Which tracker is best to track my children?

[Sayithowiseeit]

I'm trying to find a good tracker for my children, the itagpro sounds good but I couldn't work out if it was hyped up as the review person had a discount on it.

The air tag, can it only be used with an i phone? As I have an Android.

Is there any other good ones? I need it to be accurate and be able to manage distances.

Any help would be appreciated please
Thank you

They get an audible notification. I don't listen into her conversations, my daughter has SEN and is starting to be to be independent and I need to ensure she is safe.
I wouldn't use a tracker if she was NT.

Yes, I didn’t say they weren’t?

if they are living at home though it’s basic manners to let others know rough plans. Whether that’s a quick phone call to say they’ll be home late/not at all, or share location.

mine choose to share location rather than remember and feel obligated to text. Having to call your mum and tell her you’ll be home late feels less adult to them.

dh has just called me to tell me what time he’ll be home from his cycling trip.

just because you’re an adult doesn’t mean you can disappear for hours or days without telling anyone else you live with where you are. If that’s what you want move out and live on your own.

You can track the phone without permanently tracking the owners' every move.

I hate how normalised all this tracking has become. It’s a complete invasion of privacy. I don’t want to be tracked. I didn’t realise my husband could track me (I never consented to this and don’t track him) until recently. So I turned my share location thing off and he is in a massive grump.

So now, because I hate tracking he thinks I have something to hide. FFS I don’t go anywhere interesting and he’s the one away for days with work.

Who on earth is tracking people’s every move

We use family link.

It's not because I think they're going to be abducted.
It's not because I need to know where they (or their phone) is at all times.

It's simply because sometimes they have forgotten to tell me they're staying behind at school for whatever reason, and they're not picking up. If the phone is at school then I can be reasonably certain that's where they are. If they've gone to a friend's house and are late coming back, it's helpful to know if they're on their way or not without having to call.

Not that these things happen often, like most kids these days they're ferried around like little princes! I literally haven't checked the position since about a year ago when one of mine dropped his phone somewhere. Before that, I checked because I got a notification to say he'd left school. He hadn't, I think sometimes when the signal is sketchy it doesn't accurately report.

Also not sure what tracking kids has got to do with spouses tracking spouses.

Same thing? You can’t track a phone without tracking whoever has it.

i don’t sit glued to find my phone, or get tracking notifications every time someone moves…. It doesn’t “permanently track every move”, it simply shows current location. The same location service has to be permanently on to track the phone, you can’t switch it on after the phone has been lost or stolen.

it’s simply a tool. I don’t check it routinely. If dc says off out with x, might stay over or you might need to pick me up from the city centre, she can decide without having to phone me. I can see she’s at x’s at 1am, lock up and go to bed. She knows I will do this and chooses that rather than have to phone.

For all the criticisers, when my son went missing aged 14, the first thing the police said was "can you check where his phone is?".

I think it’s because suddenly everyone is part of a family tracking thing and not everyone wants that. I don’t want to track my children (mainly because I tried it for a bit and it was inaccurate and caused me stress! At one point it looked like they were in the river Thames and I thought they’d drowned!!).

I had a friend who tracked his daughter at Uni and would be awake worrying at 3am as she was till out. It’s all got ridiculous.

People on here who are looking to see when their husbands leave work, or whether their adult children are still in Spoons on a Saturday night.

Absolutely. I was an absolute shit as a older teen/adult, early 2000s so I had a phone, but rarely topped it up so I couldn't even text from it. I would often just not pick up if a parent called. I would also just say "I'm going out" and not be back until arse crack of dawn.

My children are younger but they're much more thoughtful than I was so I don't expect they'll do that tbh. And I likely won't retain the tracker. But I will insist they observe some common courtesy.

Well that’s on you to know what you’re sharing. You will have consented at some point as you can’t share location without agreeing. He can’t just track your phone without you knowing.

did he set it up for you?

It’s not an invasion of privacy if you consent.

I know this is a post about tracking kids but do all adults track each other in a couple? It’s not really something that sits right with me.

Think he set my phone up. Don’t remember consenting to being tracked.

Same thing? You can’t track a phone without tracking whoever has it.

You can in the sense that you can just use "Find my iPhone" if it goes missing, you don't need an app that tracks someone's every movement like Life360 or some of the others people are mentioning.

I totally get that you may need to occasionally find a lost phone - but all the people who are using trackers to see whether their husbands have left work etc. clearly aren't using it for that, lol.

So he’s set the phone up and consented to tracking when he did it.

you have bigger problems than sharing location. Especially if he didn’t tell you and didn’t share his own location.

But I agree it’s on to me to check my location services and what I am
sharing. I’m more annoyed that when I switched it off he clocked within a day or so…and seemed annoyed about it. So that why I’m questioning if this is something all couples do.

I can’t imagine tracking me is that interesting! Ooh look now she’s in Waitrose…

You can check where someone's phone is in an emergency without using it to track their every move, though - that's the point some of us are trying to make.

There's a big difference between using Find My iPhone in an emergency or because you think you've left it in a taxi, and using it everyday to see where people are all the time.

Yes I work for social services with at risk children.

biggest bugbear is parents who confiscate their child’s phone as punishment. Then they go missing and there’s no way of finding out if they’re safe, with friends etc.

But surely they can just switch their phones off if they don't want to be tracked? This technology is all well and good, but it only works so long as the phone is switched on and the tracking is activated - and if the phone is actually with the person it belongs to!

A child who has purposefully gone missing will most likely have switched their location off. They all do it round here even when just out with their mates.

Yep. Round here they leave the trackers on but just leave their phones at a mates house and go out anyway - so anyone checking will thing "great, Sarah is safe at Susie's house" but in reality Sarah and Susie are both out doing God knows what, God knows where, with no access to a phone in an emergency.

Obviously all adults don’t, you don’t, and you can see from this thread not everyone does.

Me and DH’s devices are tracked because I am always losing my phone & laptop around the house, and always asking DH if he’ll be home for bedtime/if the trains are fucked etc so I can just see where he is instead of contacting him. I’m not hunched over my phone all day watching where he is 🤣 I go on the find my app maybe once every 2 months to find where he is. On it all the time for my own devices!

Also that one time he fell asleep on the last train and wasn’t home when I woke up at 2am - very helpful! Could see he was travelling through an AONB - clearly in a taxi making his way home from Portsmouth!

We used Life360 and it was brilliant when my daughter's school bus broke down and she wasn't sure where she was (and was then walking the wrong way to meet me!!)

We currently use ScreenTime to add parental controls onto her phone and it also has a tracker on it. We don't track her (her phone!) as such but it's there for an emergency.

There may be a touch of hyperbole in your post. Neither example is tracking every move