Back when I was a teenager my parents had a simple rule – I had to be home by midnight. There was a doozie of an exception, though. If I was drinking they didn’t want me to drive, so all I had to do was call home, tell them I was drinking and I could stay over at a friend’s house.
You can imagine that my parents pretty much thought I was an alcoholic in high school since twice a week like clockwork I called home at 11:45 pm to let them know I was too drunk to drive home and would be staying the night at wherever. Most of the time I wasn’t actually drinking, but who wants to go home at midnight? One time I remember calling home from Las Vegas (a four hour drive from Huntington Beach where I lived) to let them know I had had a couple of beers and would be staying at my friend John’s house down the street until morning (oh, right, like there’s anything you can do about it now, Mom).
Today things are different, though. And seeing iPhone apps like iCurfew just makes me shudder. Kids are still going to stay out late and not tell their parents what they’re up to. They just have to get way more creative about it, I guess. Because iCurfew tells your parents exactly where you’ve been and where you are now. You can send messages back and forth along with a handy Google map showing where the little troublemaker is right at that moment (probably outside a 7-11, trying to get someone to buy them beer).
Any kid worth his salt will try to figure out a way around this. My thought is to pay off someone to hold onto your phone and hang out at the movie theater messaging nice things to your parents while you are off doing God knows what. But I’m sure some enterprising young hacker to be can come up with a much more elegant solution.
But they better hurry, because adding a breathalyzer to this thing is probably next.
What teenager is willingly going to install this app, let alone spend money on it.
Parents could easily tell them that they could only have an iPhone if they had this app and used it to check in every night.
All a parent really has to do is have a .mac account and use the find my phone feature. It shows you where they are at anytime. Of course the kid could just turn it off.
Might be a requirement by the parents if they are paying for the phone.
Hell they could probably set it up for your parents
From what I see, it emails the coordinates, so you’d have to know how the emails were formatted and then just have a few setup in Mail with various links to send. Yes?
Sounds like it. If I were in high school I’d build a web app that mimics the output of this application (with whatever coordinates you wanted, of course). Then I would show it to everyone else in school and they’d think I was really cool. Right guys?
I’m sure they will have thought of that and will include some wierd thing in the email that the iPhone can’t reproduce without using this app.
Copy and paste?
Probably the email comes from the app’s server, not from the kid.. Most kids probably can’t spoof an email address.
not that hard. i could do it by grade 12. if it was needed i’m sure they would find a way.
Catch 22: The kind of kid who can write code to spoof an app isn’t exactly out boozing and getting laid. But that enterprising kid could sell his code to his or her more party-animal classmates
@david
Further Catch 22: The kid that can write code like that probably doesn’t have party-animal classmates that he’s on speaking terms with.
This is bad. The devs sold their soul for the money.
Can the police use this too?
I wouldnt doubt it at all.
Wow Mike. You’re parents were nothing like mine. As a teenager I was never aloud to stay out until midnight let alone admit to drinking. My ‘old man’ would have skinned me alive he knew I was drinking as a teenager.
If I was 25 years younger I’d ask if I could be your new adoptive brother.
Actually – my parents still suck. Want a new 41 year old brother? I like tech stuff
Hey Chris,
Too bad your parents suck. Come over to my house. I’ve got Atari!
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking when I read it. Hell, I’m in grad school and I still have to lie to my parents about drinking.
That’s it. You’re grounded!
1Curvf3w
My parents have yet to grasp the concept of email, much less use an iPhone to keep track of me. One time my dad tried to use my cell phone (I pay for it, it’s a cheapo prepaid) and he couldn’t figure out how to dial in a number.
+1 here. my mom emails and uses office like a regular person. my dad can barely read a text message if i send him one (so of course i send him txt msgs =p)
hahaha. i text my dad sometimes but he hates it because i’m on his plan and he pays the bills.
my parents are tech illiterate mostly. they’re the older type of parents so it’s hard for them to reorient themselves, but we’re practising with them sometimes. my dad lives on his cellphone. i bet if he had a bb or an iphone he’d never shutdown. we use nokia.
just wait until they get geo-fencing shit running on the app… if johnny goes outside of cindy’s house then bam email and text the parents. that whole vegas trip would have been shot down before you pulled out of the neighborhood.
Just leave the phone at the house then. Find a way to make some extra cash and get your own phone and plan on the side.
Extra prepaid phone + SIM + leave this one at a friend’s house. Problem solved.
+ call forward in case they call.
Useless without multitasking. Just leave the app closed and your parents are shut down.
Kind of makes it hard for the parents to take away the phone as a punishment if they’re using it as a tracking device for the kids…
It’s like when I was a kid and my parents would send me to my room…I never cared cause I had a cable TV, phone, computer in there with me to pass the time…
Well, I’m 18 and I think this is crap for kids, but you know we didn’t have this technology back then. If I grew up with cellphones (I didn’t use one), or even an iPhone, I’m pretty sure the I would accept it into my life. All the kids would probably try to skew or screw with the system, but it probably has to do with the “first time” acceptance.
This is dumb. You can use Gowalla for free! Why pay .99? http://gowalla.com/
has a better interface and can alert you when the person checks in.
Get Google Voice and transfer your cell number to it. Leave your phone where you’re supposed to be (with the ringer off) and have your calls forward to a different phone where you are. That way you’re still reachable.
I hope no high school kids are reading this.
jon, good stuff, i was thinking almost the same thing. and if multiple kids wanted to fwd to the same cell (like a designated driver but with the phones haha) you could even set up a DID # and fwd all the different gvoice #’s to the same phone since the goog only allows one mobile per.
since this screws up texting and im guessing more parents are now texting their kids, too, one would assume the kids would also have to constantly monitor the gvoice site..but prob nbd here..
This will work for a little while. As soon as a parent reads this advice…he/she will ask the child to call them back as soon as they hang up. What does the kid do then?
There are apps that lets you choose the number that you want show up on caller id.
yeah i think there’s at least one you may have heard of…google voice.
getting around this is simple make sure when you leave the house you forget your charger and conveniently your battery dies while your out with your friends (just remember to only have one bar when you get home) If your cell phone is off you cant be picked up on GPS
It’s really amazing when you think about how different it must be to grow up now. Things like this, speed controls and black boxes in the family car.. no wonder kids are expert hackers.
i think kids are completely split about their tech use being a form of interaction with their parentals. some kids and parents are all for these new tech tools and some kids absolutely despise them and will still try to figure out ways to dupe the units…while some parents hate these tech tools because it actually makes them see their children in a new light.
i personally make sure that my parents don’t have access to me through tech tools, and although i don’t lie if i am going to lie i make sure i don’t get caught.
i went to a concert with a guy who was older and didn’t tell anyone, came home really late to find that my oldest brother had ratted me out and gotten my parents all worried so that my parents had called the police. my dad completely went psycho on my friend and told him he was dead meat the next time he took an underage kid out to a concert. they didn’t even believe we had been to a show (we went to a charity rock show-my idea) and thought we were having sex (as if). one of the worst moments of my life. i went home i think at 12 or 1 am. it was completely out of the norm for me but entirely worth it cause i got in underage and saw one of the best shows of my life.
Or you could just abide by curfew… what a shocker!
I got into enough trouble when I was of the “legal age” or at least at college and not bound by parent rules. It was more fun than trying to sneak around as a teenager.
I mean you’d really go through all that trouble of buying a phone, leaving another at a house getting call forwarding for what- an extra hour or two? Seems it’s not really worth the effort.
Easy solution for teenagers: tell your parents you’d prefer an Android phone and they can check your location using Google Latitude.
Don’t tell them that deep in the settings there’s an option labelled ‘allow mock location’. You’ll then need an app to actually set the mock location (as you won’t have a debug console with you on your night out), but I’m sure that app can’t be far off.
You were a bad son. So maybe you are a bad jusband.
Let’s rename the app iHusband
And a bad employee ?
Let’s rename the app iEmployee.
And a bad driver ?
Let’s rename the app iDriver.
Oh wait they just did that one in Netherlands !
Ha, cute post!!
What next, a Iphone app that sniffs for drugs in your kids room and narks on them?
It’s funny how you guys instantly try to hack this simple app,
u think that’s bad. imagine an asian kid in an asian country.
Btw, i believe there will be work-around, as it should.
HB? I think you went to my highschool.
I think this goes to prove the parents are shitty at being parents. I think doing this sort of thing to your kids will create even more tension between a teen and the parent. I did more “bad” shit than most of you combined when I was a teen… and I told my parents, but I also followed some rules. Create a line of trust and stick to it. An agreement between parents and children should always be in place just as in any relationship. Stalking them or wire-tapping them will not work.
Not to mention the fact that the kids are probably 10 times more comprehensible when it comes to technology. WTF humans.