Talking Angela reveals something else parents need to know

Talking Angela robbed my little girl of a peaceful night’s rest this week. With a headful of bad information passed down from an uninformed parent to that parent’s misinformed child, we had a situation at the Brown home.

As parents, we’re all used to putting out fires, solving crises and generally applying salve to the wounds, physical and mental. Yet nothing grinds my gears worse than setting straight info delivered from a parent whose job it is to know better, or at the very least educate themselves in the opposite direction of kneejerk-ism.

I’d already read about Talking Angela a few weeks ago making my usual rounds among the news aggregation sites, but I didn’t expect to have a lengthy conversation about it with my 8-year-old. It’s an app for smartphones or tablets that has so far been downloaded more than 10 million times, and it made one little girl very scared at bedtime.

A white Parisian cat named Angela sits at a sidewalk café, and depending on the settings on the app, answers questions, asks questions, responds to facial cues through the phone’s camera and responds to touch via the touch of your device.

What it does not do — but is rumored to — is provide a window into your child’s home for a digital creeper. It doesn’t hack, it doesn’t invade privacy, it isn’t state-of-the-art pedophile spytech meant to line up a cast of victims for a bogeyman peering through the computer screen. It’s harmless, albeit pointless.

I must have heard three different rumors from my daughter talking about this, including that if you answer all the questions, Angela tells you you’ll die; if you look at the cat’s eye closely, you can see a man at a computer watching you; it asks you where you live and other personal info.

This is a real thing apparently, and our kids are spreading it among each other. The sad part of it is, one of the children who delivered the info to my daughter also said her father called the police to investigate the app. Wow. Kids are kids, and you can only believe them as far as you can throw them, but each said these “have you heard’s” were coming straight from people who should know better.

The newspaper guy in me believes little and relies on even less, and I try to teach my daughter the same thing. With kids, it’s all about leading with the chin, and they scare easily. The end result was my little girl freaked herself out recounting the tales of Talking Angela.

The junk app hoax was debunked a long time ago, not just by the app’s developer, Outfit7, which has done multiple on-camera interviews to say the technology is simple, the verbal response and cue are based on the scripts and no information ever leaves the app. Internet security analysts have also been interviewed numerous times to say the app has been deconstructed, the coding gone over line by line, with the claims made by hoax perpetrators impossible to achieve.

And all of this information is nothing more than a Google search away, a Snopes.com entry between full-blown paranoia and setting the record straight.

Being a parent is difficult now, yesterday and forever. But the fact is, we’ve got to change and adapt to the times, and that means in a digital age, when our children are more comfortable with technology than we are, more savvy with notebooks, tablets, iPod Touches, smartphones, we have to stay in the same time zone.

At some point I’m going to fall behind my daughter and son technologically, where the whole world will be like my grandmother’s VCR flashing 12:00 forever. In fact, that day will probably come sooner than I’d like to admit.

How else will I stay sharp? What natural instinct will I fall back on? Healthy skepticism and believing nothing without seeing it or experiencing it with my own eyes; it’s the best gift I can give my children and the best way I know to stay ahead of the game.

The bigger message here is stop believing the crap handed to you. Don’t allow it to take root in your own garden, don’t help germinate it in your children. Rumors and hoaxes, hearsay and falsehoods, old wives’ tales and white lies, it’s my job as a parent to help my kids identify them, squash them, pluck them out of the earth before they grow.

This column first appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, March 14, 2014.