Stalking your children via GPS is wrong on so many levels
By Dave Parrack
Worried about your children traveling abroad during their gap year? Then why not stalk them for the duration? GPS makes this very easy to do, but whether your kids will thank you for it in years to come is another matter.
Not being a parent myself maybe I’m unqualified to talk on this subject. But I won’t let a simple detail like that stop me from doing so. As bad as letting your children run riot and not teaching them how to be responsible adults is, the other extreme of mollycoddling them and insisting on having a constant stake in their lives, even after they’ve grown up, is probably worse.
We’ve already seen how technology is allowing parents to stalk their children into adulthood, and a new, rather bizarre, product proves that theory beyond any reasonable doubt. While the original story about technology focused on new communication methods such as email, texting, blogging, and social networking, this time round it’s a GPS (Global Positioning System) device that’s the issue.
According to The Daily Telegraph, a mother in her 50s is managing to keep an eye on her teenage son during his gap year, despite him being thousands of miles away on the other side of the planet. Rachel Wilder is in Oxford while her 19-year-old son Harry is currently spending his gap year backpacking around Australia and the Pacific Rim.
That kind of distance isn’t enough to prevent Harry’s mother from keeping an eye on him as using a GPS device called Traakit which allows her to know where he is to within 15-feet. A Web site allows Wilder to check on Harry’s progress daily, while she’ll also receive text messages should he go anywhere he isn’t supposed to.
While I can see the upside to the system, with backpacking in foreign climes hardly the safest of pastimes these days, I still think the negatives outweigh the positives. What sort of freedom or independence is this kid getting when his doting mother is effectively stalking his every movement on a daily basis.
What’s more, this story turns out to be not entirely as it first appears to be. It turns out that the Traakit device was developed by Harry’s uncle and he’s the first to test it out in the wild. What better way to launch the product than to get it spoken about in national newspapers and tech sites across the Web?
The problem is that Harry himself may have dealt the product a serious blow with his statement of, “if I didn’t want mum to know where I was going I can always leave the thing in the car.” There’s nothing like a bit of old-fashioned honesty to throw good PR off the rails.
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June 1st, 2009
I think it depends on the teenager. There are some teens, and twens frankly, who need a parental eye on them for whatever reason. Other kids are intelligent and level-headed enough, and reliable enough that parents need not be worried.
If you have a certain kind of kid, then tracking him or her by GPS can be not only a great way to keep tabs and make sure ground rules aren’t violated–but more importantly it gives the parent peace of mind that your kid is OK or that you know what’s going on.
It can also be a useful tool if negotiated between the kid and parent. It sounds in this case like Harry kind of is testing it out for his uncle.
Anyway, the value of peace of mind is something that you cannot truly understand until you have a kid yourself…
June 1st, 2009
Dave, thank you for the article and your thoughts. We are working on a service which I think you may have a similar take on. I am leading the project and hope to gather as many different perspectives as I can on this topic to be able to design our product to be beneficial to as many people as possible.
Please let me know what you think of our screencast and forward any concerns my way! :)