SYDNEY: A new app named as Teensafe has been near to roil out in Australia which will allow the parents to check on what their children are doing on smartphones.
The app, called Teensafe, already claims 1 million users in the US.
But Australian police are warning that while the threat to children from online predators is real, spy apps allowing parents to track their children’s smartphone usage are not a ‘silver bullet’ and could breach trust.
Sydney mother Ana Bruno has a 13-year-old daughter and thinks the app is a wonderful idea.
“At the age of 13 should you have privacy?” Ms Bruno asked 7.30.
“There’s too many, you know, paedophiles and bad people out there that try to take advantage of girls, and girls this age, that I really don’t think we’re invading their privacy.”
But her daughter, Penelope, sees things differently and thinks parents should not spy on their children.
“I think they should just trust us more rather than get an app to spy on us,” Penelope said.
Senior police with the specialist child protection unit Taskforce Argos agree with Penelope.
Detective Inspector Jon Rouse from Taskforce Argos said parents should learn about the social media their children were using, and communicate the risks to them.
“Surely as a parent, your role is to engage with your child and have a loving, caring, trusting — and the key word there is trust — relationship with your child,” Detective Inspector Rouse told 7.30.
“Immediately you embark on this kind of a path and it breaches that trust, and I think it would take a certain kind of relationship with a child where you would be resorting to this as the solution.”
Detective Inspector Rouse knows the dangers of the online world better than most, and he briefly used a similar app to monitor his daughter’s phone.
“I felt so incredibly uncomfortable after that, that I deleted the app, for a start,” he said.
“But I was also privy to a conversation between her and her friend that amounted to a level of bullying and I could see in her behaviour after the communication that, you know, it had affected her, and I knew why because I was privy to it.
“But I felt so terrible about doing that, that I would never, never betray her trust like that again.”
Detective Inspector Rouse also said teenagers could avoid the app by using another phone.
