The Oppressive Parental Force has done it again – only this time, they’ve employed the type of villainy you probably read about in high school, taking a page out of George Orwell’s 1984 in order to keep closer tabs on their rambunctious progeny: meet Life 360, the always watching Eye geared to monitor the whereabouts of kids.
With the growing national appreciation for GPS comes an infinite number of applications that harness its adeptness at locating that which loves to be lost, and falling neatly into the category (right between Places Where You’re About To Be Late and Places You Were Supposed To Be Five Minutes Ago) are the darling little munchkins that give parents grey hairs. Life360 is but one of many emergent monitoring systems offering to Big Brother little Timmy on his way to school…but the question some individuals are asking is when does this trend become too much?
When Fox News asked one California mother about her take on Life360, she had nothing but praise to offer – she brings the program into play on a regular basis, using it to watch as her husband escorts their two children to school, and then to keep track of her babies throughout the day. "You just never know," the woman said. "In the safest of situations, something could happen whether it be a kidnapping, stranger danger, getting hurt or anything like that, and you want to keep track…It's just making sure they got where they were supposed to be – end of story."
Surely, Life360 offers some degree of equanimity to anxious parents – but is the supposed assurance of one’s child’s safety lulling guardians into complacent naiveté? Aside from the inevitable accessibility of any and all information recorded on the internet (thus allowing strangers to potentially track your children as well as you can), naysayers of family monitoring software also argue that users tend to assume no possible malfunction on the part of the equipment – a grave error in judgment in an age when many GPS applications are notorious for imprecise localization, and when kids (being kids) might easily lose the instruments used to keep them safe.
Chris Hulls, CEO of Life360, has acknowledged such consumer concerns, but insists that such software will raise the bar for child protection, and will quickly become a vital tool in parents’ day-to-day firewalls. "It's beyond just safety," Hulls said. "Every single electronic device is soon going to have a location associated with it, and that brings up a whole host of new products as well as concerns. But it really is a new world, and parents are adopting this technology at a very quick rate.”
While we understand the cynics’ fears, we can’t help but support a program that will inevitably serve to both greatly reassure nervous parents of their children’s safety and come to the rescue if needed. Our conclusion? So long as mom and dad don’t invest in a Thoughtcrime department to fend off a planned cookie jar heist or late night TV, this Big Brother can stick around.
