I’m a secret SPY DAD
He tracks his children’s every move remotely. He stalks their social media. He has a hidden camera in the garden that can even bark orders. Odd? No. JUSTINWEBB says it’s every parent’s duty
You get the kit and surrender some privacy – that’s the deal Parents need to get ahead of the game in our all-seeing society
ENOUGH! I cannot continue any longer with this double life. It is time to come in from the cold. Or go out into it. Time to admit openly what I have struggled with privately. To say: I am a spy.
Yes, on the face of it I have a (semi) respectable job on the radio. But behind the scenes I am operating a veritable GCHQ of monitoring equipment. My study hums and bleeps with electronic chatter. I am all ears and, increasingly, eyes as well.
The other day during a slow moment on the Today programme – a taped report was playing – I was chatting to fellow presenter John Humphrys. This was a safer chat than some chats John chooses to have off air – it was about our sons, who are similar ages.
‘Look at where Sam is,’ I said, and showed him on my phone. My 17-year-old was in Washington DC staying with friends. The Snapchat app whizzed us across the ocean and planted us down in a street in North-West DC. It takes quite a lot to shock Mr H. But this did. ‘Whaaaat?’ ‘How do you do that?’ He was so amazed that he mentioned it to a rather surprised guest in an interview about another subject later in the programme. To John, who brought up kids in the olden days when you said goodbye in the morning and hoped for the best, this was indeed a new world. And I got the distinct impression – you get this with John sometimes – that he was a tad sceptical about whether my app was necessarily progress.
But I am not ashamed. I know there will be many who take a dim view of this, but I suspect many thousands of parents are doing the same as me. The fact is, we are living in a new age of parenting, and while we tend to think of social media as being something used by our kids, and sometimes abused by them too, we oldies can be users and abusers as well.
It is time to acknowledge this and to come clean – and time, too, to explain to the kids that this is part of the bargain of modern life. You get the kit. But you pay a little in terms of surrendering your privacy.
That’s certainly the deal in our house, and why I’m extremely thorough in my role as ‘spy-dad’.
I check their locations, I follow their Uber rides to make sure they come to no harm. There’s even a ‘spy’ camera in the garden through which I can even address them, Big Brother style, of which more later.
An important point: this is not about surveillance of lifestyle or interests or friends. I have no access to the ‘stories’ they post online about themselves and I don’t want any. I don’t even have a Facebook account or the ability to see theirs.
When they tell me Facebook is for losers and grandads, I suspect they are being honest. But seriously, their facebook lives are not for me. This is about monitoring of safety – it’s a physical thing – and I reckon every responsible parent should consider it.
So what do my children think? Sam, my son, couldn’t care less about the surveillance. I don’t think he even registers that I know where he is. But Martha, his twin, most certainly does. What is it with girls? John’s blurting out of my (semi) secret spying on the Today programme was, of course, heard by Martha in the car on the way to school – and there was hell to pay.
But I tell Martha two things in reply: first, this deluge of electronic information is part of modern life, and second – wow, it could be very much worse.
I reminded her of the time we went to America over New Year and stayed with friends. The teenagers were to have a party at the house while we went out. Halfway through the evening, I wondered aloud about how the kids might be getting on.
‘Oh, let’s look,’ said our host, who promptly opened up his phone to show us live video from various cameras around his house. Being America, the teenagers were drinking boxes of juice and chatting about church. I admit I felt a little queasy. Did they know they were on camera and, even if they did, might they forget? And what does this do to the character, the soul, of the person doing the watching?
Jonathan Franzen, the celebrated American author, wrote a wonderful book called The Corrections in which a child puts the kitchen under surveillance. As I remember, it doesn’t end well. Ah, but that was years ago. I am increasingly certain that we are on the cusp of an all-seeing society, and if we parents need to get slightly ahead of the game then so be it. There’s no surveillance in the house (yet) but I’m making no long-term promises.
And I do have it in the garden, in the form of a rather wonderful camera picked up in an electrical shop for a tenth of the price of what the alarm companies charge. It monitors our patch of grass 24/7 and sends me little alerts if it thinks it sees something. It even allows you to talk live through a speaker to whoever you see out there.
The other day I was on the border between North and South Korea, the most highly militarised and monitored border in the world. I could see the North Koreans with their binoculars looking at me. And at the same time I could see my dog in South London.
And then, suddenly up comes an Uber notification: my driver is arriving in five minutes in a black Prius. Of course it’s not my driver, it’s Martha’s. It’s the middle of the night in London and she’s on her way home from a club – she books through my account although even if she didn’t, we could hook her account with mine so that I could monitor her. Or, more precisely, monitor her driver. I watch the little car symbol winding through the familiar streets, ready to pounce if it deviates from a proper route.
The North Koreans think they are experts in surveillance, but will have had no idea, as they gazed across the border, that they had already met their match. As I tell Martha: if it’s good enough for Kim Jong Un, it’s good enough for me.
So here is the deal. Findmyfriends is compulsory. This is the slightly spooky installation that pinpoints the movements of people with Apple phones and gadgets, and it allows me to see where my kids are – with aston-
ishing accuracy. They appear on a detailed map whenever their phones are on and communing with the internet. No worries here: they have it anyway to see their pals. To anyone younger than 30 it’s commonplace.
Snapchat is a bit more invasive. It is a messaging app – so people use it to send quick photo messages to each other. Not being down with the kids or pretending to be, I would never use it to communicate and I share the concerns of the Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, who said this week that the app is ‘troubling’. She says parents should ban their children from Snapchat because it is ‘particularly addictive’.
Hmmm. All right Anne. But I am a bit of a Snapchat addict myself. I use its very precise location technology to see where all three of my children are. You get a little avatar that jumps from place to place; that’s what I showed John in the studio. When it sees them on the road, the avatar gets into a car. At an airport it becomes a plane.
I love it. And all three of the kids, Sam and Martha, who are 17, and Clara who is 13, go along with it. The big advantage for them, it seems to me, is freedom. There is no checking in to be done. I can see where they are.
The other issue as a parent is what you do with the information. I absolutely respect the rights of the older kids to be out and about in London – without telling me anything about what they are doing. I just want to know they are safe. That they are where they expected to be. Is that too much to ask? After all, it’s such an extraordinary fact of modern life that we have the technology so freely available to keep in touch. My mum would have loved to be able to have seen where I was – and to have spoken on video links – when she lived alone in Britain and I was travelling the globe in my early days as a BBC reporter. We rightly worry about the impact of social media on our lives, and here is where it gets tricky. It seems obvious that the ‘internet of things’, where everyday items in our homes get connected online, is going to give us the ability to monitor, and see, an almost limitless amount of each other’s lives. As a parent, where does that end? My son Sam has type 1 diabetes, which requires constant monitoring and treatment with insulin. He wears a device that allows him to see his blood-sugar ratio at any moment and correct it. The device can be hooked up to the internet, to the mobile phone network, and thus (in theory) to me. In a few years such devices will be cheaply available to all. Will Sam allow his parents to see his blood sugar into his 20s? Might it be a comfort to him knowing someone else is taking part of the responsibility or might it be a curse, never allowing him properly to grow up, to take his own responsibility and his own risk?
Yes, part of me understands that. But part of me also says that attitude – that growing up involves cutting off – is creating a fetish out of what used to be a necessary part of life but is not any more. We don’t have to be out of touch. Of course we can choose to be. But the advantages of closeness outweigh the disadvantages, at least for people who are responsible for each other.
Aha: that brings us to spouses. There even I draw the line. I have no idea where my wife Sarah is at any given moment of the day and I don’t want to know. If there was some particular reason to stay in touch closely, then perhaps the technology could be fired up for us too. But this is dangerous ground. It feels spooky.
But for the children it emphatically does not. Surveillance is freedom: from worry, from having to stay in touch, from danger. What can be wrong with that?
Might it be a curse – never allowing my son to grow up?