Cranor featured in Bloomberg article on tracking

Engineering and Public Policy FORE Systems Professor Lorrie Cranor was featured in the Bloomberg article, The Case Against Tracking Your Kid’s Phone. In the article, Cranor asks, “Does this software actually keep our kids safer?"

With millions of students going back to school this month, their movements are frequently being tracked — by their parents. In a small survey of a dozen British parents sending their kids to secondary school, 75% of them said they would monitor their child’s movements through an app of some sort, largely for safety reasons. Many said it gave them “peace of mind” to know where their children were. Yet, Britain’s privacy watchdog buried a warning to parents in its new rules for companies: “Children who are subject to persistent parental monitoring may have a diminished sense of their own private space, which may affect the development of their sense of their own identity.”

“Does this software actually keep our kids safer?” asked Lorrie Cranor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, who’s studied how children interact with technology, and who does not track her own kids. “If it doesn’t keep them safer, then why are we doing this?”

If turning tracking off completely feels too much like unbuckling a child’s seatbelt, Cranor says one way forward is to use apps that only do so in limited circumstances. She recalls conducting a project in the early 2000s in which she allowed her friends and family to track her whereabouts, but only within certain times of a day or when she was on campus. The goal was to see how she and other study participants would react. “I was more comfortable when I had that sort of control,” she remembered. 

iPhone users could, for instance, turn off location sharing directly from Messages, but keep an app like Find My iPhone on their devices for emergencies, and take that app off the home screen. 

Cranor recommends that parents talk to their kids about GPS tracking, and make sure to get their consent to do it at all. “Secret tracking is usually not a good idea,” she added.

To learn more about what experts are saying about tracking, read the full article.