Big Mother

A self-described “serial entrepreneur,” Alan Phillips had already founded two companies and was looking for a third when he was inspired by an unlikely source—his 14-year-old son. One day, Phillips called his son on his cell phone after school, and was told he was at a friend’s house. But 20 minutes later, driving to downtown Hopkinton to do some errands, Phillips ran into him skateboarding on the sidewalk, something he was forbidden to do.

“I said, wait a minute—there’s something wrong here,” says Phillips. “There is no way he could have gotten from his friend’s house downtown in 20 minutes.” At the time, Phillips and his partners, Jeff Plummer and Frank Shrove, were intrigued by a new federal law requiring all cell phones to have global positioning satellite, or GPS, capabilities by this year. The mandate, called E911, was pushed through so emergency services can pinpoint the location of callers phoning in by cell.

The trio of entrepreneurs envisioned a new use for the technology—one that would allow parents like Phillips to always know where their children were, whether they were skateboarding, joyriding, or drinking unsupervised at a friend’s house. The company they created, Framingham-based uLocate, lets parents who subscribe to Nextel wireless service simply open up a website and get a map with the location of their child’s cell phone.

“You need to solve a problem that you understand,” says Phillips, whose partners also have teenage kids. “We all understood the difficulties of being a parent.”

Since Phillips and his colleagues created the company three years ago, the concept of child tracking has snowballed to the point where it may soon be mainstream. Several companies have sprouted to take advantage of uLocate’s software, including a new service by MapQuest released late last year. Phillips touts the invention as a way to keep tabs on a family in a busy world. His son is now a teenage driver, and Phillips and his wife can make sure he’s on his way home to meet his midnight curfew; when their daughter goes to the mall, they can keep tabs on where she is.

In place of a weekly allowance, another Boston-based company, MobileLime, lets kids use their cell phones to make purchases at stores and fast-food outlets, giving parents a log of what a child is buying. Other parents are installing in-car cameras and “black box” technology to monitor exactly where their teen is taking the family sedan. Ostensibly to protect teens against recklessness behind the wheel, such devices also put the kybosh on the late-night joyriding that’s been a staple of every rock songwriter since Bruce Springsteen. Other new technology takes Internet blocking a step further by letting parents secretly record every website their kids visit and read every email and instant message they send.

Some companies, like New York-based Napco Security Systems, are even touting hidden home surveillance cameras hooked up to the Internet to monitor what goes on in your kid’s room while you’re at work. It all makes sense in a way—Websites track personal information with cookies and spyware, stores chart your purchases with discount cards, and President George W. Bush has claimed the right to spy on citizens in the name of the war on terrorism. Why shouldn’t parents get in on the act?

In an age when kids are exposed to Girls Gone Wild ads on basic cable, heroin seems as easy to score as pot, and the media is full of reports of things like “rainbow parties” at which teenage girls take turns giving boys oral sex with different color lipstick, advocates of parental spying say kids’ use of technology requires parents to keep up with gadgets of their own. Critics, however, have coined a term for the trend. Instead of Big Brother, they call such surveillance “Big Mother.” And what, they ask, ever happened to trust?

JACK CHURCH KNOWS firsthand how important it can be to keep tabs on your family. He lost his own son five years ago in a car crash. When the coroner’s report came in, it revealed that he had been drinking. “Only someone who has buried a child can understand all of the what-ifs that run through your mind,” Church says. “I try to stress to parents not to take your child’s safety for granted.”

Church is now the president and spokesman for Teen Arrive Alive, a company that uses uLocate technology to monitor teen driving habits. Parents can log into a computer site that updates every two minutes with a teen’s location and driving speed. And because the GPS is carried on the cell phone, it can monitor the child even when he or she is in someone else’s car—or not driving at all. “Probably half the parents who subscribe to the service have kids who haven’t even started driving yet,” says Church. “Their concern is for safety. You can’t turn on the TV without seeing an abduction case somewhere.”

While Church won’t reveal how many cell phones the company has sold, this spring it’s orchestrating a big push in the Northeast, where the phones are now available in over 200 stores, including 18 in Massachusetts. “This is the leading edge of technology,” he says. “Quite frankly, this technology saves lives.” Church points to statistics from the National Transportation Safety Board that 6,000 teenagers were killed in car crashes last year as reason enough for parents to spy on their kids. “I don’t expect teens to like it,” says Church. “Teens don’t like rules or structure, period. But I’ll be the heavy any day if it’s going to keep my kid alive.”

Still, Alex Koroknay-Palicz, director of the DC-based National Youth Rights Association, argues that looking over your kids’ shoulders electronically can keep them from setting their own boundaries. “Even with GPS devices and cameras, you can’t watch them 24 hours a day,” he says. “The best thing to do is to prepare kids by instilling an inner fortitude and independence. Parents might think spying is in the best interest of their kids, but it’s not.”

IN PART, Big Mother has been driven by the changes in technology itself. Parental spying, after all, is a time-honored technique employed since the invention of the telephone, when eavesdropping with a hand over the speaker could let parents intercept information about where their kids were going, and with whom. Now kids as young as 10 have cell phones—and many aren’t talking on the phone at all, but sending instant messages or participating in chat rooms or online forums. All of which makes it necessary for parents to up the ante, say proprietors of Internet monitoring programs like EBlaster or PC Tattletale.

“Teens are extremely secretive,” says Don Schnure, developer of PC Tattletale. “They don’t want you to be in every part of their life. But if you are going to turn your kid loose on the Internet, you need insight into what’s happening to them.” For years, parents have used filtering programs that block objectionable Web sites. But those don’t do anything about the communications with friends and strangers that can lure kids into dangerous situations. Monitoring programs provide parents with logs of everywhere a child goes on the computer, including chat rooms, and all of the communication he or she receives, including emails and instant messages. “Some parents don’t like monitoring software, because they feel guilty about invading their teens’ privacy,” Schnure says. “But there is no privacy on the Net. Pretend to be a 15-year-old girl and go online with a cutesy name. You can’t be online for 15 minutes without getting solicited. I don’t care how smart your kid is, there isn’t teenager out there who is emotionally sophisticated enough to deal with that.”

Only a quarter of young people who receive solicitations for sex online tell their parents, according to a poll by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Even some child advocates agree that the boundary between cyberspace and the real world is thinner than many parents believe. “I think suburban parents like to believe that their children are sheltered,” says Katie Wheeler, director of the Girls Coalition of Greater Boston, which has spearheaded education about teen prostitution. “It’s a whole new world for parents with the Internet to realize that the dangers are right there in their homes.”

IT WAS SIMPLE curiosity that caused Ronit Enos to check out what her kids were doing on the Internet. A South Shore salon owner and mother of two, Enos installed tracking software to find out what cliques her children were hanging out with at school. Instead, she discovered that her 10-year-old son was visiting explicit porn sites. Even more worrisome, her 13-year-old daughter participated in a graphic conversation about sex with other kids in her class. Enos and her husband talked to their daughter, and were reassured to find that she, too, was disturbed by the sexual conversations.

But she was even more disturbed to learn her parents were spying on her. “I could see it in her eyes that she was disappointed,” says Enos. “It was like, ‘Hello, you don’t trust me.’ She was upset that we violated her privacy.”

The next year was a tough one in the household. Even though Enos and her husband promised not to spy anymore on the computer, their daughter constantly tested them, opening up so far before slamming the door shut. Enos says she learned the hard way how to listen without judgment, and gradually her daughter has started sharing with her again. “You want your children to come and tell you what’s going on,” she says. “You want to continue to protect them, but you can’t. You have to let them develop their own radar.”

Most child psychologists agree, counseling against the temptation to follow your child’s journeys on the Web. “It usually creates incredible and unnecessary stress for the parent who reads into what they have seen,” says Pamela Cantor, a clinical psychologist in Natick who lectures at Harvard Medical School on teenage self-destructive behavior. A parent of one of Cantor’s patients uncovered evidence of her daughter bragging about sex on the Internet—only to discover that she was making it up. “The good news is it got the girl to seek help,” says Cantor. “The bad news is that it betrayed trust and gave the family a lot of sleepless nights.”

Cantor says she sympathizes with parents frustrated by their children’s overuse of the Internet. But she says relying on Internet monitoring or tracking technology can just be lazy parenting. “Reading their IMs isn’t going to solve what’s going on in the basement on a Friday night. Most kids do learn for themselves. Saying ‘I caught you’ could make a kid feel more ashamed and secretive.”

In cases like that, says Norine Johnson, a psychologist in Quincy and author of Beyond Appearance: A New Look at Adolescent Girls, teens could engage in even more self-destructive behavior. She says that typically boys act out by using drugs or alcohol, while girls may act out with dangerous sexual activity.

Last year, Kelly, a senior at Acton-Boxborough high school, caught her mother using AOL software to read her emails, including some from friends her mother didn’t approve of. She was forbidden to hang out with those friends. “I was furious,” says Kelly. “It was too much an invasion of privacy, and it didn’t accomplish anything—I didn’t stop hanging out with them. I just got better at keeping secrets.”

The mothers who visit Enos’s salon had mixed opinions on the thought of spying on their children. “If my children were younger I would definitely do the GPS on the cell phone. It’s a safety issue,” says Pam Smith of Weymouth, who has three children aged 19 through 21. “Unless there was a serious drug problem, I can’t imagine doing that—it’s like reading their diary,” counters Mandi Wellman, a Hingham mother of a 13-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter. “Say their cell phone says they’re at Swenson’s Ice Cream Place. Well, who’s there with them? If you don’t have that dialogue with them, you don’t know anyway.”

A father from Lexington with a 16-year-old son and a daughter who is “13 going on 30” admits that he and his wife checked the history of IM messages his son had left open on the computer in his room. By reading the messages they found out that their son’s girlfriend was cutting herself, and talked to him without revealing that they knew what was happening. Despite his worries about his teenage daughter being a target for predators, however, he hasn’t checked her Internet communication, settling for regularly ripping out articles from the newspaper about abductions and rapes and placing them surreptitiously on the kitchen counter.

Told about the GPS monitoring, he says “that sounds like a pain in the ass. I’m too busy to ever look at that.” Moreover, he says, it’s too much of an intrusion. “The other day my kid said he was going to Winchester to shop and in his car there was a Dunkin’ Donuts bag with a receipt from the Burlington Mall. Did I call him on it? No. It just goes into the mix of thinking how much to trust him. I tell my kids I’m going to let the rope out at a rate I’m comfortable with. If you show me you’re reliable, you’ll get more rope.”

IT'S THAT SORT of resistance from parents that has caused some companies to focus less on the “tracking” aspects of GPS software and put a more positive spin on the technology. In October, Internet innovator MapQuest released its own product, MapQuest FindMe, which lets people share their location information with any “buddy” they choose. The service, available on Nextel phones, starts at $5.99 a month. “We didn’t call it Mapquest Family Finder or Child Tracker,” says Walt Doyle, Mapquest’s former general manager, who helped launch the new service by contracting with uLocate for the software. “We wanted to speak to a larger audience—from the business traveler looking for the best four-star restaurant to the husband who says, ‘I’m here, where is my wife?’”

Boston native Doyle was so impressed with the new technology that he left MapQuest and moved back to his hometown to become the new CEO of uLocate. Like Teen Arrive Alive’s Jack Church, he predicts that as consumers grow accustomed to using GPS technology to track their friends, they’ll get less squeamish about following their kids. While Nextel is the first cell phone carrier to integrate the GPS service with software applications, the other big three—Verizon, T-Mobile, and Cingular—are set to follow soon. Doyle says uLocate is negotiating with major cell phone carriers to sell “people finder” options with family phone plans. ULocate even has plans for a website of its own, called “where.com,” which will let users with camera phones post photos to a website by location, adding a more fun take on the technology.

“We build these things. We don’t tell people what to do with them,” says Doyle, who downplays any sinister-seeming aspects of the products. “Technology can be twisted in any number of ways. But if we can use this to improve the security of our kids, isn’t that a good thing?”