Out and About

Abstract

This chapter discusses parents’ use of mobile media to enhance their children’s personal safety. There is an extensive slate of mobile communication features, customized apps and services that parents now actively tap to monitor their children’s whereabouts, or to simply have a sense of their well-being. Mobile media such as live webcam feeds, CCTV cameras, and location-tracking services and apps have effectively enabled parents to keep track of their children even when they are physically apart. As children grow older, parental oversight continues through ceaseless mobile connections and even an extended parental surveillance network. Parents of teens and emerging adults also tend to use their children’s social media footprints to undertake subtle and covert surveillance.