unhappyben | Raising a Daughter in the Panopticon | Common S3nse - 2026

Can everyone hear me? Well, that's good. I think everyone is still at the altar aquarium, so that's good. Thank you for coming. Um, I'd like to be an altar aquarium too, but that's probably fine.

Um, my wife and I had a daughter earlier this year. Um daughter earlier this year. Um , at 3 days old she was given a BSN number, which is the burger service number in the Netherlands. It's a government ID, so she was already, you know, in a database where she couldn't keep her head down. Um, she couldn't smile, and, well, she's still awake.

She still, she still can't really fall asleep. Um, and then a few weeks later I started getting notifications from my bank, uh, they were writing to me, “Hey, do you want to open a kids’ savings account? We will give you 10 euros if you deposit 1000 euros." Um, “Hey, maybe you’d like to give your daughter a head start? She's, you know, young, new.

Here's some more money for you if you deposit 10,000 euros. Um you deposit 10,000 euros. Um , and for me, such a handicap was something she couldn't decide on and couldn't give up. Um, and this is perhaps a polite version of something much more important in our society, and that's what I'm here to talk to you about for 20 minutes, and hopefully if you have children, this will be useful to you, which is raising a daughter in a panopticon. So, before she could smile or talk, or she still can't talk still can't talk , before she could do anything, she already had her tax identification number.

Um, the banks already knew who she was, and it's kind of a moving mechanism that we live in in modern society, you know, you're born, you're given a tax identification number. When I was in England personally, I don't think I got mine until I was got mine until I was ...16, hmm, but it's completely different here. Hmm, and the email or notification you receive is just marketing. Hmm, there's not much you can do about them.

Uh, if you agreed, then you agreed. But deep down, things are a little scarier. So little scarier. So , every gift you get from me or my parents, her grandparents, every contractor she has, everything we buy, our direct debits from daycare, it's all indexed, time-stamped, and recorded in our family profile by banks and other data brokers. Hmm, all of this paints a picture of a family paints a picture of a family that has predictable needs for the birth of a new child, I would say.

Hmm, obviously they can't do much with this information in marketing, but they can create a behavior map for us. So, until they decide, like, "Hey, your kid needs a handicap kid needs a handicap ." “Haha. They already know who she is, who we are, and what we are going to buy next, based on things like these predictions, for example . And I think the scariest thing about kids these days is that they're accumulating a data train faster and deeper than any generation before them.

This is becoming a much bigger problem than I think many people realize. Emm. Another thing I learned recently is that a whole dataset would be a child's play. She is going to go on school trips. She will get her first phone, her first laptop.

We just went on vacation to Italy or Greece. Sorry, we're going on vacation to Italy next week. And all of these moments and information will be, you know, rows in someone's database. So when I pay with my card, they will know where we are, what we bought. Um, this is a complete map of who I am, who she is, and what we paid for.

Emm. And as I said before, it's not that knowing what I bought is valuable. It's about... It's about... turning this information into a behavior map.

Um, maybe we go to doctors and pharmacies more often in the winter because she's sick. Um, maybe my wife and I order Uber Eats three times a week, um, because we're really tired. Um, you can reconstruct childhood and our lifestyle based on these types of payments, and you can tell when we're coping and when we're not, I think, in the most enjoyable way. Um, all this information is never deleted. It is never destroyed or cleansed.

Um, when the banks fail, um, it's not going anywhere. She is being sold. They are uniting it. Um, she's leaking, and I think one of the most important things right now is that she's being retrained. So, all of our information is constantly being learned by artificial intelligence, and once it gets into these models gets into these models , it's very difficult to get it out.

Um, we saw a lot of violations. I think there have been so many violations in recent years. The year 2025 was particularly difficult. Um particularly difficult. Um , Coinbase had a leak in 2025.

One of my good friends was part of this and... He's getting a lot of emails and phone calls in the UK right now. In France, we saw a lot of people being held hostage over their cryptocurrency, and I don't know if there's anyone Dutch here, but ODDO also leaked a lot of data about people who had n't been customers for 10 years. My wife was even one of them. We haven't been to ODDO since I moved here 8 years ago and her information was leaked by them.

Um, that's true. It's difficult, I would say, for us. And it's the same with my daughter. When my information is leaked now , it's not just my house or my wife's house, but my child's house as well . And what makes it even scarier is that someone who knows that maybe I have some cryptocurrency or some wealth also knows my home address.

And this data will be somewhere in the future. This data will be somewhere in the future, you know, owned by companies that didn't exist when it was collected, used by people who...didn't exist when it was collected. And I would say the scariest thing about having a child is that they can't consent to any of this data collection. My job is to give consent on her behalf.

So this is something that is extremely important for us to remember. And it's not just banks that collect all the information, it's practically everyone at the moment. For example, Coinbase, Revolut, neobanks like Ethos, every payment app, every card app, every card —they all collect and monetize transaction traces. So, each of them has their own algorithms that take a behavioral map of your spending, your withdrawals, your deposits, your leveraged loans if you do that, and then monetize the transaction trail. I think most people are familiar with the phrase from social media, like, if you don't pay for the product, then you are the product.

In consumer finance, you pay for products, and you are also a commodity because they are essentially monetizing you. They know how to get you to buy the next thing. And that's kind of the world we've gotten into, I would say. No one really chose consumer finance this way. Hmm, that's about where we are now.

Hmm, there was no referendum on what they could do with our data. You sign up for a service that you have to pay for, hmm, and if coffee is here, here, or for dinner, or an hour later, hmm, you check the terms of service that you didn't read because no one will read them, and that's it: they can monetize your transaction and try to sell you something in the future. Hmm, this is , I would say, the scariest thing. I originally wrote this essay on Twitter, um, I think a little bit before AI became so big, um, AI makes structured datasets even more valuable. This is essentially ideal training data.

It would be , in my daughter's case, you know, 18, 50 years of perfectly structured, clean, time-stamped, logged data that, um, makes it extremely easy to predict, profile, and evaluate a person. So, this is going to be even easier than it was for the people who did it to us, uh, for her. And by the time, I think, by the time she can hopefully buy a house or an apartment, her credit ratings will be like ours on crack. At the very least, I have to tell my mortgage advisor some information about myself. I suppose it'll be a little different, uh a little different, uh , when she's old enough.

And the same goes for , you know, her insurance premiums. They will have all the information they need to information they need to really understand it in detail. And for me, the consent given today is practically consent given forever. Um, and for her, uh, she can't consent at all because, like I said, she does n't even sleep anymore. So.

Um, and I think this is also maybe a little difficult, so bear with me. Um, it's not just transactions that will be monetized and learned from. Um, she'll grow up talking to an artificial intelligence, right? I spend almost half my day talking to Kimmy now, working on some research. projects.

I think most people here do the same. Hmm, she grew up, essentially, talking to an artificial intelligence about things she was embarrassed to talk about. If you imagine what we were doing on Google, searching Reddit, uh, Quora forums, if you're familiar. Hmm, I don't know if I'm getting too old . Hmm, kids won't ask Claude or ChatGPT about the weather .

They will ask about things they are ashamed of. Either they are afraid or they are worried. Their crushes, their fights with friends, the things that scare them at night, the things about their bodies they don't want to talk about. This is, in essence, a confessional. I'm sure we've seen a rise in people falling in love with AI agents and things like that.

This is, in essence, a confessional. Hmm, where you sign away the rights to teach all your information, which is kind of the opposite of what you want to see in a confessional. Hmm, these will ultimately be her deepest thoughts, or at least someone's deepest thoughts. printed, trained, dated, fed, and then added back to the training circle. And I think the scariest thing is that the only thing stopping this is privacy policies.

So I never read the privacy policy. I would be surprised if the six of you if the six of you ever read the privacy policy here . And no lawyer likes to read privacy policies. And let's face it, no child will ever read a privacy policy. Um, yes.

And I think if you saw some of the things that are out there, we would probably change our minds, you know, about what we're actually signing up for. Especially with artificial intelligence, once it's trained, once it's on the scale, once it's there, it doesn't come out. There is no button to delete my information from Anthropic servers or ChatGPT servers, in this case OpenAI. There is no way to remove it from there. She is there, and we must suffer the consequences together.

Um, great. So, privacy was a personal issue until 6 months ago . It was my choice, my data. When I said data. When I said no, it was over, and that was good.

Now it's a parental choice, I would say. So every payment I make on her behalf, buying her things, going to daycare, going on day trips, every transfer of money to her as a Christmas gift or a birthday present from my parents, from friends – parents, from friends – that's a node in her social graph, where she's at the center. Um, yes, and it's a pretty scary thought, I think, to imagine when she turns 18 and becomes an adult in the eyes of society that this entire structured dataset will be indexed not only in her profile but in her family profile as well. Our address, our expenses, our travels–everything about her will be known in more detail than about me. Um, and this surveillance is what she will inherit.

I hope she inherits my British accent, touch wood. Um, and she will inherit this surveillance at the same time. It will simply be there, and that is a fact, just like today. Um, that's all. That's what it's all about ...

the presentation that privacy choices are now parental. And this applies not only to me as a father, but, I think, to everyone who is a father. And most of us are familiar with the idea of ​​raising a child in the traditional sense, meaning you feed them, educate them, keep them safe, make sure they don't get hit by a car. Um, I don't know what else you do. You send them to school, teach them good manners.

Um, and I would say that's the last thing on the list for raising a child, and a lot of parents probably don't realize it because privacy isn't common sense yet isn't common sense yet . Thank you. Um, we want to make sure that other people can't mine my child's data before they can even say the word "data say the word "data ," or, for older children, even write the word "data." And it's not about hiding something from the government. They mostly know what I have, you know what I have, you know .

I am expressing myself quite clearly. I pay taxes. But it's important to know that privacy is not secrecy and the desire to make sure the desire to make sure that every payment app, every data broker, every model... data broker, every model... that studies consumer finance doesn't have her information just because it's the norm.

We should not default to this idea of ​​disclosing our data. So when she goes to get her mortgage, I don't know, at 21 or something like that, she'll be a stranger. They won't have a complete list of information about her. They should ask her questions. They have to know things.

And it is very important to be careful from day one. So this is something I've been pretty aware of over the last 6 months because it's really hard to give up in hindsight . Of course, you can opt out of emails. Hmm , but if it ever touches the registration service, if it ever, you know, on the Internet, they say the Internet is forever. Hmm, he must be living forever at this point.

So we try to do as many things as possible that maintain confidentiality, which I think explains why I do it. Hmm, that's a bit boring or exciting, depending on how you look at it . This is giving her cash gifts in a piggy bank. I remember shaking my piggy bank as a child, taking out money, going to the toy store, spending money. I hope that when she can do this she can do this , they will still accept cash in this country .

Let's see. Uh, I'm not entirely sure about that. Uh, for cryptocurrency it's peer-to-peer. Maybe it's no longer meeting someone in a parking lot and giving them cash for Bitcoin. Hmm, but it's still possible.

But it still ensures that when we connect to the chain, we do so peer-to-peer. We do this in the most secure way possible, without the need to create a centralized sharing profile for it. Uh, what is this? Oh, privacy pools. My favorite is probably the privacy-preserving protocol at the moment.

Uh, hopefully some of you are familiar with him. Using this breaks the link in the chain between her wallet and my wallet. Uh, obviously she's not going to spend any money anytime soon , I hope. So, it can stay in privacy pools as long as possible. Uh, which is obviously good for a breakup.

link. Um, next time she was born, I bought a Keystone Pro 3. Not sponsored, but a great wallet. It has an air gap. Um, never touches the internet.

Sign the QR the internet. Sign the QR code. And I loaded it with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero. Um, I hid it in a safe place so it could be seen in, I don't know, 20 years or something. So, he is separated from me.

He is separate from her, and she can use these funds in the future, um, whenever she wants. Emm. And I think the latter is just completely separate. No accounts in her name. She doesn't need an email address .

She doesn't need any bills until she's a little older. Um, yes, and I'm no saint. I have a smart home. I always call them my Chinese listening devices. I have vacuum cleaners, smart smart bulbs, Home Pods.

I'm not unplugging it , and I'm not going to give it up. I love living in the city. She will have a phone, a direct card. She will have it all . information.

But the parts that I can hide from other people's datasets and databases, uh , those are the parts that I'll make so she starts out with better financial privacy than I do. And I think she will grow up in the Panopticon. Uh, this is the last slide, and then we can all leave. Uh, she'll grow up in the Panopticon. I can't change that.

Everything about daily life at the moment means that surveillance is imminent. It's kind of scary to be us. I think there are some things think there are some things we can do against this, but that's it. And most children inherit by default, so they get the same bank accounts as their parents, the same phones as their parents. Uh, maybe they use the same centralized exchanges as their parents because it's the cheapest.

Many of these things are stimulated. Maybe you get a discount on fees on a centralized exchange, which is why you chose it. Uh, I want not only a monetary inheritance for her, but also the habit of asking, you know, who chose this by default, and was it chosen for me? Do I have power over the decision? Am I giving away data?

Am I a product? Um yeah, she got a tax number before she could, you know, lift her head. Um, and that's my job, and I think if some of you here are parents, it's our job our job to make sure that the data stays as safe as possible for them as safe as possible for them . Um, that's, um, that's all. 3 minutes early, great.

So, I guess if...Thank you. I don't know if anyone will have any questions, but just to make sure that if you have kids, don't sell their data before, I think.