins on social media.
And it’s often not the usual suspects in her office, she says, but a diverse parade of students she sees acting one way in person and very differently in the digital world.
“It’s shocking — the language and the threats and the mean things that are said,” she says. “And I would say 75 percent of the time, I call a parent and their parent will say, ‘Well, no, they said they didn’t do that.’
“And I’m like, ‘Well — they did.”’
These kinds of incidents can turn particularly ugly, sometimes involving surprisingly young participants.
In January, two 12-year-olds were arrested in Panama City Beach, Florida, for cyberstalking that police said led to the suicide of a classmate named Gabriella Green, who’d been repeatedly bullied.
In other instances, young people are buying drugs via social media or encrypted websites. Or, as Coffey’s kids explained to him, they can use prepaid “gift” cards for Amazon or ebay — available at most any drugstore — to buy contraband. They order makeup, say, or vaping accessories, and have them delivered to friends’ houses.
Law enforcement officials say the taking and sharing of racy “sexting” photos and videos also has become a common and even expected component of dating life for many teens.
Last year in Naperville, the Chicago suburb where Wistocki worked as a detective for many years, a 16-year-old killed himself after police discovered that he’d recorded himself having sex with a classmate and then shared the recording with his hockey teammates. While searching his phone, they also found photos of other partially nude girls in a secret photo vault app disguised as a calculator.
And yet, Wistocki says, too often parents remain in denial with what he calls “NMK — not my kid.”