The ethics of spying on your children

AirTag design
According to clinical psychologist Dr Avital Pearlman, using AirTags is nothing to be frowned upon per se – but it’s the conversations around it that are key

The little dot moved across the map on the screen, travelling further away from the South African city of Cape Town, towards a mountain range. From Kent, where he was monitoring his son’s progress, Peter sent a panicked text: “You’ve taken the wrong train, you’re going in the wrong direction!”

When Peter’s 18-year-old son went backpacking around South Africa, they agreed that he would add an AirTag to his bag. Of course, his son wanted independence, but so much could go wrong and rather than have his parents’ imaginations go into overdrive, picturing kidnappings, robberies and worse, why not take a tiny, 32mm lightweight tracking device to help avert disaster; or at least keep everyone abreast of what was going on so they could know when to call the police?

Peter is not the only parent to do this. AirTags were launched in 2021, originally so that you would never lose your keys again – you attach the £35 disc to a personal item, it links to your phone and tracks it. But AirTags are increasingly being used by parents to keep tabs on children too. And the summer is peak time as families head off around the world on holidays – opening up infinite possibilities to get lost, wandering off at French markets or with new friends.

This weekend, it emerged that Zara and Mike Tindall are using among those using AirTags to keep tabs on their children. The Tindalls’ elder daughter Mia, who is 10, was photographed on a family outing to the Burghley Horse Trials in Lincolnshire on Saturday, to watch Mrs Tindall competing, with a small silver AirTag attached to her shorts.

One woman says the tracking devices have been a game-changer with her sons, aged eight, seven and four. She gives them to her children when they go on holiday or on days out. “We first did it after one of them got lost in the park – they usually all run off in different directions – and he was so frightened,” she says. “I used to put a card with my contact details on them in their pockets, but a parent at my childrens’ school told me about AirTags and it is so much more relaxing now we have them.

One of my sons walked off in the airport recently because he saw something exciting and we were easily able to locate him and scoop him up.” Her phone alerts her every time a child has strayed, saying “Item has been left behind”, for all to hear. The children don’t mind – they wear them on key rings and the youngest on a ribbon around his neck.

“It will be tempting to do it when they are teenagers,” says the mother. “But then it stops being about safety and starts being more about discipline, a bit Big Brother. But for now they don’t mind at all.”

Apple AirTag
Apple released its AirTag in 2021 - Alamy

When Apple launched the device, it specified that it was not designed for children or pets – presumably to avoid being held liable, and an inbuilt feature helps prevent tracking for sinister purposes, specifically in abusive relationships or by stalkers. A notification pops up on an Apple device if an unknown AirTag has been planted in your bag or on your person, and the device will also beep when it starts moving, to alert those around of its existence.

It can be divisive. Despite living in an era where most children own a smartphone and are electronically tethered to their parents (via the Find my iPhone app or similar) we are also more wary of surveillance than ever before, protective of our (and our children’s) privacy and somewhat disdainful of the helicopter parenting culture that stifles our kids’ independence.

But despite these concerns, I too have done it. When my son began secondary school and started getting the train to the centre of London and back, aged 11, it was a big increase in independence. Yes, he had a phone, but phones can get lost and get forgotten at school and run out of battery or data, so a little disc in his blazer pocket made a nerve-racking new journey slightly less intimidating – for me and him.

A straw poll on my class WhatsApp group confirmed I’m in good company. One mother admitted that she puts an AirTag under the inner sole of all her kids’ shoes. Another avid fan said it had opened up new worlds. She had always been too scared to take her kids to amusement parks, until she discovered the AirTag. There are other brands of tag, including Weenect GPS tracking – and the downside of Apple’s tag is other iPhones need to be around for the GPS to work (and you need to keep your phone charged).

According to clinical psychologist Dr Avital Pearlman, using AirTags is nothing to be frowned upon per se – but it’s the conversations around it that are key. “It’s about transparency and your children being aware that you’re using it,” she says. “That communication is the important bit. Teenagers, specifically, shouldn’t feel that they’re intruded upon. Ideally there’s a shared understanding about what the needs are in terms of tracking devices and why the needs exist.”

Safe and sound: Naomi Greenaway with her family on holiday
Safe and sound: Naomi Greenaway with her family on holiday

At the end of my son’s first year at secondary school, when the blazer needed to go up a size and the AirTag had fulfilled its mission, it was retired to a drawer. (Although it then started sending me “separation” notifications every time I left my house – useful, perhaps, if it’s keeping tabs on your wallet, otherwise, downright annoying.) Then, when my daughter, 14 at the time, was preparing to go on a Duke of Edinburgh expedition, the little disc found its way into her rucksack, which allayed her fears and mine of getting lost in the wilds of Hertfordshire.

When my youngest daughter was 10, keen for independence, my husband and I had to decide whether she was going to be AirTagged. It’s in the tween years that parents often buy their child a smartphone – for this exact reason – but I was loath to do so.

An AirTag allowed me to know where she was without the myriad issues a smartphone brings. Author and campaigner on tech ethics Tanya Goodin has some more advice: “First, we should be asking: What messages are we giving our kids?” says Goodin, whose book, My Brain Has Too Many Tabs Open launches in paperback next week.

“Is it that the world they’re going out into is so terrifying they need to be tracked at all times? That we ourselves are so fearful of it that we need to do it?” And would you let them track you – or your partner? In “our day”, of course, we all roamed free and survived – and perhaps thrived on the freedom.

In fact, if our parents had been tracking us back then, would we ever (Mum and Dad, this is obviously just a hypothetical example) have climbed the gates into the park at night? I can’t help wondering what sort of sad, sanitised childhood that would have been. Perhaps all this location sharing is squeezing the fun out of this generation’s childhoods too.

Dr Pearlman believes harping back to the good old days isn’t necessarily helpful when parenting our own kids. “Yes, we may have had more freedom, but they are forever connected – to their telephones and social media – so that freedom just isn’t there any more.” My teenagers know where their friends are at all times, thanks to the Snap Map function on social media platform Snapchat, which shows users the location of all their contacts in avatar form on an illustrated map.

Airtags
How AirTags work: the tag is attached to a personal item, it links to the owner's phone and tracks it

In my children’s case, their Snapchat contacts are strictly people they know in real life too. You can opt out, but that would mean that when you turn up in a hotel on Lake Garda, you might never discover that you have a friend staying at the hotel next door, as my daughter did last year. Whether we track them or not, our kids are already connected to each other.

But the question is, in reality, does it increase their safety if we’re following them too? “It’s a slightly false sense of safety,” Dr Pearlman says. “We can’t control what happens to our children, even when we know where they are, but the knowledge that they are where they are meant to be offers peace of mind.”

In my experience as a parent, having that digital connection to my offspring can be of immense comfort at specific moments. When I first dropped my eldest daughter at nursery almost 15 years ago, being able to log on to the nursery’s “nanny cam” from home made an emotionally draining experience a little more bearable.

Fast forward to the present day, and seeing her wind her way into the centre of town on my phone screen, using the Find My Friends app, as she took her first Uber with friends, felt similarly comforting. In fact, I often wonder how my parents coped, waiting for me to come home on a Saturday night and into the early hours.

So when the inevitable request came from my youngest daughter to start getting the bus to school, the question remained: to AirTag or not to AirTag? Goodin’s view? “You’ll have to ask her.” My daughter didn’t miss a beat with her response: “Yes! Then if I don’t turn up at school when I’m meant to, you’ll know where I am.” That was enough for me to bring the AirTag back out of retirement. It provided peace of mind for both of us, at least until the dreaded moment she got a smartphone.

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