Tracking the phones of loved ones is problematic. I’ll do it anyway
An illusion of control seems precious when so much of life is uncertain.
Parents generally say that they are tracking teenagers for safety reasons. It is reassuring to see the emanating green dot of your 14-year-old walking home at midnight. I think of my own mother, who just had to hope that her daughters, crisscrossing Manhattan by subway at 2am, were not in the middle of a crime scene. There wasn’t even a late-night text telling her where we were. How did anyone sleep back then?
I have a feeling, though, that many parents tracking their children are craving more than just the peace of knowing they are safe. One of my friends, who likes to check the locations of her adult children, says, “it gives me a feeling of control”.
Tracking bestows some sense of glittering connection that you don’t otherwise have when your children are rattling around remote places. Watching their dot hover on a street corner, you feel a link, a pleasurable blip of being conjoined, illusory or deranged as it may be. In a time when so much feels threatening, and so much outside of our control, it is not mysterious that this one imaginary thread connecting us to children, boyfriends, husbands and parents should feel weirdly precious.
Even though I like this knowledge and find it reassuring, it can also seem invasive. Shouldn’t people be able to float through the world undetected? Shouldn’t you be able to tell a white lie to your spouse about where you are every now and then? Is it so bad to want privacy?
There is something violating about all that invisible information, that monitoring. It feels vaguely dystopian, even though I sort of love it. It is clearly terrible for middle-schoolers to be able to see avatars of their friends on Snapchat maps and to know who is with whom at any given moment, exactly what fun gathering they are being excluded from. It’s FOMO on steroids.
My daughter, at 21, pretty much knows where all of her friends are at all times. It doesn’t seem strange to her that you would have or need or use this information. At college she knows who is at which library or who is at which cafe. The idea of knowing where all your friends are is very humdrum to her cohort. One of her roommates’ parents offered to take their daughter off tracking, out of concern for her privacy, but she shrugged off their concerns. The idea of being constantly tracked isn’t exotic or outlandish to them. It’s just how things are.
Like everyone else, I feel that my own use of this technology is benign, while other people are perhaps taking it too far. When my daughter was on a gap semester in South Africa, I liked seeing that she was in her rented apartment at night. It gave me an arguably false sense of peace. The idea of watching over her from afar held a certain appeal.
I know people who have casually discovered dubious behaviour through location tracking. Someone suddenly going dark – “location unknown” – at a key moment. I know people who have seen children in the wrong place. Is seeing everything, uncovering every little obfuscation or omission, really desirable? I am not so sure.
A woman called one of my friends to ask why her ex-husband was in Brooklyn. She was still tracking him even though the marriage was over. My friend knew he was dating someone new, with a house in Brooklyn, but what could she say? The ex-wife had access to information that was torturing her. Watching her ex move through the city, as a green dot, was interfering with her separating or distancing herself.
This seems to fall neatly into the category of information you shouldn’t really have. Still I felt bad for her, how could she resist? The possibility of tracking him fuelled a dubious desire, a flame of self-destructive curiosity.
Is tracking overall a helpful addition? Life did sputter on before without all this knowledge. It is, in some sense, a burden to be able to know. Like much of our newish technology, the possibility of tracking is a wildly mixed blessing: It brings us both reassurance and a new frontier for worry.
In those days before you could know where people were, you made peace with the mystery of other people’s movements. You didn’t need their location at all times because you couldn’t have it. The new technology created a hunger: You need your children’s location at all times because you can have it.
The Wall Street Journal
