Freshman year, I turned off Find My Friends for my mom. She noticed within an hour, even though she lives hundreds of miles away and couldn’t have done a thing if I needed her. It wasn’t a fight, just a text: “Hey, did you turn off your location?” Casual, but pointed enough that I knew she’d checked. That’s when it hit me: The tracking was never about being able to help me in an emergency. It was about her being able to look.
I understand the safety reasoning for having it on in high school, driving a car my parents owned while I was still under 18. Did it work? Not really. Until my dad told her about it senior year, she never checked. That let me get away with plenty she had no idea about (if you’re reading this, Mom, I’m still alive, so don’t get mad), and the safety argument was thrown out the window.
I always think about the ad that ran from the late ‘60s to the late ‘90s, simple and blunt: “It’s 10 p.m., do you know where your kids are?” That ad couldn’t exist today. Kids barely have third spaces to hang out in anymore, and if they did, their parents would already know exactly where.
Logically, it makes sense that my parents would want to know where I am. They’re paying for my college education, after all. But 10 to 15 years ago, constant visibility into your kid’s life was a foreign concept, one that would’ve been seen as weird — even “helicopter-y.” So why has that become normal now?
Part of it is just smartphones existing. Our parents grew up needing to find an actual phone to let their parents know where they were. Now that constant visibility is technically possible, and not having it almost feels like you’re hiding something, even when you’re not. The technology didn’t just make tracking easier; it quietly reset what “normal” parenting looks like.
It’s also been monetized. Life360, an app built around location sharing, is a publicly traded company worth billions, selling subscriptions to parents who want driving reports and geofencing alerts on their kids. The fact that we’ve built a profitable business model around parental surveillance says something about how normal—and how lucrative—this anxiety has become.
And it’s not just a parent thing anymore. I share my location with pretty much any friend who asks, and living near NYC makes that feel reasonable: If something goes wrong on a late train, someone can find me fast. But even doing it, it feels slightly off, like I’ve talked myself into something I’d have found strange a few years ago. It’s become a weird proxy for closeness, as if not watching someone’s dot move on a map means you don’t care.
Location sharing isn’t inherently bad; there are good reasons for it sometimes. The issue is that we’ve stopped treating it as a tool for specific situations and started treating it as a baseline expectation of any relationship, parent or otherwise. Privacy used to be the default and sharing the exception. Now sharing is the default, and privacy is what you have to explain.
So no, I don’t think my mom is a bad parent for wanting to know where I am. But I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask why “always visible” became the norm, or why it followed me from a house I wasn’t allowed to drive alone into a dorm room 300 miles from home. At some point, being trusted to exist without a dot on a map should be part of growing up, not something you have to negotiate for.
