Honey, let’s track the kids: the rise of parental surveillance
At 4pm on a Friday afternoon in June 2019, Macy Smith, then 17 years old, was driving alone in a white hatchback near Pilot Mountain in North Carolina. The road twisted through a thick forest and a torrential summer storm lashed down. Macy lost control on a corner and the car hydroplaned, hurtling through the trees and flipping over three times before settling in a ravine. She was flung into the back seat and the vehicle pinned her left arm to the ground.
Macy was frantic: she stretched for her phone, but couldn’t reach it. She listened out for passing cars, but it was a remote spot and they didn’t come often. The first went by without stopping, then the next, then a third. It became dark. Macy had lost feeling in the arm that was trapped, and her neck throbbed. By 10.30pm, 28 cars had come and gone. But then the 29th did stop: Macy heard the doors open, and the voices of her stepfather and brother calling her name. They followed the tyre skids down the embankment and her stepfather held her hand through the blown-out sunroof. Macy had kept it together until this point, but now she sobbed.
The family had found Macy using the Find My Friends app, which allows users with Apple iPhones to share their location with others. Her mother, Catrina Cramer Alexander, had checked it when Macy hadn’t come home and was not answering calls. They then jumped in their car and followed the pulsing blue dot to the ravine.
“Having that location, if we didn’t have that, we would have never known where to look,” Alexander told a local TV station. “I’m certain that that is what saved her life.”
What happened to Macy is every parent’s worst nightmare, though mercifully there was a happy-ish ending: Macy had a fractured neck and underwent an operation to repair nerve damage in her arm. But it’s not hard to imagine a worse outcome. What if her phone had smashed? What if it couldn’t get a signal in the forest? “It’s unreal that I survived that crash,” she said afterwards.
Find My Friends was unveiled on 4 October 2011, the day before Steve Jobs’s death, and has been installed as standard on Apple products since 2015. But the app was not the first or even the market leader: that’s Life360, which describes itself as a “family safety service” and has received funding from Google and Facebook since it was founded in 2008. Standard location-sharing apps, such as Find My Friends on iOS devices and Google Family Link for Android, give a GPS pinpoint for users, which they can either choose to reveal to others or not. Life360 does that too, but – for a fee – you can activate premium features, such as being notified if someone in your circle has been involved in a car accident, or if they have driven above the speed limit or even gone beyond a set “geo-fenced” area.
There is a significant market for these features. Life360 is used by 32 million people in more then 140 countries; it’s currently the seventh most downloaded social-networking app on the App Store and its San Franciscobased company has been valued at more than $1bn. A survey of 4,000 parents and guardians in the UK in 2019 found that 40% of them used realtime GPS location tracking on a daily basis for their children; 15% said that they checked their whereabouts “constantly”.
That word “constantly” will send many teenagers into a cold sweat. At best, location-tracking apps can feel like an extension of helicopter parenting; at worst, they might feel like stalking. While all the apps tend to emphasise that they provide security for the child and peace of mind for the parent, some clearly go into deeper, more invasive territory. One, Find My Kids, allows you to activate the microphone on your child’s phone remotely, so you can eavesdrop on their interactions. OurPact gives you access to screenshots of your child’s online activity, “all encrypted for maximum safety”. Bark monitors and scans messages sent from a device, looking for issues such as “cyberbullying, sexual content, online predators, depression, suicidal ideation, threats of violence, and more”. The app claims to “cover” almost 6 million children, and has detected 478,000 “selfharm situations” and 2.5m “severe bullying situations”.
Location tracking has become a battleground in many families, bringing up issues of trust, privacy and personal growth. And while the discussion mostly relates to teens, it can start much earlier. Find My Kids, which launched in Russia in 2016 and is now worldwide, notes on its website: “Youd [sic] kid is too young for a smartphone? Use children’s GPS smartwatch!” In the US, the GizmoWatch 2 offers real-time location tracking and is aimed at children as young as three. KIDSnav is pitched at five-year-olds and up and offers GPS tracking and a built-in microphone to listen in on whatever is happening around your child.
All parents have to ask themselves what is best for their child. And Macy Smith and her family are in no doubt that location-tracking apps can be invaluable: in fact, after the accident, the family upgraded from Find My Friends to Life360, because of the crash detection and roadside assistance it offers.
“I know it’s hard for teenagers to give up your privacy,” Macy told ABC News, “but sneaking out and being places you don’t want your parents to know about is not worth being trapped under a car for seven hours.”
In a sense, location-tracking apps have crept up on us. Most parents would agree that planting a chip in your child that monitored their movements and vital signs – as depicted in the Arkangel episode of the dystopian, tech-anxiety series Black Mirror in 2018 – would be a little extreme. But smartphones have put similar technology in all of our pockets and, well, when it’s 12.30am and you want to go to bed and your kid’s not back from their friend’s house, it’s pretty difficult to resist.
“If it’s on your phone, why would you not look?” says Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who has written extensively on children’s rights in the digital age. “Up till now, parents and children had evolved lots of ways of handling it: ‘Phone when you reach your friend’s… I won’t worry as long as you’re home by 11.’ But now with the apps and tracking, you know everything. So it’s: ‘Why did they go to the shopping centre on the way to their friend’s? They said they were going to this friend, why are they on that side of town?’ Once you’ve got information, it is almost wrong not to look at it.”
Not all teenagers find location tracking an invasion of their privacy. Many are happy to share their whereabouts constantly with their friends: Snap Map, a popular, opt-in function of Snapchat, pinpoints the user’s exact position and those in their circle (with alarming accuracy) whenever the app is turned on. Some don’t even mind their parents keeping tabs on their movements. “When I think about it, it makes me feel safe, because I know that Mum or Dad knows where I am,” says Lola Pethybridge, a 17-year-old student from south London. “Or even my brother” – who is two years younger – “if it came down to him having to figure out where I was. It’s just that safety net where you can say, ‘I need help.’ Or, ‘Can you come and get me?’ And the relief of, ‘Oh, someone I trust knows where I am.’”
Next year, Pethybridge hopes to go to university – will she turn off the family’s Find My Friends then? “Just judging by my habits,” she says, “I don’t think I will.”
The subject of location tracking is a more contentious issue with other families. Alicia Hardy, a solicitor from Petersfield in Hampshire, encouraged her two children, Ben and Louise, to use Find My Friends after hearing about it from her sister who lives in the US. Ben, who was 17 at the time, lasted for about a month. “At that point in my life, I wasn’t necessarily that happy about Mum knowing where I was all the time,” says Ben, who is now 23. He smiles, “I was sneaking out to smoke, so I didn’t want Mum to see that I was leaving school.”
Louise, meanwhile, was 14 and went along with her mother’s Find My Friends request; now 20, they both still use it. “I introduced it not because I wanted to catch my kids out doing stuff wrong, because frankly, I did stuff wrong, but for me it was more an anxious-mother thing,” explains Alicia. “Children can be on their phones all day to their mates. But they don’t answer their phone to their parents or text them back. And that’s really, really irritating for parents, because they systematically would not answer for hours. I tend to catastrophise, whereas Marco doesn’t even think about it.” (Marco Hardy, her ex-partner and Ben and Louise’s father, agrees: “I’ve never even looked at an app or even contemplated it,” he says.)
By many objective measures, young people face fewer dangers than they did a generation ago, but it probably doesn’t feel like that to their parents. Livingstone has found in her research that daughters are especially likely to be tracked, with concerns about sexual assault and, in recent times, reports of drink-spiking. Many of the apps lean into these worst-case scenarios. One of the add-ons that Life360 offers is Disaster Response: “Evacuation support in case of natural disasters, active shooter events, and more.”
Louise Hardy agrees that, at times, location-tracking apps have made her feel safer, but still has some conflict about them. “As a kid you’re meant to do stuff that your parents don’t know about,” she says. “You’re meant to make mistakes, you’re meant to mess up. So them always having an eye on you takes away from childhood a little bit. But Mum is a worrier, so it’s just a case of keeping her a bit sane.”
The Hardy family are clearly very open with each other, and that’s important according to Philippa Perry, a psychotherapist and the Observer Magazine’s agony aunt. “Children sometimes want some things to be private,” she says. “I never used online monitoring with my child because she was an adult before I knew about the software. I relied on that old-fashioned method of asking her where she was going. Once she answered me, ‘I’m not telling you.’ To which I replied, ‘Darling, even Dad has to tell me where he’s going so we know where to start the police search.’ Which, luckily, she found reasonable.”
For Perry, location tracking, like most technology, is neither good nor evil: what matters is the boundaries you set and all parties being comfortable with the negotiation. “It’s not for an outsider like me to say whether or not to use it,” she says. “Like all things, if you want your children to be open with you and feel like they can tell you anything, don’t react angrily or negatively or dismissively when they confide in you. If you have done this in the past and now you have a mute teenager, try to repair that rupture by telling them where you overreacted in the past without making excuses for yourself and say you’ll do better next time. And do better next time.”
Many teens feel a line has been crossed, especially when their parents make location tracking a condition of paying their phone bill. On the online forum Reddit, on boards such as r/insaneparents and r/raisedbynarcissists, kids share horror stories and screenshots of unhinged interactions with their parents. On TikTok, videos instruct users on how to change their phone settings to fool Life360 into freezing their location (“I broke Life360, you are welcome”). On Twitter, a 20year-old called Cedar Rose from Kansas City recently made an appeal for $3,000 so they could leave home and their “homophobic… anti-vax” parents who track their movements constantly on Life360. “This is my final resort,” they wrote. “I have no freedom in this house, absolutely none. And I can’t take it any more.” To date, Cedar has only raised $510, along with some snide comments that they should “just get a job”.
Whether the useof these apps keeps children safer and more sensible is disputed, but there is obviously the potential to impact relationships between parents and their offspring: certainly where trust has been eroded, location tracking is unlikely to repair the damage. A small study in the Netherlands found that teenagers who were monitored were more secretive and less likely to confide in their parents. “If young people want their privacy, they’ll find a way of getting it,” predicts Livingstone.
Where there is more widespread agreement, though, is concern about what happens with the data that is collected. Life360, for example, made $16m in 2020 from selling location data (it is how the app keeps its basic model free, the company states). This information might end up with insurance companies, or realistically with anyone who feels there is a value in paying for it. Livingstone says, “The idea that children are getting a detailed digital footprint not of their own making that tracks everywhere they go, and that’s being used to sell advertising to them now or later, is reprehensible.”
It’s no spoiler that in the Black Mirror episode Arkangel, the (wellintentioned) use of location tracking ends in disaster: the abject breakdown of trust and understanding between a mother and daughter. “In the real world, the experiment – that we have only tenuously signed up for – is ongoing and we will experience the results as they happen, with the fallout felt by our loved ones. “Children have always had times in which they
were unobserved and playing outside and generally at risk and coping,” says Livingstone. “We have a crisis in mental health, so it may all be linked that they’re not developing those everyday habits of resilience. But there are some huge unknowns: we have no idea really what it is to grow up when you are constantly observed. So in that sense, we just have to say, we don’t know.”