Teens are filling Tiktok with memes deploring Life360, a parenting app that tracks teens

Life360 is an app that lets you track a mobile phone user in fine-grained, realtime detail, with options to set alert for things like "is this person exceeding the speed limit?" It's widely used by parents to track their teens, and this seems to be the summer where it comes into its own, with millions of families around the world relying on it to act as a kind of remote leash for their kids.

In response, teens have begun to fill the meme-heavy, kid-centric social app Tiktok (previously) with short videos deploring Life360, offering tips for evading it, and complaining about how their parents use it.

Life360 is an excellent example of how the most important thing about a tool isn't what it does, but who it does it for and who it does it to. My family uses a similar tool (built into Android) sometimes when we're at Disneyland: it means that if you want to split up and then rendezvous later, you don't have to call your kid to find out where they are (which might be inside a ride, where they can't answer the phone), and instead, you can just head over and meet them. Similarly, when my daughter first started walking home from school, we made an arrangement that she'd text us when she left and turn on the location-tracker until she got home, which reassured both her and us.

But expanding that into a system of fine-grained, continuous surveillance that comes complete with alerts that warn you to call your kids and give them hell if they go outside of a certain perimeter or are inside a moving vehicle that exceeds the posted limit by 1mph turns a convenience into a totalitarian nightmare. Read the rest