‘iSpy-ing’ on Your Kids: Cool or Cruel?

There’s a new popular iPhone app called iPhone Spy. This app allows you to hack into and track all of a person’s phone activities, including texting, emails and Internet browsing, and it can also track them physically with GPS. These are some recent posts on the app’s website:

“Stop your child’s texting addiction with the iPhone Spy.”

“Track your kids in the crowd with the iPhone Spy.”

“Does your teen text while driving? Use iPhone Spy.”

As I look over the site, forwarded by a colleague, I feel a little nervous about its implications. Is this just a more high-tech, invasive way to be an unethical, untrusting person? When I get to the part about how the app can “hit a cheater where it hurts,” and is great “for keeping an eye on your wife,” I am no less comforted.

I don’t have kids of an age to use or abuse an iPhone. But I do have friends with unreal stories of the trouble their children have been able to get into on their smartphones and they do scare me: child predator scams, cyber-bullying, posting information to the world they can never get back. The worst is when someone says that their big mistake was thinking that it would never happen to their child, that they’d always thought theirs was a “good kid,” and how they wished they had just dug a little deeper to keep them safe.

It seems to me that your relationship with your child should be stronger than needing to do something like this and that it has great potential to undermine that relationship if used in any kind of sneaky way. But I’m wholly willing to admit that I have no experience or knowledge about the issue of children and technologic privacy. So I consulted some experts who I hoped would.

I went, first, to my mom. Quaint as this sounds, my mom is actually a killer in the field of ethics — a professional bioethicist who gets courted across the country (and sometimes beyond) to consult, teach, discuss and write about ethical quandaries. Otherwise known as Dr. Miriam Piven Cotler, my mom had big issues with the iPhone app. While allowing for the fact that parents have a duty to protect young children, she stressed that “they also have an obligation to raise loving persons in relationships based on trust and truth…if they are in such jeopardy, wonder how the communication has been destroyed so that they cannot come to the parent.”

She suggests that if they’re innocent of dangers, we educate them. If that’s not possible, we should at least warn them that we will keep tabs on them. Then I pressed Mom on the idea that a truly at-risk child who knows you are spying on them will only find a way around this, negating the reason to do in the first place: to keep them safe. She said, “clearly, in the face of danger, we must protect them. It is a balance, a fine line and a true moral dilemma.”

I then went to an Encinitas psychiatrist who sees both individuals and families, Dr. Howard Richmond, and asked him what words he would have for clients thinking about using this app. “I would be extremely cautious about parents using spy technology on their kids. I can see how on one end of the spectrum, this app can be misused and even abused by parents; the implications on the development of trust vs. mistrust can be far-reaching. On the flip side, if a child is violating certain common sense principles and 'rules' of the household, the app could perhaps be used as a last measure of accountability.”

Finally, I consulted another colleague, Yalda T. Uhls, regional director for Common Sense Media and a researcher at the Children’s Digital Media Center@LA. Yalda blogs, researches and writes almost exclusively about children and technology. She’s also a mom. She does believe in using spy apps, but maintains that you must always tell a child when you give them a device that their parent is allowed to check their activities on them.

“Having these devices is a privilege,” she says, “and if inappropriate behavior is discovered — like cyber bullying or inappropriate photos — then the parent should take them away for a period of time.” This approach sounded slightly more invasive than the other experts I asked, but Yalda is the only one of them with kids who are at risk from communications technologies right now. 

“I told my daughter each time before I did it and after the first few months, I basically stopped.” She says she hopes that her child might reflect before she hits send knowing that her mom or dad might check.  “My goal is not to spy but to help her learn the right behavior, by guiding her in the beginning — and to eventually regulate her own behavior online.”

Hearing these three perspectives, I feel like I understand the issues involved a bit more, although I’m still no closer to knowing what I would do about them. With my eldest at 5, I still have enough years to go that I also assume this will all soon change with ever-faster emerging technologies. Right now, in fact, I bet there’s a teen in his basement coming up with an “Anti-iPhone Spy app” app. If so, I suggest Apple find him, tell us what he knows, and see if he wants a job. In the fight to keep our kids safe in the modern world, we parents need all the help we can get!