A Bird’s Eye View: Care, Control, and the Use of Surveillance Apps Among Family Members in Germany

Year, pages: 2024, 325 - 345

This paper explores how digital tracking is incorporated into family life in Munich. Parents using tracking technologies found them to be useful in caring for their children’s safety and preventing violence. This paper argues that monitoring was characterised by moral friction, since parents wanted their children to be more independent and questioned whether they should control their everyday movements and online activities, but were anxious about what could happen if they did not track their children digitally. The paper reports qualitative research involving both interviews (21 with parents and 8 with children) and participant observation in home settings or community organisations. The paper also analyses children’s experiences, who found tracking to be useful in emergencies or for locating their parents, but mostly used social media sites such as Snapchat to monitor their friends or siblings. The paper discusses horizontal forms of surveillance in which children would check their parent’s or friend’s locations in real time. As such, we see multiple ways through which notions of familial care are negotiated in relation to the use of digital tracking.

Dungey, C. 2024. A Bird’s Eye View: Care, Control, and the Use of Surveillance Apps Among Family Members in Germany. In Sociológia - Slovak Sociological Review, vol. 56, no.4, pp. 325-345. 0049-1225. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/sociologia.2024.56.4.12

Dungey, C. (2024). A Bird’s Eye View: Care, Control, and the Use of Surveillance Apps Among Family Members in Germany. Sociológia - Slovak Sociological Review, 56(4), 325-345. 0049-1225. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31577/sociologia.2024.56.4.12

Publisher: The Institute for Sociology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences