Tuesday night's MLB Game in the Roscoe-verse has the Detroit Tigers playing the Cleveland Guardians with a scheduled start time of 5:40 PM CDT. As I usually do, I'll follow the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

I am the sun I gaze below, looking The green sky, changing colours Eclipse today

You are the moon Hiding my face Eclipse today

Our shadow, dancing For the people below

Now you are here Now you are gone

We touch in the sky of our memories

#poems

A clever epigraph will appear here at some point

Listening to a dumb sci fi book about people vs spiders vs ants.

So basically, Children of Time is about humans trying to escape a dying Earth and find somewhere else to live. A scientist named Avrana Kern sets up an experiment on a planet where she’s supposed to genetically enhance monkeys so they can eventually become intelligent. The problem is that things go very wrong, Kern gets stuck in space, and the experiment doesn’t exactly go according to plan.

Fast-forward a ridiculously long time, and the species that ends up becoming intelligent is spiders, not monkeys. Meanwhile, a group of human colonists on the a spaceship named Gilgamesh is traveling through space looking for a new home. So far, I’m basically following two timelines: humans trying not to go extinct and spiders accidentally becoming the next big civilization. And apparently I’m supposed to just accept that giant sentient spiders are the protagonists now.

Sometimes it's engaging. Sometimes it drones me to sleep.

Dream.

I dozed at work. just sitting at my desk and nodded.

Had strange dream about going somewhere in a trailer.

then I had to leave the hospital and so rode a motorcycle.

I was giving a news interview to a woman in a van as I rode.

I got cocky an telling her how you ride a motorbyke, then my sleeve hung on the throttle and I started speeding out of control.

AWAKE!

GET TO WORK!

I loosened my filters on Hinge, And I started talking to a few people, nothing too serious yet. But I guess I am going to listen to the advice of a lot of people and have a “roster”. Basically, just talk to several people on dates one at a time and not getting anything else until that person resolves. I feel a little bit like a fuck boy, but I guess it is naïve to think that come across might be the one. I feel like ultimately it is putting too much pressure on it and that is ultimately detrimental. I’m at least happy I am not lying to anyone or anything like that, but I think after this month of Hinge premium ends I am going to take a break from it for a little bit.

Some days you fight the grind. Some days you just ride it out.

Jump to: The Gone Day | The Grind | Dreams | Black Lines

Rocky Days

Today is a WORK day. Up at the crack of dawn. VERY strange dreams. VIVID.

1. Bank robbery, but everyone was friendly adn I knew all the tellers.

2. Rednecks in the bayou. Good ol' boys take us out into the sticks and show us a world class old European city on the banks of a canal.

And the day is gone.

---

Somehow I slipped to 6pm. Still grnding.

The wife is listening to Ronnie Milsap covers in the living room I missed the artist covering him. He sounds good.

Daydreams About Night Things

https://open.spotify.com/track/1PTngmREtR0P0YMLdqVWBj?si=bb37b4c421f3432c

Ain't No Gettin' Over Me https://open.spotify.com/track/2bRnP6FjtlASGsDtcgRVuI?si=3c630892577340a9

What a Difference You've Made https://open.spotify.com/track/4sxet9Zdu2Z9hdhAKbjlNI?si=505bb1e9169648c5

Wonder if she's thinking about me. :–)

When I ask, I get a warm hug. She's reliving her youth.

---

The Grind

The churn never ends. I forgot what it's like to be chained to my computer. But! We'll get there. 6 images turned into 11. All due tomorrow. Really? Okay...

SO, turn up the radio and press on 'till dawn.

And don't forget to eat.

Up, down, turn around Please don't let me hit the ground Tonight, I think I'll walk alone I'll find my soul as I go home

---

Dream 260810

Rednecks, drywaller

Drive me and Ng out to their house on a canal in the rurals north of Dust Meridian. A place I've been many time between the river and the highway. It is an old austere hilltop. One lane roads. House is like the one in Southerns France (riviera. Plains but nice, it courtyard. Pitch a concert on barges. Like Mardi Gras. Rednecks push back because there's no room for pedestrians to drink and flash people. Only balcony room up here.

Complaining about cost of living

Discussion about the Queen of Swords. They know her and fear her stare.

Flood made everything purple, even the people. The hair i purple, the wreckage is purple. I marvel at. how completely covered everything is.

Watching shark videos on the guys phone. He has a fancy shroud that blocks out spill light in bright environments (outside). and a fuzzy mic.

They make YouTube content. Try to be funny. But spontaneous funny, not doggedly overscripted funny.

Ratchet old guy and his lady. A single young man.

Drive out early. Come home late. Take a shower. Get water everywhere. I put down copious towels to sop up the inches of water.

They show me the interior of their house. Very proud of the drywall work they've done. Want my approval for some reason. I tell them I used to be able to carry drywall two sheets at a time.

Guy drives an old powder blue Model A. Ng wants to drive. I worry she'll fall asleep.

I wake up. I immediately start to write this down. I try to go back to the semi lucid dream I had about the bank the night before. Robbing, but knowing everyone. But it's fuzzy at best.

---

The Same Black Line

I had my world strapped against my back I held my hands, never knew how to act

And the same black line that was drawn on you Was drawn on me And now it's drawn me in 6th-Avenue heartache

—

It's turning into one of those nights.

https://open.spotify.com/track/1qEyqHR1xsj2MC4Qy0dsaI?si=e4cb5a4d8a744d81

https://open.spotify.com/track/0U3MoAWudpBuqnGgqMDVCR?si=1dee9829366b4417

---

The ocean oceans until the night falls then it turns east to go home When it rests its weariness on the west. the cliffs, the stone and the grass— Ireland's patient isle welcome it home.

It reaches.

And reaches.

But Ireland cannot not follow.

So the ocean pulls away, silver with wanting, only to return at dawn and try again.

This is why the West coast of the emerald isle is beautiful:

the sea has spent forever missing what it loves.

---

The Midnight Hour

I always think i'm going to get more done than I do. I am a terrible time manager.

I'm a closet Rihanna fan I guess. This track always gets me goin'!

https://open.spotify.com/track/49FYlytm3dAAraYgpoJZux?si=09407f79ea4e41f8

[For my money this SNL skit with Shy Ronnie is peak Rihanna https://youtu.be/nX4vzKH4les?si=L733qPRB_RapfwYt

---

---

Farewell to yet another day. 2:30am... 4 hours of sleep await! Tomorrow HAS to move forward.

Aloha.

---

#deardiary

---

I don't really want to scream.

It's like… a silent weight in stark monochrome. A blanket thrown over everything in an old black and white movie flickering on failing film. A segue in Hitchcock's “Rope”: zoom into black then out in one continuous motion.

I'm okay. Writing is cheaper than therapy. Though I pay for that, too. Double dipping. I'm tired (copy, paste) and I need low sensory surroundings to get by but get by I will. It's a good day for a minor mental breakdown. It's sunny, the end of winter, the wind is cool and strong. I am nothing if not appreciative of the outside world.

I still need a job but, lesson learnt, interviews cause damage. Even when they're not bad, they're not good for me. I am a flare up waiting to happen. So I need to work on that, support myself, get myself through. Vitamins and sleep, tea and herbal thoughts and prayers.

And a very firm middle finger to capitalism.

Today is one of those days that feels worse because it followed a short series of quite good days. Pain, fatigue, and wiping tears and god knows what running out of my nose. It's frustrating. I'm frustrated. I don't have the energy to scream into the pillow but it's the thought that counts. There's a lot of thoughts.

Inside me are two wolves. One wolf can't breathe properly and will obtain vastly improved lung capacity living away from a cockatoo. The other wolf has difficulty regulating aldosterone and has skewed sodium, potassium, and fluid at times. Both wolves are fatigued. Both wolves are also part of a pack that includes some mental health wolves and we're not even going to touch on those wild dogs today. But they’re vying for attention too, in the neurodiverse/mental illness shadowed part of the woods.

I don't know what I'm capable of any more. I don't know when I'll have a good day, or a bad day. I don't even know what a normal day looks like.

Just. Ah. AHHH. So tired. And there are no words for the thoughts. Just howling canines fighting.

Section 5.2 of Nanit's terms of service is not written about babies. It is written about content, in the flat contractual register every consumer technology company has used since roughly 2007. By submitting User Content through the Services, it says, you grant the company “a worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, sub-licensable and transferable license to use, process, store, edit, modify, truncate, aggregate, reproduce, transfer, modify, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, perform, and otherwise fully exploit the User Content in connection with the Site, the App and the Services and our (and our successors' and assigns') businesses.”

User Content, the same document explains, means all content added, created, uploaded, submitted, distributed or posted to the services by users. In the case of a Nanit Pro, the content in question is overhead infrared video of a sleeping infant, captured from a camera mounted above the cot, running most nights for the first several years of that infant's life. The person who grants the licence is the parent. The person the licence is about cannot yet hold up their own head.

On 2 August 2026, Sapna Maheshwari of The New York Times published a profile of Nanit, the New York company whose crib-mounted camera logs the moment a baby's eyes open and close and issues a score for the night on a scale up to 100. The company told the Times it has around one million daily active users and annual revenue above 100 million dollars. The reporting also surfaced a detail no amount of policy analysis could improve upon: the branding firm that built Nanit's identity described its own brief as transcending the negative connotations of surveillance.

That is a candid sentence, and it points at the wrong problem. The interesting thing about the AI nursery camera is not that it is surveillance. Parents have always watched their children, and a camera that lets you check on a sleeping baby without opening a creaking door is a small, genuine good. The interesting thing is what the category has become. Nanit's chief executive describes the value proposition with unusual clarity, and what she describes is not a better way for a parent to watch. It is a system that watches instead.

That substitution is the story. A parent's attention is forgetful, reciprocal and impossible to transfer. A system's attention is total, permanent, non-reciprocal and, per section 5.2, transferable to successors and assigns. Swapping one for the other is not an upgrade to an existing practice. It is the creation of a permanent evidentiary record about a person who will not be able to read it, contest it, or ask who else holds a copy, for approximately eighteen years.

What a Sleep Score Is Actually Made Of

Start with the artefact, because the artefact is stranger than the debate around it.

Nanit describes Sleep Score as the first AI-driven, science-backed sleep score designed specifically for babies, delivered each morning as a single number up to 100 alongside a comparison to the baby's own typical range. It is assembled from four components. Sleep duration is total actual sleep across the night. Sleep timing measures how well bedtime and waking align with age-appropriate biological rhythms. Sleep continuity covers night wakings and time spent awake between sleep periods. The fourth component is parent visits, defined as the frequency with which a parent has to come in and settle the baby.

Read that fourth component again. A metric marketed as a measure of infant sleep quality is partly a count of how often the adult entered the room. Whatever the design intention, the artefact grades the caregiver, and grades them downward for the thing caregiving consists of. Nanit's explainer page cites no peer-reviewed validation of Sleep Score itself, pointing instead to its in-house Nanit Lab and a scientific advisory board.

The breathing feature is more elegant and more revealing. Rather than strap a sensor to the infant, Nanit sells cotton garments, a swaddle and a band, printed with a bespoke pattern. The camera watches the pattern rise and fall, infers breathing motion from the deformation, and alerts the parent if the motion stops. There are no electronics in the garment at all. The company has solved the wearable comfort problem by moving the entire sensing apparatus into computer vision. The nursery is not instrumented. It is watched by a model that has learnt what a breathing infant looks like.

The commercial architecture sits on top. Live video, sound and motion alerts and two-way audio are free. The analysis is not. Nanit's Insights tiers gate the data behind subscription: 120 dollars a year buys thirty days of sleep analysis, two days of continuous video history, 200 saved memories and up to ten caregiver profiles, while 300 dollars a year unlocks unlimited sleep analysis, seven days of continuous video history, growth tracking, and an unlimited number of people on the parenting team.

Unlimited. Not a number at all, because the vendor saw no reason to set one. That tells you what the product understands itself to be. Not a monitor. A distribution platform for footage of a child, with tiered access, retention windows set by the vendor, and an audience list with no upper bound.

Owlet Found the Regulatory Boundary by Crossing It

The other pole of this market took the opposite technical route and, in doing so, mapped the regulatory terrain for everybody else.

Owlet's Smart Sock wrapped a pulse oximeter around an infant's foot and reported heart rate and blood oxygen saturation to a phone. On 5 October 2021 the US Food and Drug Administration issued the company a warning letter, catalogued as MARCS-CMS 616354. The agency's reasoning was narrow and precise. Products measuring blood oxygen saturation and pulse rate become devices when they are intended to identify desaturation and bradycardia and to alarm when measurements fall outside preset values. Owlet had marketed the Smart Sock without clearance, in violation of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The company pulled the product.

What followed is the most instructive sequence in this industry. Owlet did not abandon the category. It went through the front door. BabySat, a prescription pulse oximetry sock, was cleared in June 2023. On 9 November 2023 the company announced De Novo clearance for Dream Sock, which it described as the first and only over-the-counter medical-grade pulse oximeter cleared for infants, indicated for healthy babies aged one to eighteen months weighing between six and thirty pounds. Both launched in 2024, and the FDA closed out the warning letter that June.

So Owlet is now, in the relevant respects, a regulated medical device company, with indications, contraindications, a cleared intended use and clinical testing behind it. And here is the asymmetry that should trouble anyone thinking about this market: Nanit, which points a camera at a child every night for years, extracts breathing motion, motor patterns, position and activity from the video, scores the result, and now proposes to project developmental trajectories from it, sits entirely outside that regime. Not because it collects less. Because it claims less.

The line between a consumer gadget and a medical device here is drawn by marketing copy. Say your sock detects desaturation and you enter a world of clinical validation and post-market surveillance. Say your camera provides insights and you do not. The volume, intimacy and longitudinal depth of the data are irrelevant to which side of the line you land on.

The Paediatric Literature Never Signed Off on Any of This

Long before the FDA acted, paediatricians were saying the quiet part in journals.

On 24 January 2017, Christopher Bonafide, Elizabeth Foglia and David Jamison published a Viewpoint in JAMA titled “The Emerging Market of Smartphone-Integrated Infant Physiologic Monitors”. They examined five models introduced over the preceding two years, priced between 150 and 300 dollars, and noted that because the manufacturers did not directly claim to treat, diagnose or prevent disease, the monitors were not regulated as medical devices. Their conclusion was blunt. There was no publicly available evidence supporting the safety, accuracy or effectiveness of these products, and no medical indications for their use in healthy infants.

The following year, Bonafide's group tested two of them. Published in JAMA in August 2018, the study put the Owlet Smart Sock 2 and the Baby Vida on thirty hospitalised infants at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, against a hospital-grade reference monitor. The Smart Sock 2 showed 88.8 per cent sensitivity and 85.7 per cent specificity for hypoxaemia, and zero per cent sensitivity for bradycardia. The Baby Vida managed zero per cent sensitivity for hypoxaemia. Bonafide's summary to the press was the correct one. If something is going wrong with a sick infant, you would want to know that one hundred per cent of the time.

Then, in 2022, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its safe sleep policy statement, produced by its Task Force on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The recommendation is one line and has not changed since. Do not use home cardiorespiratory monitors as a strategy to reduce the risk of SIDS. No monitor holds FDA authorisation to prevent sudden infant death, and there is no evidence that commercial infant vital sign devices reduce these deaths. The concern is not merely that they fail to help. It is that false alarms drive unnecessary anguish and clinical workup, while normal-looking readings offer a false reassurance that can substitute for the safe sleep practices that do work.

None of this makes Nanit's Sleep Score dangerous in the way an unreliable oximeter is dangerous. It is an argument about epistemic standing. The paediatric literature has repeatedly declined to certify that consumer infant monitoring measures anything clinically meaningful in healthy babies. Nanit is building a prediction engine on that substrate.

Care Turned Into Record-Keeping and the Chief Executive Said So

On 16 December 2025, Nanit announced a 50 million dollar growth round led by Springcoast Partners, taking total funding to 125.1 million dollars according to Forbes. The money is earmarked for what the company calls a Parenting Intelligence System, rolling out through 2026.

Anushka Salinas, who became Nanit's chief executive in March 2024 after serving as president and chief operating officer of Rent the Runway, framed the opportunity in the announcement. “Adults now track sleep, stress, and health patterns to spot trends and intervene early,” she said, “yet babies, the group that benefits most from early insight, have no comparable system for monitoring or predictive guidance.”

And then, to Forbes, the sentence that ought to be the epigraph for this entire market. “What you don't know is often what creates anxiety. When the system is doing the monitoring and interpretation, parents don't feel like they have to constantly watch and worry themselves.”

That is not a description of a tool that extends parental attention. It is a description of one that absorbs it. And it is offered, quite reasonably, as a benefit, because parental sleep deprivation is real and the anxiety of a first year is genuinely corrosive. But look at what has been swapped.

A parent watching a baby is doing something with four properties. It is forgetful: almost none of it is retained, and what is retained is retained as memory, which decays and reshapes and is legally inert. It is reciprocal: the baby watches back, and being watched by a face that responds is how infants learn that their signals produce effects in the world. It is bounded: the watching stops when the parent leaves the room and cannot be resumed retrospectively. And it is non-transferable: you cannot assign your recollection of your child's first months to a creditor.

A system watching a baby inverts all four. It retains by default and forgets only by policy. It is non-reciprocal, because a computer vision model registers the infant without responding to them. It is total across whatever window the subscription tier defines. And it is transferable, in explicit contractual terms, to successors and assigns.

Helen Nissenbaum's framework of contextual integrity, set out in the Washington Law Review in 2004, is the cleanest way to name what has changed. Information flows, on her account, are governed by norms specified across five parameters: the data subject, the sender, the recipient, the information type and the transmission principle. Nobody has ever objected to a parent knowing how their baby slept. What has changed is the transmission principle and the recipient. Deborah Lupton and Ben Williamson made the parallel point in New Media and Society in 2017, describing a datafied child subject to dataveillance from in utero onward. The nursery has not become less private in the sense of who can see in. It has become a site of extraction, and the norm violated is not visibility but permanence.

Every Statute We Have Regulates the Wrong Moment

Here is where the regulatory picture gets genuinely awkward, because the laws are not absent. They are numerous, recently strengthened, and pointed at a moment that does not carry the weight.

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act is the obvious candidate, and the Federal Trade Commission gave it real teeth in January 2025. The amended Rule took effect on 23 June 2025, with a compliance deadline of 22 April 2026 that passed a few months ago. It expands personal information to include biometric identifiers, among them voiceprints, gait patterns, facial templates and faceprints. It mandates a written retention policy stating why data is collected and when it will be deleted, and prohibits indefinite retention outright. Most pointedly, the Commission's own commentary states that disclosing a child's personal information to third parties to train or otherwise develop artificial intelligence technologies is not integral to the service and requires separate consent.

Excellent rules. Now ask whether they bite. COPPA governs operators of services directed to children under thirteen, or operators with actual knowledge that they are collecting personal information from a child. A crib camera is marketed to adults, purchased by adults, configured by adults and operated by adults. Nanit's own privacy policy states that its services are not directed to, nor intended to be operated by, children under sixteen. That statement is true, and it is precisely the problem. The infant is not a user. The infant is the subject matter. COPPA's architecture was built for a child typing into a website, not for a child being filmed by one.

The European instruments have the same shape. Article 8 of the GDPR conditions lawfulness on parental authorisation where a child is below sixteen, with member states permitted to set a floor as low as thirteen, but it governs information society services offered directly to a child. Recital 65 gives the right to erasure special force where consent was given by a data subject when they were a child, and states that the right survives into adulthood. That is exactly the right instinct, and it presumes a child who once gave consent. An infant never did.

The UK's Age Appropriate Design Code comes closest. Its fifteen standards, in force since September 2021, apply to services likely to be accessed by children, explicitly including connected toys and devices, require that the best interests of the child outrank commercial interest, and require profiling to be off by default. But it too is oriented around a child as user, and its enforcement centre of gravity has been social platforms and games rather than nursery hardware. The EU AI Act's prohibitions, applicable since 2 February 2025, ban emotion recognition in the workplace and in education, and biometric categorisation used to infer protected characteristics. Neither reaches a domestic device inferring developmental state from video in a family home.

American state biometric law is the sharpest tool in the box and the least aimed. Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act carries statutory damages of 1,000 dollars for negligent and 5,000 for reckless or intentional violations, though an amendment signed in August 2024 blunted even that, limiting a claimant to a single recovery per person however many times the identifier was scanned or disclosed. Texas' Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier statute produced a 1.4 billion dollar settlement with Meta in 2024, the largest ever obtained by a single state. Washington's My Health My Data Act, in force since March 2024, goes furthest, defining consumer health data to include information derived or extrapolated from non-health information through machine learning and algorithms, and providing a private right of action.

That last definition is the closest anything in American law comes to describing what a nursery camera does. But every one of these statutes turns on consent at the point of collection, and consent at the point of collection is the one thing this situation cannot supply.

Consent Cannot Represent Someone Who Has Not Arrived Yet

Consent works as a legitimating device under one condition: the party who consents is the party who bears the consequences. Every argument for informed consent, in medicine, in research ethics, in data protection, rests on that alignment. Remove it and consent stops being a transfer of authority and becomes a transfer of liability.

In the nursery, the alignment breaks in three directions at once, and the breaks compound.

The consenting party is not the data subject. A parent clicking through terms of service exercises a legitimate authority over their child's welfare, and nobody sensible wants to strip parents of it. But the interest traded away is not the parent's. Stacey Steinberg, writing in the Emory Law Journal in 2017, described parents as simultaneously the gatekeepers of their children's personal information and the narrators of their children's stories. Sharenting, though, is disclosure by a parent who chose what to say. This is extraction by a firm that chose what to record, at a resolution and duration no parent can evaluate.

The data subject can never ratify. There is no moment at which the infant becomes able to say yes or no to a decision already taken. A teenager can delete an Instagram account. They cannot un-generate four years of nightly behavioural telemetry, because they were never told it exists, do not know the corporate entity that holds it, and cannot identify what has been derived from it.

And the timing is structurally impossible. The gap between collection and the subject's legal capacity to object is roughly eighteen years. Retention windows are measured in months to years. Corporate acquisitions happen on a timescale of three to seven years. Model training happens once and is, for practical purposes, irreversible. Insolvency can happen at any point. By the time a person acquires standing to object to what was recorded in their cot, every consequential decision about that record has already been made, several times, by entities that may no longer exist.

This is not a complaint about weak consent. Strengthening consent does not help. A perfectly informed, freely given, granular, revocable parental consent still fails, because the failure is not in the quality of the permission. It is in the identity of the person granting it. The consent architecture is structurally incapable of representing the only person whose data it is.

The Precedents Are All About What Happens Afterwards

If you want to know how this ends, the record is not speculative. Every failure mode has already occurred in an adjacent product category, usually more than once.

Start with security. On 4 September 2013 the FTC announced a settlement with TRENDnet over its internet-connected cameras, its first action against a connected consumer product of this kind. According to the Commission's complaint, a hacker exploited a flaw in the company's software and posted links to roughly 700 customers' live feeds, which included babies asleep in cots and young children playing. The company had transmitted and stored login credentials in clear readable text. TRENDnet accepted twenty years of third-party security audits.

Ten and a half years later, in February 2024, roughly 13,000 Wyze users received thumbnail images from cameras that were not theirs as devices reconnected after a cloud outage, and 1,504 of them tapped through. A third-party caching library had mixed up device and user identifiers under load. Nothing malicious happened. The system simply handed strangers pictures of other people's homes.

Now retention. In May 2023 the FTC and the Department of Justice charged Amazon with violating COPPA by keeping children's Alexa voice recordings indefinitely and failing to honour parental deletion requests, resulting in a 25 million dollar settlement. The detail that matters is why the recordings were valuable. Children's speech patterns differ from adults', so retained child voice data was a uniquely useful corpus for teaching Alexa to understand children, and transcripts trained subsequent versions without that practice being disclosed in the privacy policy. Deletion was promised, the data was retained, and the retained data made the product better.

Then ownership. In March 2025, 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Regeneron agreed to acquire it for 256 million dollars, pledging to honour existing privacy commitments. More than two dozen state attorneys general sued to stop the sale, arguing that genetic information is categorically unlike the assets that ordinarily change hands in an insolvency. The auction was reopened, Regeneron declined to raise its bid, and on 30 June 2025 a judge approved the 305 million dollar sale of the company and its genetic database to TTAM Research Institute, a nonprofit led by co-founder Anne Wojcicki. Customers who consented to one entity holding their genome ended up with a different entity holding it, through a process in which they were not parties.

Finally, the counterexample. In 2017 Mattel announced Aristotle, an always-on voice and camera hub designed to sit in a child's bedroom from birth through adolescence. Senator Edward Markey and Representative Joe Barton demanded answers on children's privacy, campaigners delivered more than 20,000 petition signatures on 2 October 2017, and two days later Mattel cancelled the product before it shipped, and therefore before it had accumulated anything.

Read those five together and the pattern is unmistakable. The promises are made by an entity that will not necessarily be the entity holding the data. The retention is not an accident but a business rationale. And the only intervention that ever fully worked was the one that happened before collection began.

Prediction Is a Different Product From Observation

The Parenting Intelligence System announcement lists six things the platform will measure. Personalised sleep guidance. Key health metrics. Movement signatures and breathing patterns. Motor skill milestones. Speech and language patterns. And then the sixth, which is a different kind of thing entirely: trends that may predict metabolic, emotional, or cognitive challenges.

Nanit currently covers birth to age five, according to Forbes, and intends to extend its models to ages nought to ten. Its own announcement gestures at a horizon of birth to a hundred years old.

There is a real category difference between a record and a prior, and the marketing language elides it. A record says what a baby did on a given night. A prior says what kind of person a baby is likely to become. The first is a description that can be checked against the world. The second is a claim about the future that is unfalsifiable at the moment of generation, because the future has not happened, and self-confirming afterwards, because the parents who receive it will act on it.

That is the mechanism that should worry people, and it is not a data breach. It is a healthy child assigned a low score on emotional-regulation trend lines at fourteen months, whose parents, being good parents, respond by treating them as a child who needs watching. It is a nursery-derived cognitive flag that follows a family into a paediatrician's appointment, or a nursery application, or, eventually, an insurance underwriting model that has learnt to want it. The prediction does not have to be accurate to be consequential. It has to be delivered, and it has to be believed.

And recall the substrate. We are proposing to build developmental forecasts from a score that counts parental visits as a negative, on a class of measurement the relevant clinical bodies have declined to endorse, at a scale of a million children a night.

The Research Literature Is Asking for a Different Design

Three arXiv papers were put forward as evidence for this argument, and honest handling of them matters more than rhetorical convenience.

The first, arXiv 2602.17418, submitted on 19 February 2026 by Diana Addae, Diana Rogachova, Nafiseh Kahani, Masoud Barati, Michael Christensen and Chen Zhou, is titled “A Privacy by Design Framework for Large Language Model-Based Applications for Children”. It is constructive rather than critical, proposing controls across data collection, model training, operational monitoring and validation, grounded in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the UK Age Appropriate Design Code. It is not a finding that large-scale AI surveillance undermines children's privacy. It is a proposal for how to avoid doing so, and its relevance here is that its guidelines exist and consumer nursery hardware is built to none of them.

The second, arXiv 2606.17957, submitted on 16 June 2026 by Kopo Ramokapane, Rui Huan, Zaina Dkaidek and Awais Rashid, is titled “Children Are Not the Enemy: Child-Fit Security as an Alternative to Bans and Surveillance”. It argues that containment approaches, meaning access restrictions, parental monitoring and screen-time limits, are insufficient, and proposes treating children as legitimate users whose wellbeing, development, privacy, safety, agency and rights are core security requirements, shifting the object of protection from the system to the child-system relationship. That is the strongest academic articulation of the principle this market has inverted.

The third, arXiv 2607.01506, does not say what it has been cited as saying, and pretending otherwise would be indefensible in an article about evidentiary standards. Submitted on 1 July 2026 by Tomohiro Nagashima, Lisa Siegrist, Niklas Scholz, Shintaro Sato, Martina Vincoli and Man Su, it is titled “Mind the Trust Gap: Identifying (Mis)alignments in Teacher-Student Views Toward Control and Agency in K-12 Classroom AI”. It reports a speed-dating study with sixteen students and fifteen teachers in Germany and finds misalignments in trust and in views on the social and emotional dimensions of learning with AI. It does not document children reporting fear of constant AI monitoring. The honest version of the claim it was offered to support is narrower and still useful: where children have been asked, their views on AI oversight diverge measurably from those of the adults deciding on their behalf. Infants cannot be asked at all.

Hold It In Trust or Do Not Hold It At All

The instinct at this point is to demand better disclosure, and it is the wrong instinct. Disclosure assumes a reader who can act on it. There is no such reader here. The right move is to stop treating infant behavioural data as ordinary consumer data governed by contract, and start treating it as property held for a beneficiary who has not yet arrived. Four things follow.

Give the infant statutory data subject status with a fiduciary rather than a consenting parent. A parent authorising collection about a person who cannot object should be held to something closer to a trustee's duty than a customer's tick-box: obliged to act in the child's interests rather than their own convenience, and unable to authorise uses a reasonable adult would later refuse. The UK Children's Code gestures at this when it puts the child's best interests ahead of commercial interest. It needs to bind the transaction, not just the interface design.

Impose hard expiry on the record rather than on the retention policy. Raw nursery video should default to deletion within days, not whatever the subscription tier allows. Derived metrics should expire on a statutory schedule tied to the child's age, not to the company's business need, because the amended COPPA Rule's requirement of a stated business need is satisfied by any business that has one.

Bar transfer in insolvency. The 23andMe case is not an analogy, it is a preview. A firm holding nightly video and behavioural scores on a million children is an acquisition target, and a bankrupt one is an estate. Infant biometric and behavioural data needs to be statutorily excluded from the pool of saleable assets, so that who ends up holding it is never decided by a creditors' committee. Consent given to one company is not consent given to its successors and assigns, whatever section 5.2 says.

And create a right of arrival. At the age of majority, every person should receive a statutory notice naming every entity holding data generated about them before they could consent, describing what was derived from it, and offering erasure through a single form. Recital 65 already contains the moral intuition. It simply has no delivery mechanism, because it assumes the person knows what happened to them.

The counterargument is that this is a lot of machinery for a camera that helps exhausted parents through the first year, and that parents like these products. Both points are true, and nobody should want to take the camera away. But the case for regulation does not rest on the device being harmful. It rests on the fact that the transaction has no representative for the one party whose entire early life is its subject matter, and that every existing legal instrument tries to fix that by asking somebody else to sign.

The generation now being scored will not remember being watched, which is precisely the point. They will encounter their own infancy the way the rest of us encounter a credit file: as a document assembled by strangers, from a period they cannot recall, according to criteria they never saw, held by a company they never chose. Their parents will have consented on their behalf, in good faith, to terms promising nothing more alarming than insights, and reserving, in the ordinary language of commerce, a perpetual and transferable licence to fully exploit the record. The forgetting that used to be the default condition of infancy was not a technical limitation. It was the thing that made being watched by someone who loved you different from being watched by anything else.

Sources and References

1. Sapna Maheshwari, “A profile of Nanit, a maker of AI-equipped baby cameras for hyper-detailed health data tracking, which says it has 1M daily users and $100M+ in annual revenue,” The New York Times, 2 August 2026, as indexed by Techmeme. https://www.techmeme.com/260803/p8
2. Nanit, “Terms of Service,” nanit.com, accessed 5 August 2026. https://www.nanit.com/pages/terms-of-service
3. Nanit, “Introducing: Sleep Score, the First-Ever Holistic Sleep Metric for Babies,” nanit.com, accessed 5 August 2026. https://www.nanit.com/blogs/parent-confidently/introducing-sleep-score-the-first-ever-holistic-sleep-metric-for-babies
4. Nanit Support, “What is Nanit Breathing Wear?” support.nanit.com, accessed 6 August 2026. https://support.nanit.com/en_us/what-is-nanit-breathing-wear-SkTibnAtgx
5. Nanit, “Nanit Memberships: Sleep, Milestones & Insights,” nanit.com, accessed 5 August 2026. https://www.nanit.com/pages/memberships
6. Nanit, “Nanit Raises $50M to Expand Its AI-Powered Systems, Giving Parents Real-Time Insights Into Infant Health and Development,” PR Newswire, 16 December 2025. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nanit-raises-50m-to-expand-its-ai-powered-systems-giving-parents-real-time-insights-into-infant-health-and-development-302643439.html
7. Gemma Allen, “Nanit Raises $50 Million To Expand AI In Early Childhood Development,” Forbes, 16 December 2025. https://www.forbes.com/sites/gemmaallen/2025/12/16/nanit-raises-50-million-to-expand-ai-in-early-childhood-development/
8. US Food and Drug Administration, “Owlet Baby Care Inc. Warning Letter, MARCS-CMS 616354,” 5 October 2021. https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-criminal-investigations/warning-letters/owlet-baby-care-inc-616354-10052021
9. Owlet Baby Care Inc., “Owlet Achieves De Novo FDA-Clearance For Dream Sock, The First and Only Over-the-Counter, Medical Grade Pulse Oximeter Cleared for Infants,” investors.owletcare.com, 9 November 2023. https://investors.owletcare.com/news/news-details/2023/Owlet-Achieves-De-Novo-FDA-Clearance-For-Dream-Sock--The-First-and-Only-Over-the-Counter-Medical-Grade-Pulse-Oximeter-Cleared-for-Infants/default.aspx
10. Christopher P. Bonafide, Elizabeth E. Foglia and David T. Jamison, “The Emerging Market of Smartphone-Integrated Infant Physiologic Monitors,” JAMA, 24 January 2017. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2598780
11. Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, “Two Consumer Baby Monitors Show Worrisome Results in Measuring Vital Signs,” chop.edu, 21 August 2018. https://www.chop.edu/news/consumer-use-baby-monitors-have-little-proven-benefit-healthy-infants
12. Rachel Y. Moon et al., American Academy of Pediatrics Task Force on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, “Sleep-Related Infant Deaths: Updated 2022 Recommendations for Reducing Infant Deaths in the Sleep Environment,” Pediatrics, July 2022. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/150/1/e2022057990/188304/
13. Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Finalizes Changes to Children's Privacy Rule Limiting Companies' Ability to Monetize Kids' Data,” ftc.gov, 16 January 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/01/ftc-finalizes-changes-childrens-privacy-rule-limiting-companies-ability-monetize-kids-data
14. Norton Rose Fulbright Data Protection Report, “FTC's COPPA Rule changes include AI training consent requirement,” dataprotectionreport.com, June 2025. https://www.dataprotectionreport.com/2025/06/ftcs-coppa-rule-changes-include-ai-training-consent-requirement/
15. Information Commissioner's Office, “Introduction to the Children's code,” ico.org.uk, accessed 5 August 2026. https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-resources/childrens-information/childrens-code-guidance-and-resources/introduction-to-the-childrens-code/
16. European Parliament and Council, “Article 8: Conditions applicable to child's consent in relation to information society services,” General Data Protection Regulation. https://gdpr-info.eu/art-8-gdpr/
17. European Parliament and Council, “Article 5: Prohibited AI Practices,” EU Artificial Intelligence Act. https://ai-act-service-desk.ec.europa.eu/en/ai-act/article-5
18. Federal Trade Commission, “Marketer of Internet-Connected Home Security Video Cameras Settles FTC Charges It Failed to Protect Consumers' Privacy,” ftc.gov, 4 September 2013. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2013/09/marketer-internet-connected-home-security-video-cameras-settles-ftc-charges-it-failed-protect
19. Federal Trade Commission, “FTC and DOJ Charge Amazon with Violating Children's Privacy Law by Keeping Kids' Alexa Voice Recordings Forever and Undermining Parents' Deletion Requests,” ftc.gov, 31 May 2023. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/05/ftc-doj-charge-amazon-violating-childrens-privacy-law-keeping-kids-alexa-voice-recordings-forever
20. Danielle Abril, “Wyze security issue exposed private cameras to 13,000 users,” The Washington Post, 20 February 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/20/wyze-camera-security-breach/
21. Jaclyn Diaz, “Judge OKs sale of 23andMe, and its trove of DNA data, to a nonprofit led by its founder,” NPR, 30 June 2025. https://www.npr.org/2025/06/30/nx-s1-5451398/23andme-sale-approved-dna-data
22. Office of the Attorney General of Texas, “Attorney General Ken Paxton Secures $1.4 Billion Settlement with Meta Over Its Unauthorized Capture of Personal Biometric Data,” texasattorneygeneral.gov, 30 July 2024. https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/news/releases/attorney-general-ken-paxton-secures-14-billion-settlement-meta-over-its-unauthorized-capture
23. Diana Addae, Diana Rogachova, Nafiseh Kahani, Masoud Barati, Michael Christensen and Chen Zhou, “A Privacy by Design Framework for Large Language Model-Based Applications for Children,” arXiv:2602.17418, 19 February 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17418
24. Kopo M. Ramokapane, Rui Huan, Zaina Dkaidek and Awais Rashid, “Children Are Not the Enemy: Child-Fit Security as an Alternative to Bans and Surveillance,” arXiv:2606.17957, 16 June 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17957
25. Tomohiro Nagashima, Lisa Siegrist, Niklas Scholz, Shintaro Sato, Martina Vincoli and Man Su, “Mind the Trust Gap: Identifying (Mis)alignments in Teacher-Student Views Toward Control and Agency in K-12 Classroom AI,” arXiv:2607.01506, 1 July 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01506

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * Listening now to the Boston Red Sox pregame show ahead of their game vs the Toronto Blue Jays. Hopefully, I'll be able to hear the full game before sleep sends me to bed.

The regular Monday chore, my weekly laundry, is all done. Everything washed, dried, folded, and put away. So I finish the day with that measure of satisfaction, and the knowledge that tomorrow morning will find me caught up and ready for the new day.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 224.76 lbs. * bp= 143/84 (69)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 04:05 – 2 HEB bakery cookies * 04:45 – 1 banana, nacho chips w. cheese & meat sauce * 10:30 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 14:40 – 1 barbacoa taco

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 02:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 03:15 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 03:35 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 10:20 – start my weekly laundry * 13:00 – listening to relaxing music while folding laundry * 15:00 – listening to The Jack Show * 16:30 – listening to WEEI 93.7, Boston Sports Radio, ahead of tonight's MLB Game between the Boston Red Sox and the Toronto Blue Jays

Chess: * 12:45 – moved in all pending CC games

In 2013 there were 39 of them. Now there are more than a thousand, and the math never got better.

The first time I heard the word “unicorn” used to describe a startup, I laughed. It sounded like something a five-year-old would name a stuffed animal. That was a long time ago now. The word stuck, and somewhere along the way I stopped laughing and started using it myself, in meetings, without noticing.

My name is Alexander Kopylkov, and I have spent more than twenty years investing in and building companies, first in real estate and later across AI, deeptech, and infrastructure. I have watched this one word do more to shape how people think about a startup's worth than almost any actual financial metric.

A word invented to describe an exception now describes a category.

A venture capitalist coined “unicorn” in 2013 to flag something specific: a US startup worth a billion dollars or more. At the time, only 39 companies on earth qualified. It was meant as a rarity marker, the startup equivalent of a blue moon. Today there are well over a thousand of them by most counts, and some trackers that go back further put the number closer to two thousand once you include the ones that no longer qualify. A word built to mean “this almost never happens” now applies to something that happens every few days.

I don't think anyone planned for that. By most accounts, the term was always meant to be a snapshot, not a verdict. But snapshots have a way of getting treated as permanent once enough people repeat them. Founders started introducing themselves with the word. Journalists started using it as a headline shortcut. I started hearing it in pitches before I heard the actual revenue number.

The billion-dollar price tag stopped meaning what people think it means.

Here is the part that took me a while to internalize: a unicorn valuation was never a statement about a company's health. It was a statement about what one investor was willing to pay for one slice of it, on one day. That's a meaningfully smaller claim than “this company is worth a billion dollars,” but the smaller claim doesn't make for as good a headline.

The last two years have made that gap obvious. Trackers that follow the broader unicorn population have found that hundreds of companies have raised their most recent round at or below their prior peak valuation, and a meaningful chunk of those are no longer worth a billion dollars on paper at all. Europe has felt this especially hard, with multiple market analyses pointing to tens of billions in paper value now under pressure across its unicorn class. None of those companies did anything differently the day their valuation dropped. The number just stopped being defended by someone willing to pay it.

I have started treating the word as a starting question, not a finish line.

The thing that changed for me is what I do the moment I hear the word now. It used to end the conversation, in a good way. Hearing “they're a unicorn” meant someone else had already done the digging. Now it's where I start asking questions: who set that price, how long ago, on what terms, and would they set it again today.

That shift matters more than it used to, because the timeline to earn the label has collapsed. It used to take founders the better part of a decade to reach a billion-dollar valuation. Some AI-native companies now clear that bar in their very first funding round, before they've shipped much of anything. I don't say that as a criticism of those founders. I say it because a label that used to take the better part of ten years and can now happen before a product ships has, almost by definition, stopped measuring the same thing.

The word will keep getting used. What it's supposed to prove needs to be checked separately.

Investors have started using another word for what happens next: “unicorpse,” a company that quietly loses the valuation it once had. I don't love the term, but I understand why people reach for it. It captures something the original word never could: a valuation is a moment, and moments pass.

I still don't mind the word “unicorn.” It's a useful piece of shorthand, and shorthand earns its keep. What I've stopped doing is treating it as evidence. A billion-dollar price tag tells you what someone paid. It has never told you, and was never built to tell you, what the company is actually worth to hold for the next ten years. That distinction was true in 2013 with 39 companies, and it's just as true now with a thousand more of them.

• 📝 I’m participating in Blaugust! And I create a page on my notebook to track my writing. I’ll share that in a different post soon.
• 📕 I abandoned a book I was reading for my local Book Club. It’s called “Amberlough” by Lara Elena Donnelly. I read up to 19%, which is actually a lot! I always want to give a book a chance, but sometimes I wish I was more ruthless. I pushed through and now I feel bad that I used all that time to read a book I wasn’t enjoying. Anyway, I’m getting better at it. There was a time when I would finish a book just to put on a check mark, even though I was hating the experience.
• 📘 On the other hand, I’m almost done with the last book of The Expanse series “Leviathan Falls” by James S.A. Corey. I love this series, and I don’t want it to end!
• 🎭 My energy levels have been a bit up and down these past few days. I don’t sleep well overall during Summer, and I can’t wait for Fall to arrive! It’s my favorite season.
• 👟 At least walking and running have been consistent this month. I went for a run three times and walked at least every other day.
• I was searching for a grammar checker tool and I found this open-source one called Harper. Pretty good without being annoying. I added to my browser.
• 🎬 I watched two movies: “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” and “Masters of the Universe”. The first is just 100% cuteness. The second is funny in this meta sort of way, and since I grew up watching the cartoons, it got me for nostalgia reasons. The plot is not great but it makes fun of itself, and that is what makes it watchable.

Post 04 of #Blaugust #weeknotes

I must admit that I hardly think of the end times. Surely I lament in the evils that have become so commonplace that we no longer are surprised by them, much less shocked. But I am not looking to the affairs of the Middle East or anywhere else to inform me of that which even Jesus insists He knows not the day nor the hour. St. Paul reminds us where our focus should be and would urge us to consider with Jesus where our treasure is, our hearts ought to be also. So in giving us encouragement and even hope, He points us to those things that belong to the Lord and bids us to keep our attention on them:

Finally, brethren, whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things. (Phil 4:8)

There is a great spiritual battle being waged among us and within us. It is not between the forces of evil under the reins of the devil against the forces of good under the reins of Jesus — of which we might be tempted to see ourselves as everything from spectators to warriors. That battle has been done. It is the once for all of Calvary and the Empty Tomb. Indeed, the battle we find ourselves in is to decide the focus of our hearts. It is the battle of the true, the noble, the just, the pure, the lovely, the good report, the virtues, and the praiseworthy, all the things which have God's approval upon them against all that do not. Fear and curiosity may pique our interest as we try to make heads or tails about the great news of the day but in the end all of which the news speaks will pass away like the wind.

Another gem from Pr. Peters. Read the rest here.

#theology

It is pretty much guaranteed that voting on October 19 will be chaotic. There are ten questions that require separate ballots. Elections Alberta estimates that they will require 60,000 staff, a very tall order. It is more likely that the polls will be understaffed.

It is very important however that your vote get counted. Fortunately there are alternatives to voting on voting day, and it is recommended that we use them.

Mail-in ballots

Mail-in ballots are available from Elections Alberta. You have to apply to get one; instructions are here. You don't need to explain why, and in fact Elections Alberta encourages voters to use this method, so they have time to think about their vote. This is the best option, I think. You can apply right now, and ballots will begin to be sent out on September 1.

Advance voting

The other option is to vote at an advance voting location in your electoral division between October 13 and 17. As far as I can tell as of this writing those locations have not been published yet. Keep an eye on Elections Alberta if you want to go with this option. As soon as I find more information I will also post it here, so it's a good idea to subscribe!

Tonight we have the Boston Red Sox playing the Toronto Blue Jays in a MLB Game scheduled to start at 6:07 PM CDT. As I usually do, I'll follow the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.