That's not a problem with the app.

That gives him the different benefit of experiencing life as a teenager without a phone.

I just fail to see what exactly tracking teenagers would be keeping them "safe" from. It seems like it wouldn't result in anything but resentment and sneaky behaviour.

Now that you do have kids, do you use such an app? Do you plan to?

(I'm a father of a 3 year old; I'll likely use _something_ like this when she's old enough to go to the store around the corner and back by herself, but will likely stop once she's old enough to take the subway by herself.)

Think of it this way, what did parents do before these kinds of things were available? Humans are still in existence, so teenagers were able to survive without this level af parental tracking. I think this level of parental overwatch says more about the parent’s insecurities than anything. You know what you were up to as a teenager. That’s probably what your teenager is doing. Did anything you do deserve big brother level tracking?

Every generation throws off the ideals of the generation that came before.

Parents monitor their kids for a combination of:

1. Worry about the outside world. Justified - but monitoring location doesn't make it any less likely that they'll get hurt.

2. Worry about their child doing something they consider dumb. Again - justified. They will absolutely do something you consider dumb. But monitoring your child won't make then agree with you and won't stop them from doing something you don't like. The tighter the grip, the more they'll fight and the more they'll resent you for making them fight.

Parents like to think that this resentment will go away when the child is older. It doesn't. Many of you probably resent something your parents did when you were younger. But it does become less intense with distance - like everything else.

Anywho - Monitoring teenagers doesn't actually help anything. Monitoring younger children might make you feel more safe, though.

As someone with extremely overbearing helicopter parents that now has a lot of issues that I have been working through over time with a therapist, please don't surveil and micromanage your children. It ultimately led to a lot of distrust of authority, anxiety, depression, social isolation, making worse choices in attempts to circumvent security controls and attempt to have control over my life, and other long lasting negative effects. I can guarantee that anything you implement (gps tracking, cameras, filters, logs) will be easily identified and bypassed, causing distrust and potentially even less safe decisions/scenarios.

> I suspect you do not have children

The absolute worst genre of HN comments is "single childless guy criticizes others about their parenting". You've got some examples in the replies to this comment.

I will say you're probably doing fine.

Google maps still allows location sharing, not just covert one.

They brought it back. It's branded "location sharing" in the current iteration of Google Maps. Works just like Latitude used to. You can see people who are sharing their location with you right in Google Maps.

But you have to authorize them and I trust more Apple than any random dev making an app with my location.

I used the "find my frieds" enabling my wife to track me for when I went in a long distance working trip from Italy in a very sketchy area of the US called SILICON VALLEY.

Jokes apart, a temporary "find my friends" can be useful, but a continuous tracking it's nonsense to me.