Daycare apps are insecure surveillance dumpster-fires

Apps are like software, only worse.

Cory Doctorow
6 min readJun 23, 2022

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A line of kindergartners horsing around in a toddler-sized institutional bathroom, looking into the mirror. Out of the mirror is the glaring eye of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The kids’ reflection is color-inverted, and their reflected, inverted faces are traced with facial recognition geometry lines. Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en German Federal Archives (modified) https://

When my EFF colleague Alexis Hancock signed her baby up for daycare, she was told that she had to download a childcare management app — to monitor and specify “feedings, diaper changes, pictures, activities, and which guardian picked-up/dropped-off the child.”

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