“It’s about safety, not snooping”
In the following post, Bjørn Nansen, Jane Mavoa and Simon Coghlan reflect on their article: ‘“It’s about safety not snooping”: Parental attitudes to child tracking technologies and geolocation data’, which appeared in the 21(1) issue of Surveillance & Society.
We are all familiar with using traditional methods like phone calls or messaging to keep track of our loved ones’ whereabouts. However, there is now a wide range of wearable devices and mobile apps dedicated to tracking precise location data that can be easily shared between users.
These new geolocative tools, such as Life360 and Apple’s ‘Find My’ service, offer more advanced forms of family monitoring and surveillance. As mobile geolocation apps, they provide parents with the ability to track their children’s locations with continuous and accurate data. But with these advancements come additional concerns — ethical, security, parental, child developmental, and relationship issues — that require further understanding.
In our article for Surveillance & Society, we delve into parental perspectives, norms, and values surrounding the widespread availability of geolocation and family location tracking technologies. We conducted an online survey with 112 Australian parents of children aged 5–18 years, which allowed us to gather empirical data and analyse their responses. Our study provides quantitative insights into location tracking practices but also allowed for open-ended responses regarding the perceived uses, benefits, drawbacks, and concerns of location tracking. These findings inform our analysis of the ethical and social implications of technologies used in family geo-tracking.
Our research contributes to existing scholarship on family data and tracking practices, which to date has shown how family tracking apps are often marketed for their safety and security features, positioning parents as responsible for protecting their children from harm and presenting their products as a solution. However, the appropriateness of these technologies varies depending on the context, and some parents look more favourably on digital tracking than others. While government or commercial tracking of children’s locations may be seen as intrusive, parents tracking their children’s locations can be viewed as reasonable and necessary in modern parenting. Yet some parents strongly reject close or continual monitoring of children that might interfere with their children’s privacy or undermine their independence.
Our findings thus reveal parental ambivalence in the use, perception, and discourses surrounding these technologies. Parents were generally aware of ethical issues and recognised the need for active parenting, open communication, and transparency when using geolocation technology within families. They acknowledged the need for consent and the right to privacy for children, though balancing this with the desire to ensure their safety through less intrusive means proved challenging.
While safety was a major reason for using geolocation technology, many families also found it convenient for everyday household logistics. By framing the use of geolocative technologies as safety or logistics measures, parents sought to redefine practices that could otherwise be seen in a negative light. They constructed their own usage as reasonable, caring, and justified aspects of ‘good’ parenting, using language to distance their practices from more problematic forms of monitoring. For example, some parents denied that their use of these apps amounted to ‘spying,’ ‘tracking,’ ‘surveillance,’ or ‘snooping’.
Parents not only hold different perspectives on the benefits and drawbacks of tracking their children but also express uncertainty and ambivalence toward ubiquitous technological monitoring. Norms related to the flow of information, especially precise and continuous location data, are still evolving. Future studies will be required to examine whether and how attitudes towards family tracking change over time.
