Jamie: I use ‘spy’ app to keep tabs on our daughters
JAMIE Oliver previously revealed that worries about social media had made him ban his children from posting selfies.
Now he has admitted he uses a ‘spy app’ to monitor the location of his teenage daughters.
The TV chef – father of Poppy, 16, Daisy 15, Petal, nine, Buddy, eight, and River, two – said the phone application enables him and his wife Jools to see exactly where their children are and the route they are taking.
‘We use an app to keep track of our kids’s whereabouts,’ Oliver said in an interview.
‘The older girls, Jools and I are all on an app called Life360, which means we can see exactly where everybody is and the route they’ve gone.’
Outlining the benefits of the app, he said: ‘If one of the girls says, “I’m going to Camden Town” and I can see they’ve gone to Reading, then we have a problem. They can check on me, too, and see how fast I’m driving. It’s brilliant.’
The Life360 software is a free family networking app which runs on mobile devices. It allows users to view family members on a map, communicate with each other, and receive live alerts when loved ones arrive at home, school or work.
Users can create ‘circles’ with family or friends who also have the app on their phone. A user can turn off their location but other members of the circle are updated so they can make sure that member is safe.
Oliver and his wife, both 43, have been married for 18 years.
He told Woman magazine: ‘I like watching Jools get older. I love her more now than I ever have before.’ He added: ‘We’re yin and yang – she’s very homey and family based and I grew up in a pub, I love going out and meeting people and that is not her idea of fun. But we come together over parenting; our approaches are very similar.’
Oliver, who works long hours running his £240million (€270million) cooking empire, said it did not feel weird to leave most of the parenting to wife Jools during the week.
He said many working parents were not always present in the week, and added: ‘Actually, I think I’m a full-time dad, it’s just that I’m physically active with the kids at the weekends and the holidays.
‘Sometimes, the kids drop in. Poppy came into the office to open her GCSE [exam] results – I’d never seen her smile like that.’
Last year Oliver revealed that he had banned daughter Daisy from posting selfies and compared the trend to pornography.
He said he is among the first generation of parents who have to deal with their children using social media, adding: ‘I’m going to generalise massively here but from my observation so far, at 13 to 14 the kind of pictures girls are putting up, from what I have seen, are split 50/50 – a normal young girl and then this weird hybrid of, dare I say it, quite porno, luscious, pouty lips, pushing boobs out.
‘I don’t even want to look at some of the things my daughter shows me. I’m like, “Really? Aren’t their parents all over that like a rash?” We banned Daisy from doing selfies.’