I remember one time when my husband and I were still in the states, trying to meet up without constantly texting our locations. I think it was for a Renaissance Fair where we wanted the ability to move around with our different kids and not worry that we lost anyone. He asked if we could turn on the tracking function in Google Maps, a feature I didn’t even know was possible. It felt fine for that purpose, and as soon as that event was over, I turned it off.

I don’t hide much from my husband. If anything, I overshare about my day because I like talking to him and would rather focus on the big conversations when we see each other rather than the minutiae of the day. But I’d never, ever ask him to install a tracking app on his phone that tracks every single centimeter he travels. We have a very honest relationship, and I know I’ve surprised other spouses when I say he’s on a business trip but don’t know the hotel he’s staying at, and haven’t asked him for photographic proof of where he is and who he is with at all times.

I’d like to think that the same will apply to my kids. I thought about it a lot when I researched the smartwatch article in our November issue. I dug through a lot of research and was ready to submit the piece, then had this nagging feeling that I should check on the safety of using a smartwatch with GPS for your kids. That’s when I found this information:

As exciting as these smartwatches might seem as an alternative to younger kids owning a cell phone, parents must be sure to check the latest data and security findings for their products. In their 2010 paper “STALK: Security Analysis of Smartwatches for Kids,“ researchers at the Münster University of Applied Sciences in Germany found an incredible amount of vulnerabilities in many smartwatch security systems. Often hackers could listen in to conversations, track or change GPS coordinates, and even send text messages that looked like they came from a child’s parents in some cases.

My takeaway from this research is to not only perform my due diligence as a parent to find the right features for my child but also check out my top choices against studies like the one from Münster University. Don’t let a tool bought for safety turn into a security nightmare.

So you can imagine my hackles rising as I read about the app Zenly. The tracking is constant, and there have been horror stories of boyfriends and girlfriends freaking out about their significant others taking detours, or saying they’re on the way when they clearly aren’t.

But is it useful if you have kids? I thought back to my own childhood when I had to use a calling card or have spare change to use a payphone (yes, I’m that old). My parents were constantly frustrated that I wouldn’t make the call to say I would be late, and I don’t know why I had that particular block. So I asked them if smartphones were around when we were kids, would they have installed a tracking app for myself and my sister?

“If I couldn’t turn it off I wouldn’t. My kids would have hated it,” my mom Barbara Fulchino answered. “I believed in trust back then.” She’s right, we would have hated it. But we also weren’t the most well-behaved teenagers on the block, so I would have understood if she wanted to.

My dad Stephen Fulchino had both a trusting and a pragmatic view: “When you and your sister were 14 or 15, it would have been tempting. But I think it wouldn’t have been right. Also, if you delete the app, wouldn’t that turn it off?”

He’s right, we probably would have just uninstalled it or used the one option to pause it, the freezing function. Forget to unfreeze Zenly, however, and you may tell on yourself since you could physically be with someone but it says you’re still at school or work.

So as tempting as it would be to know where my kids are at every moment of the day, I think even when they’re older I won’t want to track them. For one thing, the more we communicate with each other about safety, like in online gaming, the more they show me how much they can be trusted.

What about you? Would you use a tracking app? Take our poll below and let us know!

KEEP READING: Calling all Girl Scouts (Leaders): Teach STEM and Make New Friends

Photos: Zenly app

Can you keep tabs on your kids without cramping their style? Such a notion may seem contradictory, but A&L Technology is aiming to help parents do just that with its flashy new GPS kicks.

The burgeoning Beijing startup has branded its “Budiu smart shoes” as the first of their kind, although a recent Tech In Asia article points out that “child tracking shoes have been around for years,” as far back as 2007 in fact, according to a post on Gizmodo (and they haven’t exactly set the world on fire since then).

Nevertheless, A&L’s take on the product may be the snazziest and most successful yet, seeing as the company claims that 10,000 pairs of the first-gen Budiu line have already been sold, and 20,000 preorders have been racked up for the second-gen line.

Its designs include tie die, lime green with intergalactic creatures, and neon zebra style patterns. This colourful aesthetic will hopefully keep children from bitterly dismissing the shoes as glorified house arrest ankle monitors.

Those youngsters would likely be even more peeved to learn that their Budiu shoes can be tracked with a smartphone app, and that parents can even set up virtual perimeters and an alarm that will notify them if their child steps out of those bounds.

Unfortunately there has yet to be an app that can outline the psychological boundaries crossed by such overprotective, tech-enabled parents.

And one wonders: in a place like Beijng where taking off ones’ shoes is de rigueur in virtually all homes and GPS coverage gaps are still normal througout the city — is the idea of tracking a child by their shoes really practical?

It took two years of riding my bike and hailing taxis, but I finally got my Chinese driver’s license.  Shortly thereafter, I got a car!  In the past year, my new-found freedom has been nothing short of phenomenal.  I am no longer scared out of my wits to be on the road, although I have to be careful not to be jaded by the lack of road rules (something to remember during those visits back home).

Next on the agenda was buying a GPS to further explore the city.  My perfect “human” GPS had the audacity to move back to New Zealand, so I had to succumb to purchasing the electronic kind.  We decided to follow suit of many friends, buy a unit in the U.S. and then load local maps at the Unistrong office in Lido.  This way, we could continue to use the unit in the states and guarantee that the language wouldn’t just change on its own.  However, the maps simply wouldn’t load.  Unistrong couldn’t give us a good reason why, it just wouldn’t work.  Option two was to load them off of the website, which we did, but the maps were just enough off to get a “recalculating” prompt during the entire trip.  Annoying, confusing and worthless.  We decided to keep our U.S. GPS and buy another one here.

We now own a second Garmin, purchased nearby so that we can take care of any problems that may arise.  We’ve been happily traveling along, adding many locations to our “favorites” list.  Until recently, that is.

The GPS would not turn on.  It wouldn’t even show that it was charging when plugged in.  It was dead.  I took it back to the store, and after calling in to them almost two weeks later, I was told that the battery needed to be replaced for RMB 500.   This is four months after paying more for the unit here than I paid for the identical product in the U.S. 
I didn’t pay it, of course, and I asked them to try again to figure out the problem.  A few days later I went back to pick it up (no charge), test it at the store, and to get the answer “absolutely nothing” when I asked what they found to be the problem.

At least in the meantime, I was able to find my way around on my own, using good old paper maps.  I also used our new Shunyi subway line, which is a nice option if you don’t want to deal with traffic and parking.   However, now that I have a car, which still feels new and exciting to me, I’ll still trek out there, get lost, and enjoy the freedom of driving on my own.

Is this overprotection good for them? Should kids be allowed to experience cut knees and bloody noses as part of the growing up process? It’s tough to say, and is obviously one of those “where do you draw the line?” dilemmas.

There’s a good quote from the film director Terry Gilliam about parenting that I’ll paraphrase, if I may: “The good thing about children is when you drop them, they bounce.”