Phone tracking while at university

[Fenimore]

Astonished that so many parents I know are tracking their kids by phone. These are 18/19 year olds. I guess the young people don’t mind or they’d turn off the tracking. I just don’t think it’s healthy.

One parent I know is checking every day to see if their son is at lectures as well as what time he’s home from a night out.

i don’t track DD. One, she really wouldn’t like it and two, I think it would be stressful as well as being an invasion of privacy.

Does anyone do this?

Nobody has suggested that you stop caring about your adult children. I’m respectfully suggesting that your desire to know their business does not trump their right to privacy, even if that’s hard for
you. In your example, your daughter was clearly physically capable of calling you and letting you know she was in hospital, but chose not to do so. For you to then track her down and call her removed her autonomy in that situation. (And sure, she had willingly allowing herself to be tracked - but in a crisis situation that probably wasn’t uppermost in her mind, and the fact that she didn’t proactively contact you should give a clue as to what her own preferences were.)

Yeah I’ve got nothing better to do…

it’s an observation and yes I suppose I am judging because for many people it’s not about keeping in touch, it’s about policing their adult children’s lives or an unwillingness to just let them be independent or to grow up.

My DH works in a university. He has parents ringing up lecturing staff to berate them for giving their kids poor marks. someone rang wanting security to check they’d returned from a night out. These are adults. University is not an extension of school.

and no it’s probably not my business but it would be a weird old world if we were never allowed to comment on something you find strange/troubling/worthy of comment.

@Fenimore I think asserting "these are adults" is a pointless and fairly empty refrain. As soon as you turn 18 you don't suddenly find the skills you were missing as a 17 yr old, or the confidence, and definitely not the experience or knowledge of say an adult of 28.

Everyone is different and adulthood is something that comes quickly to some and more gradually to others.

Of course you don’t. But I can’t really accept that knowing your kids’ every move while they are away at university helps them or the parents. To be fair, there’s lots of sensible responses on here about how useful tracking can be. I wouldn’t do it but I can’t see how some would. However, my original post was about how some people use it disproportionately, chasing them up when they don’t appear to be in the places they are expected to be. I believe that level of surveillance isn’t very healthy.

As for phoning universities to complain about grades etc…they won’t speak to parents anyway because they are over 18.

I think you've made your point enough times now. It's certainly getting a bit repetitive.

They can turn off the app - no need to leave phone home . . .

Oh ok wasn’t aware I couldn’t respond to posts in a thread I started.

Im afraid I asked my 14 year old if i could put in one only yesterday! Although it’s because she has been diagnosed with epilepsy and we just don’t know if her overwhelming tiredness is due to meds or night seizures. Regardless, she refused - fair enough - so we have to figure out another way of trying to assess the cause. She’s not keen on sharing a bed with me either. Totally understandable she doesn’t want either of these breaches of privacy. Also tried a watch which is meant to pick up seizures but it’s going off and waking her when she’s not having a seizure, so no good either. I guess back in the day the only option would have been co sleeping for a while, I fear I may need to persuade her there, as we really need to know what we’re dealing with.

You can respond as many times as you like, but repeating yourself does not make your opinion any more interesting or insightful. You're not actually "responding" at all, because you're not taking on board what other people have said and then saying something new. Repeating yourself, ad nauseam, is just that.

I wonder whether it is in fact far less safe to be tracked, given the battery power used will
increase the chance of the phone dying and therefore putting a call for help/an uber off the options.

Are you sure that's right? Is it significant battery power and is it not the power of the user doing the tracking that gets used the most heavily?

I am not a techno, but would be interested to hear from anyone who is.

Just checking a location doesn’t use much power. Live tracking, if anybody actually does this, will obviously use more.

Enabling GPS so you can be tracked accurately does significantly affect battery life. The more apps you have using it the more power is used.

The amount of battery drain will vary widely depending on specific circumstances but this study estimated the drain to be 13% in strong signal areas rising to 38% in poor signal areas.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/295243672GreenerandSmarterPhonesforFutureCitiesCharacterizingtheImpactofGPSSignalStrengthonPowerConsumption

Thank you!

That's perfectly normal and just consideration

Well the person being tracked/stalked has to have their location services switched on all the time so yes of course that’s a significant power drain.

Uni aged kids are more likely to crash and die driving cars. It doesn't stop parents rushing to get their 17yr olds behind the wheel.
I find it all rather infantilising. Bad things happen, tracking them doesn't stop that.

My DH can track DD on his phone because he activated it after she lost her phone at home and I nearly put it in the washing machine. She's aware of it and it has come in handy when we've been trying to pick her up from places late at night.

Now she's at Uni and I think during Fresher's week he checked where she was a bit, especially when she went on a pub crawl into the city. But now he's decided (with her permission) to still keep the ability to track just in case she loses her phone but we won't check it to see where she is. We don't need to know and she likes keeping in touch via WA messages and weekly video calls so we know she's OK.

Someone my DH works with still tracks their kids at 26 and 28 with full time jobs. That seems crazy to me.

@Elbowpatch answered better than you, with actual facts not just "of course" which is next to useless.

I missed that post. Glad to have it confirmed though.

I don't call it tracking, as a family we are just happy to share this information. We used Life360 to share our location for a very long time. DD checks where we are as much as we do. I don't make a thing out of it but I found it useful recently whilst she travelled through Europe for a month. It saved the "are you ok?" messages every so often. It works both way, DD would also ask "why are you in X place?" or "I can see you are in town, can you please buy me X from Y store". If I do ask her where is is by text, she will say stuff like "why are you asking, check my location". We all know that we can turn the location off any time if we wish to do so, but as we don't tend to lie about where we are, it doesn't affect having it on. I have never used it to say "why are you in x place, you need to get home" or use it in an intrusive way. It works for us.

We also share location with our elderly parents, I assume that is not seen as us controlling them or them us either, is it?