Texas Man Rescues Daughter Using Phone's Location Feature

A Houston father was able to rescue his daughter after using her phone to track her location. Over the weekend, the 15-year-old took the dog for a walk and never came home. The father then used the parental control features to find her location, about 2 miles away. When we arrived, he found a pickup truck containing his daughter, their dog, and the kidnapper. The daughter was able to escape with help from her father. Police arrested the kidnapper "without incident."

Stories like this illustrate several nuances of privacy. For one, every situation and threat model is unique and sometimes it is fair to take a slight privacy trade off for the sake of individual safety. For another, it shows that these tradeoffs can actually work sometimes. But these should be choices made by the individual, not defaults sneakily enforced by companies. It also illustrates how we can have tech that both protects us and respects us if we choose. The article didn't specify if this family was using iPhone, but they most likely were. Apple's "Find My" feature for parental controls is end-to-end-encrypted (even from Apple) and and configurable to ensure only certain apps use location data. This demonstrates that the idea of giving up privacy in exchange for features or safeties is a false dichotomy.