Most of us I expect, first found this site after yelling into the void, “Am I alone in thinking… the very ancient shouldn’t be isolated in nursing homes for their own safety… that masking children is malevolent” and so on. The gush of relief it wasn’t just me fearing that Whitty et al. were fouling everything up was immense. Alas that dread hollow of thinking differently from the majority has yet again engulfed me. And this time there seems to be no Toby Young or Peter Hitchens to calmly reassure I’m not alone.
Am I alone in thinking… it’s wrong that all children are now tracked?
See: silence. No intake of breath. No tutting. No muttering disapproval. No national debate. No phone in on LBC. No social media backlash led by J.K. Rowling. No podcasts with lovely Right-leaning mothers sounding the alarm. No reports by Big Brother Watch wittily entitled Big Mother Watch. Nothing.
All our children are tracked and no-one bats an eyelid.
It turns out everyone’s been doing it for years; I only noticed on Saturday. My 15 year-old son was at a party and the pick up was down some complicated farm track. I was the last parent owing to getting lost. On the way home I asked my son if any other parents were late. “No, they put a pin in where their child is.” Like some batty old Aunt I kept asking him how they knew where to go – I also had the address but the postcode didn’t correspond to the house. He sighed in exasperation, “They’re all tracked, so you see where the person is, put a pin in Google maps and drive.”
“Tracked? What do you mean? What for? The parents know where you are – they dropped you off? What? Tracked all the time? Why? How long has this been going on? But you’re all 16 – isn’t that creepy? Should I be tracking you and your brothers?”
“NO!” he finally said to shut me up, “I love being the only one who’s not tracked.”
On the fringes of the sceptic movement are those who worry about the implementation of a Chinese style social credit system, and even further away are those who suggest the next step in this top-down control will involve micro-chipping babies in the same way we do cats and dogs. As far as I can see this fresh vision of misery has already arrived: all children are tracked and have been for years, and it doesn’t concern anyone.
Perhaps I’ll be accused of neglect for not tracking my six-foot-two sons. What an odd thought. The eldest was in Sicily last week on a field trip. Imagine if I did track him and saw his little blob (I honestly have no idea what an avatar of a real-life person looks like on a tracking app) teetering on the edge of Mount Etna, or the sea, or in a bar. What would I do with that information: message him and tell him to get to safety quickly? Ignore or panic? All options seem pointless.
“But he might be dead,” suggests my husband helpfully.
“Well in that case he’ll be dead,” I snap, “And tracking him won’t help.”
“Or kidnapped then, or injured.”
“It hasn’t happened yet.”
“Michael Mosley,” my husband adds with due solemnity.
My questions are these: are children grateful for being tracked because it’s stopped them worrying about themselves dying, becoming injured or kidnapped? In which case, being tracked has solved millennia of panic, and we can all sing praises to the beneficent god of Life360 – though I’m not sure recent child mental health statistics back this up. Or am I alone in thinking that it is morally outrageous and socially damaging to track children. What about freedom? Adventure? Exploration? Independence? Growing up? Not tracking human beings?
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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