When Apple released an inexpensive tracking device called an AirTag three years ago, I thought my days of chronically losing stuff might be over. The AirTag was designed as an easy way to keep track of valuables that are often misplaced -- luggage, keys, purses and wallets.
It’s also become a way to stalk and track humans.
The quarter-sized Bluetooth device costs $29 and can be hidden in a car, clothing or accessory surreptitiously. Using an AirTag to track an adult without their consent can be a crime, but it’s become an increasingly common way for parents to keep tabs on their children.
In a recent online discussion in a moms’ group, a parent shared her anxiety about her young child attending an all-day summer camp for the first time. Several moms commented that they drop their children off at day camp with an AirTag on them.
There are tons of wearable tracker holders on the market for kids -- wristbands, keychains, lanyards and pins. Some parents simply tie one to a child’s shoe or place it in a backpack. They see it as a bridge between the time when children are old enough to attend camp but too young to have a smartphone.
This advice left me with mixed feelings. On one hand, I see how it would be reassuring for concerned parents to know where a young child is while outside of their care. But it also feels strange that we’ve become so accustomed to being surveilled and surveilling others.
It’s such a normal part of our society that we’ve stopped talking about the possible drawbacks.
When our children were young, we didn’t have access to this technology, so I have no idea whether I would have used it. But when our children first started driving, all of us added the Life360 app, which tracks the location of every family member, to our phones. We figured it would give us peace of mind, especially since we had told our children not to text while driving.
Thankfully, we never had any real emergencies that necessitated relying on this app. But it was helpful if a teenager was late to arrive home: We could glance at our phones to see if they were headed back.
Strangely, once they went off to college, none of us deleted the app. It had become a normal part of the invasive tech in our lives.
We don’t question the whereabouts of our young adult children. But if a week goes by and I haven’t heard back from one of them, it does ease my worry to look at the app and see their location on campus. They can see our locations, too, so it feels almost like a mutual safety measure, albeit a limited one.
AirTags, too, can provide a false sense of security: The tags can be unreliable in certain situations or run out of battery.
Is this simply technological progress? I’m not sure.
From an increasingly young age, we’ve become conditioned to accept being monitored and watched. Like any technology, it can become dangerous in the wrong hands.
The bigger question is how and why we’ve become so much more anxious over the past few decades, which is fueling the demand for such products. If you’re middle-aged or older, you likely had more unmonitored time as a child than younger generations have.
Unlike our parents, we raised our own children in a 24/7 news cycle with the advent of social media. We have been exposed to so much secondhand cruelty and fearmongering online and in the media. Events that are relatively rare, such as kidnappings and mass shootings, are shown to us repeatedly in graphic, searing detail.
Our culture imprints fear in our consciousness.
So it makes sense that we resort to tracking devices to soothe our own sense of powerlessness and anxiety.
It’s easier to drop an AirTag in a backpack than to think about why we feel compelled to do it.