Surveillance as Care: Configuring Baby Monitors in the Home

With the development of consumer surveillance technologies, monitoring has become increasingly accessible and woven into family life. Prior work has examined parents’ attitudes, privacy concerns, and selected uses of surveillance technologies like smart cameras and location-tracking apps, but offers limited accounts of how parents, as surveillants, configure and experience these technologies themselves in daily parenting. We address this gap by focusing on baby monitoring technologies (BMTs) as a high-salience context during a sensitive stage of family life. Using inductive thematic analysis of Reddit discussions, we examine how parents engage with BMTs in practice. Our findings revealed how parents actively assemble and configure BMTs, navigate and manage their emotions through them, negotiate privacy frictions and boundaries, and safeguard security in their use of such technologies within parenting and caregiving. We conclude by discussing implications for surveillance research and design for monitoring technologies in care.