I agree with you that tracking as a teenager is not ideal, although teenagers track each other's locations incessantly at least they should be free from their parents tracking. However this watch is aimed at younger children than teenagers.

My kids started walking to school and friends houses at 7 and are still preteen. After school they can be anywhere as they'll go to a friend's house or just hang out somewhere for a while on the way home. Neither of my kids has a device that I can track, only one of them as a dumb Nokia phone, which end up being left at home most of the time.

If I want to know where they are to reduce worry then either I have to call them, which feels intrusive to what they're doing; or it relies on their friend's parent letting me know where they are. I know people who worry a lot more than us, so a non-intrusive location finding of a 10 year old would reduce parental worry without making the child feel like they were being hassled. Currently these parents are giving their young kids smart phones, often without any parental controls, and I think that's a lot worse than a watch option. My main worry with these watches is about how good the security & controls are on them to prevent unauthorized messages or calls.

Yes, I'm absolutely against tracking for teenagers or adults but I could see it when my son is around 8 years old and I let him walk to a friend's house or go to a nearby playground. We live in Hong Kong, and it's very safe here once he's old enough to understand the rules of the road and be careful when crossing.

Having something to track them between 8 and 12 years old I think is useful. I remember when I lived in Japan (where children start walking to places as early as 5 years old) before the iphone came out, there were plenty of children phone that sent gps to the parents and only allowed calling to a select set of numbers.

Where are you living? Asking because I think letting kids walk alone to/from school and friend's houses depends a lot on the culture of the city/country.

Suburban Scandinavia, so we live in a relatively safe bubble. It sounds like in some other countries we'd be reported to some kind of protective services for child abandonment or neglect.

We live in Stockholm city, and it's usually considered very safe for kids, and yet most people tend to worry about young kids wandering without adult supervision, which was ok in the small city where I grew up in France (I'm 48).

There's also a really simple hack: they can just leave their phone/watch at home. And now even if you or they have an emergency, you can't reach them :)

Lol, and then they get grounded. They can't hack if they are taught to expect swift consequences for messing around

Grounded for “forgetting” their phone?

Kids are a lot more clever than you give them credit for :)

Yes, that's why it's useful to set rules and consequences based on outcomes instead of effort sometimes it eliminates the possibility of making excuses. If they want to avoid the consequences they can learn to take more seriously double checking to avoid the relevant mistake.

For example, we had this issue -- kid would "forget" the phone and then go out. We set the expectation that if they forgot they had to come straight home or else face a week or two long grounding. Lo and behold they quickly got very good at remembering.

Similar issue with "forgetting" to do all the homework and we followed a similar strategy with some success.

It's a useful technique to combat weaponized incompetence. It's nice and appropriate to reward effort instead of outcomes for new things that are still being learned, but once you know they get it, and if you suspect weappnized incompetence-- try tying an outcome they care about that you're OK with them losing on if need be, directly to the goal, and provide support and model appropriate behavior regarding reminders, todo lists, etc.

Not sure if maybe you misinterpreted my comment backward.

I have a toddler, and that has changed my view on it a bit, from the same starting point you are expressing.

With the social pressure going on, I expect she'll get a smartphone earlier that I'd honestly prefer (not that we are there any time soon), and quite a bit before she's a teenager.

So I honestly expect we'll be location sharing for a while, but I don't expect it to continue into the teenage years. By then it'll be up to her, if she wants to continue sharing it.

> With the social pressure going on, I expect she'll get a smartphone earlier that I'd honestly prefer (not that we are there any time soon), and quite a bit before she's a teenager.

Our kids (8 & 10) keep telling us nearly every kid in their class has a smartphone, but we're still not letting them have one. Fuck social pressure; that's an important lesson to be learned in itself.

I do not understand how anyone can be so categoric about this - it should not depend on peer pressure but also it should not be dictated by some ideologies. Phones (instant communication actually) is part of modern world and is here to stay and children should learn it as fast as they are able to handle it. Otherwise there is a danger of being left out for them. And at their age there is few other equal things that can make or break their future as being accepted by their peers. And of course not all children are the same so you need to know yours and decide on case by case basis (my dauther got her first phone when she was 9, my son on the other hand will have to wait)

> And at their age there is few other equal things that can make or break their future as being accepted by their peers.

Hard disagree to this idea as justification for purchasing something for a kid.

The most useful gift that my parents gave me is a cultivated disregard for what is popular. It's not that I go out of my way to alienate my peers—I try to get along well with everyone and it mostly works—but the habit of wanting to participate with the crowd is one that I've watched hamper many a life, and the lack of that habit has allowed me to get a lot further in my career and in my personal and social life than most of my peers.

I'm guessing you are in software dev or something auxiliary to it? And probably you were passable in STEM topics at school?

Then maybe, just maybe, your whole career is just happy accident of right time (software eating world) and right predispositions (STEM). I know mine is.

And if I would not have that I would be earning what 85% of my peers here in Poland do (barely enough to pay bills).

The only ones that are doing ok without this are the ones that invested everything in social skills (by happy accident of not having socially akward parents or by themselfs intuitively knowing that your group is everything).

So this is just implementation of my deepest believe that the best what we can do for our children is to make them as socially sklled as possibile. And limiting channels of communication does not look like a good way to this.

Of course Im not advocating unlimited access to everything for everyone - it depends on emotional development and predispositions.

Why would her having a smartphone lead to an expectation of location sharing? I completely expect my five year old son to have the freedom to just not have his future gadgets on him if he so prefers when he gets to the age that a smartphone is unavoidable, and I certainly don't expect him to let us track him.

Hopefully the age where a smartphone becomes a requirement to not be marked as a social outcast will gradually rise again.

This trend is about to reverse.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and other books and investigations on the topic of childhood smartphone usage are only starting to get traction.

Try to hold out as long as you can.

To be fair: the only reason I want trackers for my kids is so that I can find them if (a) they run off and get lost; or, (b) they get nabbed.

The average small child can't say what Dad's phone number is, or even his full name. Young kids have really limited awareness of their surroundings, and can get lost very easily. Add multiple kids into the mix and it can be a real challenge to keep them all together when you're out.

But how? My five year old knows his home address and his full name. If he ever gets lost he'll be safe. Actually getting lost at that age is really hard too, because a five year old is not often left unattended.

Besides, in the coming years I very much want him to grow up knowing that if he gets lost or in a dangerous situation, he will have to rely on himself in the first place. That means not freezing and just waiting for the helicopter parent to swoop in to a blinking dot on the map, but knowing how to get help and how to be safe. He'll need to do that if his parents are unavailable (some freak accident?) too in any case.

And kidnapping? Don't kid yourself. If you live somewhere where this is even remotely probable and your kid is a target (kidnapping is usually done by family), the chance that the kidnapper will take the tracking device along are remote, unless you intend on hiding it in their clothing or chipping them like a pet.

> The average small child can't say what Dad's phone number is, or even his full name. Young kids have really limited awareness of their surroundings, and can get lost very easily. Add multiple kids into the mix and it can be a real challenge to keep them all together when you're out.

I grew up memorizing my dad's number and was told to go find a trusted adult, stranger danger, etc. There was only one time I needed to use it, and I recalled it perfectly fine. If your kid has trouble memorizing it then turn it into a song, give the letter version, or change numbers. It worked fine then and works fine now. Get a grip.

Cant imagine growing up under that kind of parental surveillance.

When I was a kid, my parent's phone number was 6 digits long. You can memorise 11 digits of course, I did this aged 10 with digits of π, but also I'm a nerd.

One of my memories was losing track of where my mum was when we went shopping. She was right behind me, but 5-6 year old me panicked and ran out of the main doors.

There was a school trip to teach us personal safety issues (not sure the age, I'm going to say 11 with low confidence), and one of the tasks was (to the entire group) "Go along this corridor to meet the policeman, Officer FooBar"; we went along the corridor, someone not in uniform asked us where we were going, one of the group said "to meet Officer FooBar", and this un-uniformed person said "I'm Officer FooBar, wait in this room". Then he left and the real Officer FooBar came in and asked us to explain the situation, and that we'd been fooled because we'd volunteered too much information. (The fake Officer FooBar was also an officer, but one who was pretending to be a Bad Man™ who was pretending to be an officer).

The UK school system, at the time I went through it, the year before you finished you were sent to a "trident work experience" thing for a week (I think to keep them out of the way of those doing exams) — mine was to be a teaching assistant in a primary school. The kids all called me "Mrs Ben" because to them "Mrs" was the title given to all teachers and they didn't get the difference between family names and given names.

Aren't phone numbers longer than they used to be?

Yes, in 1920 they were shorter.

We didn't need an area code for much of the time I was growing up in the 90s in the Atlanta area. It was a huge media thing when we got a new code and finally had to start thinking about it. We had an area code (404) but nobody used it until that pesky 770 (1995) complicated life for some, and 678 (1998) later messed it up for everyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Georgia_area_codes

Of course, they're increasingly meaningless now that everyone has cell phones and gets to pick an area code.

My parent's number growing was initially 77099, though it later became 577099 when the numbering system was tinkered with to allow for growth and efficiency at the exchanges. This was only as far back as the 90s, and such short numbers still work for landline-to-landline calls today. I don't have a landline, and if I did I'm not home enough for it to be a useful way o get hold of me. My numbers now are 11 digits, not as easy to drum into the head of a kid I expect (I don't speak from direct experience: child-free and planning to stay that way, but I know many people with kids at various ages).

OK, technically my parent's number was 10 digits rather than 5 because it was <areacode>577099, but that didn't matter as I'd almost always be local to that code, and if not could state my home town if talking to an adult who was doing the calling (or if I'd dialled the operator number, which I'd need to do anyway for a revere-charges call) and they'd know that bit.

It's 2024. It's not likely you're arguing with someone who is 104 years old.

I'm less than 50 and remember 5-digit numbers being the norm in the 80s. 3 digit might have still been around in the 70s iirc.

Wait until we'll be assigned IPv6 as phone number.

Dude come on

Your no nonsense suggestions aren't appreciated, we like sending our kids locations to the NSA in real time here.

Is there any reason to suspect that tracking apps like find my are correlated with government surveillance?

For years the government used cell phone data to track locations without it being known. Why wouldn't they use a more reliable way of doing it? Is there any reason to NOT suspect it?

My question was about FindMy in particular as opposed to other ways of obtaining the data.

Yes. The NSA is collecting any data it can get access to.

Would you suspect a known burglar of wanting to rob your house? Well the NSA violated privacy of hundreds of millions of people. They deserve all the suspicion and no forgiveness.

> The average small child can't say what Dad's phone number is, or even his full name

Is that really true? I guess I'm not sure what the age cutoff for "small child" is. I was at Disneyland with my seven-year-old nephew recently, and he was able to immediately and without hesitation recite both his mother's and father's phone numbers. Incidentally, I still remember the phone number of the house my family moved out of when I was five years old, nearly 40 years ago.

Admittedly, I don't think my four-year-old niece knows her parents' phone numbers, and my other nephew, who is two, certainly does not. But that's why their parents don't let them out of sight in public.

And yes, there's the possibility that someone screws up, and they get lost. But I'm not convinced that assuaging fear of that is worth the trade-off of getting kids used to being tracked 24/7. (Regarding kidnapping, nowadays only the dumbest of kidnappers won't know to spot a smartwatch or smartphone on a kid and ditch them immediately. And regardless, the risk of a kid getting kidnapped is likely orders of magnitude lower than their parents might believe it to be.)

First, how often do your kids get nabbed? And if they get lost, they should hopefully have the skills to get unlost.

>The average small child can't say what Dad's phone number is, or even his full name. Young kids have really limited awareness of their surroundings, and can get lost very easily.

Kids can be taught at a very young age too. Teaching our kids our address and numbers was really important and surprisingly easy when they were still toddlers. To this day they still know our numbers despite rarely if ever having to actually dial it into a keypad.

> The average small child can't say what Dad's phone number is, or even his full name.

There's a solution for this already. Face tattoos.

/s