There are other such media hypes which you can explain like that without involving a neurologically active parasite. For example the belief that whites are being systematically replaced by blacks/hispanics/muslims/jews/... Or the belief that there is a single supreme being in the sky, watching everything we do, having killed his son for humanities sins. There are no rational reasons to believe any of this, still, many people do, with lots of media helping them reinforce those thoughts in quite effective bubbles.
The proof obligation is the other way around. You need to show that constant surveillance actually makes a difference, on a population level. Otherwise your claim is the empty one.
I wonder that too, but I think you are at least one generation too late with this. Your average phone already tracks where you go, with whom you interact, what you search for online. It asks you "how was this restaurant?" and reminds you what you did last year at this time.
There is a miniscule minority of folks who care and disable as much of that as they can, but the vast majority doesn't know how and doesn't care. I even know lots of people who work in the industry and just don't bother disabling any of this because they claim it's all unavoidable anyway, and they are probably right. Oh and they had that attitude already 10-15 years ago.
So, this is already a thing if the past. And we are at a point were even if your devices are not tracking you then everything around you is. Each Tesla parked on the roadside films you when you walk by. Each phone close by tracks that your phone is close by. And nobody cares. Heck, people argue it's for the better, imagine somebody getting raped, so good we have lots of cameras close by to find the bad guy! As if society is any safer for it than 30 years ago
Don't worry, if it doesn't have it then I'm sure a future model of this watch will have a "I'm not on a wrist" logging/alerting function.
So the kids need to figure out that in order to do this kind of thing they need to attach their watch to some less-cool kid's wrist that stays at school while they do the fun things. At least that less-cool kid hopefully gets some kind of reimbursement for offering that service.
Hm, but that clock likely seeds the PRNG used to create the gameplay. If that was always the same then the whole exercise would be pretty boring.
So their experiments purposely vary the time. It's just that for some input value, the thing they are running dramatically (well...) differs from other times, and the model wasn't expecting that, nor were the authors.
So the bug is in ... their deterministic execution environment not stubbing out the current time, so that different runs are not actually deterministic but dependent on that non-deterministic input called the clock.
Well, and that they are side-loading some library which can change.
There are other such media hypes which you can explain like that without involving a neurologically active parasite. For example the belief that whites are being systematically replaced by blacks/hispanics/muslims/jews/... Or the belief that there is a single supreme being in the sky, watching everything we do, having killed his son for humanities sins. There are no rational reasons to believe any of this, still, many people do, with lots of media helping them reinforce those thoughts in quite effective bubbles.