All children have secrets from their parents. This isn’t a bad thing - as we make the transition from teenager to adult, we learn who we are and who we are going to become. This is a fraught process, no one finds it easy and it is important that you have the space and privacy necessary to do it.

But it is understandable why parents want to be involved - even when you don’t want them to be. However, the nature of modern technology means that invading your privacy is remarkably easy.

Breaching The Firewall

Any person under the age of 30 will have grown up with computers in their school. It is almost a certainty that anyone in this age group will either have had to circumvent internet filtering themselves or will have seen friends and classmates doing so.

School networks are restricted networks, you cannot usually access a website that is blocked by a school filter. However, teenagers are nothing if not resourceful, especially when it comes to accessing things that they shouldn't.

As a result, most of us had our first encounters with proxy networks while at school. If not, all information you need to know can be found at Smartproxy.

These proxy services enable users to circumvent firewalls and the other most common techniques used for internet filtering. Of course, in reality, this has more to do with the weakness of the filtering systems that are in place than it does to do with the skill or ingenuity of teenagers.

However, this still provides a computer novice with their first taste of the power that comes with being able to hack a device.

Hacking And Tracking

Take a moment to feel at least a little bit of pity for the children who will be growing up with computer literate parents. For those of us who are currently in our mid to late 20s, computer literacy was not common at all amongst people our parents age.

As a result, we grew up understanding computers a lot better and a lot more intuitively than our parents did, something which no doubt helped us to frequently circumvent their attempts at controlling our usage.

This is starting to change. Any parent who is in their 30s will likely have a reasonable degree of computer knowledge simply from experience. Teenagers today and in the future are going to have a considerably more difficult time pulling the wool over their parent's eyes where computers are concerned. What's more, their parents will have a much better understanding of the technology that they are using than our parents did.

In many ways, this is undoubtedly a good thing. However, parents are always capable of overstepping the mark and becoming overbearing. There is now a plethora of software and apps on the market that make it much easier for parents to snoop on their kid's tech use if they so desire.

Does Your Mother Know?

The reality is that your parents don't even need to be very tech-savvy in order to monitor you through technology. Everything in the world of technology is designed for a mass-market audience. You don't need to know how an iPhone works in order to own or use one.

Equally, your mother doesn't need to have an understanding of exactly how something like a keylogger works in order to be able to install it on your phone or laptop. It's possible to hack a cell phone without prior knowledge. In fact, these products are aimed squarely at parents who do not have the necessary background knowledge to be able to properly police their child's tech use.

Of course, it certainly helps nosey parents that the businesses that make your cellphone - and the apps that you run on it - are all doing their utmost to collect your data and track your activities. All your parents, or anyone else who wants to spy on you, need to do is install software that can read and present that data to them.

Keyloggers And Tracking

A quick Google search will instantly bring up services like Kid Logger - free keylogger software that can be installed on any target device and used by anyone. A keylogger does exactly what it says on the tin, it logs every keystroke input into the machine and stores it or relays it to another person.

Modern keyloggers do more than just monitor what keystrokes are input, parents can now outsource just about all of their responsibilities for ensuring their kids use tech sensibly to an app.

For example, many of these keylogging apps will also monitor activity and will let parents know what apps their children use and for how long they use them. Some of them will even intercept location data in order to reveal exactly where a device has been during the day.

The reality is that if your mom wants to know what you are doing on your phone then there are plenty of ways they can find out. The software and apps they need to monitor you are widely available. Even if your parents know nothing about technology, it’s not unreasonable to assume that they are monitoring you.