For 17-year-old Macy, it was a terrifying ordeal. Driving home one day, her car skidded on wet asphalt and plummeted eight metres down a wooded embankment, out of sight from the road. Trapped in a ditch, she spent seven torturousVery complicated or difficult. hours fearing that she would never be saved.

Her mother, Catrina Alexander, was at her wits' end as her daughter failed to return her calls or texts. But then inspiration struck: she and Macy had agreed to share their locations on a mobile phone app. Soon enough, Macy had her mum by her side, and was rescued from the wreck.¹

No wonder location tracking apps have exploded in popularity over the past decade, appealing particularly to anxious parents. A survey from 2019 showed that 40% of parents and guardians in the UK were using some kind of GPS tracking on a daily basis.

Knowing where your child is at all times has become the norm. And it promises a wealth of benefits, from comforting worried parents to providing greater safety.

But not everyone is convinced. Some say it violates a child's right to privacy and damages trust. Others worry it reduces young people's independence.

Furthermore, some believe that the use of such apps is the slippery slope towards more serious forms of surveillance. A number of third-party apps have appeared for particularly fretful folks. Parents can remotely activate the microphone on their child's phone to record audio, or scan their offspring's messages to alert them to "concerning interactions".²

Giving your child's location data freely to third-party apps presents its own pertinent dangers. Private companies can track a child's every move from infancy and sell their findings.³

Mobile location vendors, who make millions selling our "private" information, persuade us that our location data is anonymous. But researchers have found that 95% of individuals can be positively identified with just four location-time data points.⁴

As well-intentioned as parents may be, the data produced by location tracking apps could put their children at risk. Nobody knows who the data may be sold on to.

Some researchers say that the rise of these apps is an unfortunate symptom of parents increasingly using technology to mediate their relationships with their children. But others say it is a sympathetic cause amid constant headlines about dangers to children. Who can blame a parent for wanting to be prepared?

Are they suffocating?

Yes: Children have a right to privacy, even when they are very young. These apps are not only depriving them of that privacy; they are also creating anxieties in parents rather than dispelling them. Parents need to learn to take a more hands-off approach.

No: It is natural for parents to want to protect their children. They now have access to more resources to do so than they had in the past. Who can blame them for using these resources?

Or... It is not privacy within a family that we should be worried about. We should be far more concerned about companies selling our location data to people who can use it to identify us and find out about our lives. Who knows what the implications of this could be?