Being a parent is stressful. Believe me I get it. I don’t know from personal experience, but I do have a lot of second and third hand experience from friends and family who are parents. First time parents seem to get the worst of it. Unless they’ve helped raise younger siblings in their youth, they are often experiencing everything for the first time. Every cough, odd behavior, or strange sound in the middle of the night is usually enough to send a brand new parent into a convulsive fit of anxiety. That seems to be the constant state of far too many of you out there.
Well, let me add to that ever-present sense of dread. It appears that hackers have found a way to get into the baby monitoring gadgets you’ve been employing to keep track of your delicate spawn. These, of course, are the devices that connect to the internet and give you the ability to monitor your child from the comfort of work, Starbucks, that dinner party whose invitation you’ve been avoiding for weeks, or wherever else you may be. Most people utilize their laptops or some kind of tablet or smartphone to access the various programs to view and monitor the feeds.
On the surface, these are great little gizmos. They provide far more detailed information to parents than the tried and true walkie-talkie devices that often only act as one and sometimes two way radios. You can actually see and hear what your child is doing in real time with most of the new WiFi enabled monitors. But, if you have an unsecure network or any other potential security flaw, hackers can get in and hijack the feed. This can lead to uncomfortable and downright disturbing circumstances. There was one case of a hacker mumbling sexual things to a 2-year-old through her WiFi enabled monitoring device.
There are some sick people out there. If you’re going to use one of these devices, make sure you are keeping your family safe. You can’t predict crazy, but you can protect yourself from it. At least digitally.
