To think trackers on a teens phone is just wrong in most cases?

[Roseberry1]

Had a call from my dcs school on Friday. They are 16 in year 11. The receptionist said my dc hadn't been marked as attended to the last lesson and asked if I knew why, etc. It turned out my dd had crossed wires with the teacher in a mix-up, was on site, and it was all legitimate reasons, etc. Anyway, that's not the point in the thread.

The receptionist asked me, "Do you have a tracker on her phone?" When I said no, she gave me the impression I should have one (not just my dc but all teens). I find this so odd! Surely, there should be a certain level of trust when your 15/16 + teens go out. I dated this guy who had a tracker on his 15 year olds phone, his kid was only cycling to his mates house and was tracked, which I thought was ott.

Reasons a parent might track:

They live in an area with a very high crime rate where safety is a real high-risk issue.

Their dc are known to be in lots of trouble a lot of the time, often breaking the law.

They go "missing" for long periods and don't appear home when they are supposed to.

Not for teens just hanging out with their mates in a fairly safe town. Surely, as I said, a certain level of trust has to come in somewhere, and even if they do make mistakes, that's part of learning as you grow up. The thought of being "tracked" all the time by your parents just sounds odd to me!

@CurlyhairedAssassin if I DO want to contact him (usually once or twice a week for a quick catch up) I generally check his location first (if I haven't had a response from whatsapp) as usually that would tell me that he's not in his room and so off doing something and it's not a good time to call. Occasionally I might notice he IS out, but do you really think I then sit fretting over him all night till I can see him back in his room?! He usually just whatsapps back a few hours later/next morning "Was out at football".

You track your adult son who lives away from home at university? Doesn’t matter if it’s ‘only’ once or twice a week. I’m in my 20s and you know what my parents did when I was at Uni? They would text me and if I didn’t reply straightaway, they didn’t fret. Why? Because I’m an adult. I would just text or ring them later when I was free. If I hadn’t contacted them in several days then they’d probably start to worry a little. This was never the case though.

If I was your son, I would turn off my location on my phone, disable location from Maps/Google Maps, and disable other apps like Find My iPhone.

I think I resonate with this more than anything as I'm a private person, and my privacy is important to me.

My dm has tested boundaries, even without a tracker. She would either ring or text, then if I didn't answer within 10 minutes, she would ring my dd and ask, "What's mum doing?" I could have been on another call, busy doing something, watching a film/programme or may have just not wanted to talk at that moment. All very acceptable reasons. It was never an emergency, she was just being nosey.

My dd said to me one day, "Mum, nan's doing my head in when she does this" as it was happening all the time, so I had to say something to my dm about it. It wasn't an anxiety reason. It was a pure nosey reason. But even if anxiety played a part, it doesn't trump my right to privacy, especially in my own home. If she had a tracker, she'd be a nightmare!

Upon reflection of this thread, my dislike for trackers on teens must stem from my dms noseyness from when I was a teen onwards, not because I was out doing drugs or breaking the law so she could keep an eye on things, she has big fomo issues (which is a whole new thread) and the more she'd pry, the more I'd pull away and not tell her things. If she found out another way (for something innocent) then she'd revel in letting me know she knew what I was doing (in the case of my dd she thought she had found a clever way to pry, even though I'm nearly 40!) I'm a great believer in respecting people's privacy and not forcing them to reveal everything they are doing in a day, as long as they're not off doing crime/drugs etc! I had a conversation with my dd this morning about trackers and asked if her friends have them? She said her boyfriend does, and he hates it, and it fills him with anxiety, and it creates tension between his parents that there's a lack of trust/being spied on.

On this thread, there are a handful of reasons I can see why someone would need it alongside the reasons I said in my OP. But on the whole most of the answers are more about parents (of both adults and teens) anxieties as the reason being projected, which can not be healthy.

Whilst it has its place in some circumstances, it's not something that should be normalised going forward, especially as these teens start relationships.

I think this post really stuck out to me because it's the equivalent of my dm ringing my dd to see what I was doing if I hadn't answered. If my dd said, "She's sat on the sofa," that apparently isn't a good enough excuse in her mind, so I must be ignoring her. In this post, if the son didn't answer the WhatsApp, his location was tracked because apparently the only justified reason to not answer is that they are away from their room. Needing to know the location so they know if they will hear from dc that evening or they won't go to bed/sleep is making the assumption that the dc is available everytime they are in their room, which is a mental burden in the dc and most likely creating a sense of guilt if they don't call that evening. The son can turn the tracker off, yes, but if the situation is anything like my mum, that just creates a whole load of new issues, and when you're young and don't want to upset your mum, you just keep quiet.

Now I can say something to my dm as I've got older, mainly because she was getting my dd involved, but that still creates martr mode and silence while she sulks because everyone's "picking on her."

But a dc should be able to go off to uni and have it where a "hey, just calling for a catch up, call back when you're free. X" is enough.

All the people with phones in our house have them (with consent). It is useful to be able to see where people are if we're waiting for a lift, or collecting from somewhere and they're late, or I want to know if it's too late to ring DH and ask him to stop at the supermarket on the way home!

No invasion of privacy. No "spying on you" undertones, just a family working together.

Well my parents were respectful of privacy as I am of my teens but it’s helpful to check that my (lovely but impetuous 14 year old) is where she should be. She is very tall and beautiful and has already had some very unpleasant grim experiences with pervy men on public transport. We all come at this from our own place. You are overlaying your own experiences on everyone else and worse criticising our parenting on the back of it which is pretty unfair.

Maybe you would be happier if students back to 1993 and queuing in the hall with your phone card. Not going to happen.

Knowing where your daughter is isn't going to stop pervy men.
I would go mad if I thought someone was tracking me.
Phone would be in the bin and they would be tracking it to landfill.

^All very acceptable reasons. It was never an emergency, she was just being nosey^

I think that's key to your attitude OP. You're so insulated from tragedies and emergencies that you can't even empathise with or understand when locating devices could avert or alleviate disasters.
As someone who has known four women/girls who have been kidnapped/kept captive/murdered, switching on Find My Phone is a very basic step that in all of those cases would have helped the women/girls be found sooner.
The big privacy concerns are with the apps abusing data not with parents consensually knowing their DCs' whereabouts. Apps like Life360 sell data including to companies that then provide data to governments. Anonymisation is much less robust when it's linked to identifiable locations ie if your name is replaced with a number but that number goes back to your home address every day then there is a real possibility of jigsaw identification. Since Life360 has now bought Tile and received funding from Facebook etc that risk and concerns about market share etc increase. Should you trust an app with arm's length connections to organisations that have sold data, breached data guidelines and worked with governments? That's the real question and there have been a number of interesting articles about those links and ramifications in relation to Life360.

YABU - it isn't really an issue of right or wrong, it's a matter of choice and how people organise themselves and their families. Some people use more technology than others. You also get paranoid parents either way, even in ye olde worlde days when I was a kid you'd always get some kids who had to check in manually more with their parents than others. I don't think the development of technology has changed that, it's just changed the format of how it's done. Other parents neglect their kids, I don't think either extreme example is particularly illustrative of most parents and how they use or don't use modern phone technology.

There are pluses and minuses either way, I wouldn't think parents were weird or wrong for choosing to use them or not choosing to use them.

I'm genuinely aghast at how many people on this this thread use trackers in their family and see it is as uncontroversial. PPs are mostly giving specific examples of its 'handiness' eg putting the dinner on but what about the general principle that no one should have to feel potentially answerable to someone about their whereabouts 100% of the time? Surely it's a 'human right' (I don't mean as a legal term but morally) to be able to spend your day doing as you choose without someone else knowing about it, whether it's perfectly humdrum or not? I don't think small practical benefits are a reason to ditch a whole moral landscape of autonomy and independence.
Those people who track their teens - what if they want to just do something on a whim, that wasn't in their plan for the day that you knew about? It seems to me that you would either not do anything, -in which case what's the point of tracking? - or phone them at the time/ask them later 'I see you went to xxxx, what were you doing there?' making them account for their actions. Surely that's not a good thing.
And finally, we have all got carried away with safetyism these days (may be a hangover from covid when it was all we heard about). Living is risk. There is such a thing as 'dignity of risk' and young people are being denied that, whether they have agreed to be tracked or not. If they wanted to go and do something or go somewhere risky, do they not have the right to do that? Did you want that when you were teenagers?

These things are important to me and to my family. I would never accept trackers in my family in any direction. Just because the tech can do something, doesn't mean we should let it.

To call it paranoid parenting is laughable.

To use a tool that makes everyones life easier that nobody minds and the kids actually prefer is purely common sense.

@flashria I am with you. Trust and privacy matter. As do having healthy boundaries.

And tracking family members does not protect them from incidents like the very unlikely danger of kidnap. The first thing any kidnapper does is remove the persons phone and throw it away.

If they wanted to go and do something or go somewhere risky, do they not have the right to do that? Did you want that when you were teenagers?

How does having a tracker turned on take away that right?

My (almost) 14 year twins and their 11 YO brother have trackers on their phones. They know.

The only time I've ever used it was when one of them kept pinging at me as having left school - it had never happened before. He was in school, no idea why that happened.

Otherwise it's just handy to know if they lose it we can find it, or if I'm expecting them from somewhere and they're late I can check. Although to date I don't think that's ever happened.

I don't share my location with them because it is part of a specific family safety app. I wouldn't mind if they wanted to though.

yarrawonga presumably because the parents would go swooping in to rescue them. Because what's the point otherwise? Those situations are exactly what people are citing as a reason to have the tracker in the first place. Or at the very least someone would pick up on it and ask about it, and who would do something like that if they knew they would have to explain it later? Hence the tracker is changing their behaviour and enforcing 'good choices' while limiting options. That may or may not be seen as a good thing.

I'm not insulated from emergencies or tragedies at all, not sure where that came from, from me saying with my dm it was noseyness. I'm not unreachable for an emergency, and neither is my dc - we have phones on us that can give and receive calls. I've experienced plenty of emergency situations, which is when I get the call or make the call.

@WinnieFosterReads I have never known a kidnapping case where the kidnapper does not remove and throw away the phone. By the way the police can track phones without a tracker being on the phone.

I know a tracker won’t insulate against grim incidents but if I see my 14 year old waiting at the bus station for too long damn right I will go and get her as that is sadly that is where the vile incidents have happened and she is so keen on being independent she is likely to not want to bother me to ask for a lift.

Every situation and family dynamic is different but carry on digging in that we are all neurotic Big Brother type helicopter parents 🙄

Then you don't know about the many DV cases where usually an ex partner decides to keep his victim trapped at home whilst he attacks and murders them. Or ex offenders targetting neighbours - again keeping them at home until they can murder and dispose of them. That's a gap in your knowledge not proof that it doesn't happen.
And police getting permission to track a phone through cell tower pings takes much longer than looking at Find My Phone.
I understand. It's hard to look at the reality of male violence and the figures about how many women/girls are murdered after being restrained and imprisoned at home. But your lack of awareness and ability to look the other way doesn't make those risks and realities disappear.

Winnie, how would a tracker help in these situations though? If an ex has held a woman captive, surely people would look at the tracker and see she's at home and feel a false sense of assurance? And it is more than likely that the ex is tracking the woman's movements using an app.

A phonecall or text to police would help in this situation but I genuinely don't understand how a tracker could help anyone?

Then surely their family would see they are at home on the app and not raise the alarm because there's nothing to be suspicious of? Whereas trying to call/text and getting no answer for days might just ring alarm bells?

We are semi rural and often not enough signal to make and maintain a phone call but every now and then data can get through so an aprox location can be seen even if phone doesn’t have recipe to on that exact second.

aending a text or making a phone call to someone who is already on the way is more bothersome than the kids just checking find my iPhone to see if I’m nearly there etc.

in fact when mine all started secondary school they were able to not be bothered by me constantly texting to see if they had made it home and I could just check they had got home and crosses the major A road ok!

Then if your ex is holding you hostage in you own home, which is what the post you quoted is in response to, having tracker is not going to help because the family will just see they are home and not realise there is a problem?

I'm not unreachable for an emergency, and neither is my dc - we have phones on us that can give and receive calls.

This is what I don’t understand.

Having a tracker implant is going to be much more useful than having one on your phone.

If you have a phone then you can do everything that PPs have said they use a tracker for (apart from finding a lost phone or medical issues).

If you get kidnapped, chances are they’ll throw your phone away.
If they don’t then you can use the phone to ring 999.

If you’re being held hostage by your partner and you’re not answering your phone or replying to texts - then a loved one is going to grow suspicious and come to your home to find out if you are ok.
The tracker is irrelevant.

These trackers aren’t a secret thing and anyone who is going to try and hold you hostage is going to turn them off straight away.

Being kidnapped by a random person is much less likely that being controlled by an abusive boyfriend and one thing they are bound to do is track your phone and know where you are every minute of the day.

I’d rather run the risk of being kidnapped than I would allow myself to walk into a controlling relationship.