Your parents should have access to your location 24/7

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Your parents should have access to your location 24/7". Your opponent's style: Edward Snowden

Most parents worry, is my child safe? Where are they right now? Especially as their children begin to gain more independence and start going out after school with friends without telling them, the problem, ensuring safety, becomes a problem. So yes. Parents should have access to your location 24/7. After all, they have an obligation to protect you even after you are in your late teens.

You're confusing protection with surveillance. Yes, parents worry—that's real. But constant tracking doesn't make kids safer. It makes them sneakier. Kids who can't be trusted to leave the house without a tracker learn to disable apps, lie about their location, or delete their history. You've destroyed the very thing that actually keeps them safe: honest communication. And that "obligation to protect" cuts both ways. Parents also have an obligation to raise independent adults, not dependent children who panic without GPS coordinates. Teenagers need to learn risk assessment, make mistakes, build judgment. You can't outsource parenting to a phone app and expect it to work. Want your kid safe? Talk to them. Know their friends. Build trust. Not this.

My opponent has clearly pointed out that using a GPS harms the trust between parent and child. Does it really? After all, if they are not doing anything they aren’t supposed to, surely the child wouldn’t mind. The mere act of tracking the location of your child is not what is causing cracks in the parent-child relationship.

That's backwards logic. "If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't mind being watched" is the exact argument governments use to justify mass surveillance. It doesn't make it less corrosive. Kids aren't little criminals being investigated. Constant monitoring says "I don't trust you" louder than any conversation. Research shows surveillance actually increases secrecy and anxiety in teens, not honesty. They learn to hide better, not to be more truthful. Trust isn't built by proving innocence 24/7. It's built by giving someone space to prove themselves worthy of freedom. You can't manufacture trust through GPS. You either have it or you don't, and tracking destroys what little exists.

Let’s circle back to the point that kids that are dependent on a GPS raise independent adults. A GPS is merely a safety net, it is a passive app that parents can use when they deem necessary. A GPS does not give the user any advice to go to a place or not. This disproves your claim. I would like to repeat that a GPS is a mere safety net. Parents should not use it obsessively but not having it could lead to permanent damage to their wellbeing as 1in 4 girls aged 16 or below are SAed in the UK. GPS offers a peace of mind for the parents and child. Knowing it could save them when extreme situations arise.

You just admitted parents shouldn't use it obsessively—then argued they need it 24/7. Which is it? And that statistic proves my point, not yours. One in four girls facing assault isn't solved by knowing their GPS coordinate when they're grabbed. It's solved by teaching them consent, how to recognize danger, trusted adults to call. A tracker watching from home does nothing when they need help. You're selling false security. Parents feel better, kids feel watched, and actual predators don't care about your app. Real safety is awareness and communication, not surveillance theater that makes parents think they've solved the problem when they haven't. A safety net only works if someone's actually watching and ready to catch. Most parents tracking their kids are at work.

As I have mentioned before a GPS is a passive app. It tracks your children but parents do not have to check it every waking moment. Having a tracker on your kids and checking where that is are two different activities. The flaw in your logic is that yes, telling a trusted adult can help. But after the SA. The damage will be already done. You fundamentally misunderstand where the damage from SA happens. It is the violation of your consent and feeling as if your body isn’t yours anymore that harms the victim. Simply saying no will not fix this issue. “A tracker watching from home” as you put it, can help. Alerting local authorities or parents getting involved themselves if they acted quick enough could save them from experiencing SA. Of course the flaw in this is parents might not be checking. But isn’t the slight chance that your child might be spared experiencing a crime than just being there to comfort them knowing you might have been able to prevent it?

You're asking parents to gamble with their kids' autonomy on a "slight chance." That's not safety, that's anxiety management for adults. Here's the reality: a parent checking GPS once a day can't prevent assault. The predator doesn't announce themselves on a map. By the time a parent sees their kid left a safe location, it's too late. You need real-time monitoring—which is obsessive, which destroys trust, which circles back to my original point. You can't have it both ways. Either it's passive and useless, or it's active and invasive. Pick one. The uncomfortable truth is no app prevents SA. Only education, boundaries, and a kid who trusts they can call home without judgment does that.