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