If you're using iOS, have you seen Find my Friends? My group of friends and family all have each other set up on that app.

It definitely does seem potentially kinda creepy or weird initially, but if you do truly trust each other, it's actually really useful. e.g. You can passively see where someone is before nagging them to ask if they're going to get here soon, etc.

My daughter has iPhone 5S with Find my Friends activated. I find it rather buggy. It does not "stream" location so for example if she is on bus and I try to check she jumps off on the right stop it goes something like this: Now I can see she is 500M from her bus stop, Updating.... cannot locate.... updating... cannot locate... after few minutes... Doorbell rings, oh she is home now and app also show her location is home. Not exactly pleasant experience as a parent.

Right, but that is simply the reality of not destroying the person's battery life. You can't continuously stream an accurate location to the web without using a lot of power - it has to be pull rather than push. This is also a bit better around privacy and data protection.

You can also configure the phone to send out its location just before its battery dies.

> Just to be clear, I don't want this as a 24/7 thing, but rather on those odd occasions where a higher level of alertness is required, i.e. when my older son finishes a band gig at midnight in the seedier part of town.

The disconnect here for me is that your hypothetical is hardly a new phenomena unique to our time. What would you have done in the 50s? 80s? 90s?

Let's put things in perspective here. The very fact that you can have real time updates on the metrics off the /device/ that is expected to be carried with your son means you have a direct channel of communication to your son's device. Worried? Give him a call. Problem solved.

> Worried? Give him a call. Problem solved.

Why? I always see such massive push back to technology in what would theoretically be a tech-adopting crowd.

Why would i, as a band playing Son, want to have to stop practicing or playing a set to call my family back in a timely manner? Couldn't some technology, perhaps a device in my pocket, allow my parents to know where i am, handle the burden?

Why is my mother knowing where i am such an invasion of privacy? Mind you, i'm 30 now, but i don't care if my wife knows where i am 24/7. Hell, i want her to. I'd also like to know where she is. We've got nothing to hide from eachother, so why should the 1950s method of calling eachother periodically to ping our locations be used? Why is 1950s your metric for success here?

I want technology to make my life less of a hassle. By all means, make it secure, i'm not arguing anything different. But i'd like to move beyond 1950 please.

I would really like to think that this technology we surround ourselves today would make things much easier to stay in touch, no? When I was a kid playing in bands etc. in the 80's, I had to actually put myself in MORE danger sometimes by walking down a street to a public phone to call my parent or arrange a lift after gigs. I am glad my son doesn't have to do that.

"Giving him a call" is all fine, except if they are mid set or are tearing down while another band plays - stages can be loud places, and not the best things for talking on a phone, or even texting when they are busy moving gear. A quick check to see "Oh, he is still at the venue" or "He appears to be at the band's storage lockup right now" is enough for me to know that it is pretty much ops normal.

There is no question technology can improve things. The problem is not the tech, it's society and actors in society. Google and alike are willynilly becoming institutions and "pushback" is not against tech in the least (cell phones are tech, right?).

Actually, that doesn't solve the problem that Trusted Contacts solves for location requests, which is specifically providing most-current-known location to a trusted party when the subject is unable to respond (and which does not rely on having a current channel to the device, though the more recent the central server had such a channel, the more current the response can be.)

While I don't necessarily agree with the monitoring of kids, there is also the Google+ Location sharing (which I use with my SO).

Honestly, I don't think it really matters if your kids are OK with it or not. They are still kids and you are responsible for them.

If they are 18 and paying for their own service, then fine, that's another story.

But until then, I don't think it even matters. Seriously, I feel people without children just don't understand how parent's feel.

I think we as parents sometimes should take a step back from our feelings and I think this is a prime example. Just because you feel a certain way (and pay for their phone) doesn't make it alright to push such an invading service onto your children. You feeling uneasy when your teenage child is out and about is your problem, not theirs, so you deal with it.

I found it interesting to swap some of the words around to draw a corollary against governments spying on their own citizens:

Honestly, I don't think it really matters if your citizens are OK with it or not. They are still citizens and you are responsible for them.

If they are politicians and have a say in the service, then fine, that's another story.

But until then, I don't think it even matters. Seriously, I feel people just don't understand how the government feels.

I was okay with this analogy until the politicians vs. citizens part. Maybe you should reconsider how bonkers your children : 18-yr old independent children :: citizens : politicians sounds

It's a pretty good analogy for the United Kingdom, at least, with the recently passed Snoopers Charter which gives unlimited access to a large number of government agency to the browsing information for all citizens, with the exception of politicians.

Why do you even put money in the equation? Raising kids is not about paying for stuff. Nor is paying for stuff what defines your relationship with them. Whether you're paying for stuff or not has little to do with how you're trying to raise them as responsible, trustworthy individuals.

If you don't put children in situations to experiment and earn your trust, they will never learn.

And yes parents worry, that's normal. If you lose sleep over your kid being out having fun with friends, it's perfectly ok. It's feature of raising kids, not a bug.

Whatever happened to Google Latitude? I know I used it a few years ago; it just shows the current position of a persons phone at all times...

Google retired it in July of 2013 and made it a part of Google+.