OnStar’s Family Link enables spousal spying and parental monitoring

image credit: General Motors

Madison Ruppert, Contributor
Activist Post

The pervasive paranoia of American culture never ceases to amaze me. Be it citizen spying applications distributed by government agencies or private individuals, incentivizing such activities through “soft control,” or the rise of cloud-based video surveillance, it has become impossible to deny that our society has become obsessed with surveillance.

This love affair has shown up in a wholly novel fashion with OnStar’s Family Link, a $3.99 per month add-on to General Motors’ OnStar service.

This will allow parents to spy on their children, and, even more importantly, allow suspicious spouses to keep tabs on those who they supposedly love and trust.

OnStar Family Link provides a website where paranoid parents and snooping spouses can see the location of the enrolled OnStar vehicle in real time.

Furthermore, it allows the account holder to receive location updates via text message or straight to their computer at specified intervals.

GM unveiled the system during an elaborate promotional event involving a fake family, a massive Manhattan home belonging to director Marcus Nispal, and a Chevrolet Volt, according to Extreme Tech.

Currently, the additional details provided to customers when hovering over the vehicle’s icon on a map are somewhat lackluster. As of now, it only includes a nearby street address and a time stamp.

That being said, I do not think it is hard to imagine that they would allow additional details, which OnStar automatically records, to be available to Family Link subscribers, perhaps for a larger monthly fee.

Thankfully, people are not blindly jumping on this technology as some kind of godsend. Extreme Tech makes a great point of pointing out that if teenagers really wanted to avoid being tracked by their parents, they could simply get out of their newer and safer OnStar equipped vehicle and into an older and less safe vehicle which does not have a built-in tracking system.

They also point out, “If both spouses have the password, two can play the game. Hello, big brother and maybe divorce court.”

I cannot see how any healthy relationship would thrive when one member of the relationship holds such a deep distrust of the other that they actually go out and purchase a way to keep tabs on them throughout the day.

Maybe if your spouse was prone to dissociative fugues it might be warranted, but seeing as that is absurdly unlikely, I see no real reason why a truly loving couple would want to choose to spy on each other.

The potential to monitor the whereabouts of teenagers makes much more sense, but as pointed out above, all it would take is a quick vehicle switch to make it completely pointless.

Any rebellious teenager who really wanted to avoid the prying eyes of their parents would likely be able to find someone else with a car to use.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has also taken the new technology to task.

“It’s troubling,” the EFF’s Parker Higgins said. “Any time a new service like this is introduced you have to think beyond what’s described in the press release.”

Indeed, Cheryl McCarron, a representative for OnStar said, “We are depending on subscribers to tell other family members that they’ve enabled the service on the vehicle.”

Clearly, this is a little bit too much to expect from an individual who would choose to pay to spy on their spouse. If such an individual was trustworthy enough to be expected to tell their family members about the fact that they are under constant surveillance, they would likely be upstanding enough to actually talk to and trust their family to begin with.

Aside from the glaring concerns when it comes to tearing families apart and encouraging a culture of paranoia and suspicion, Higgins points out that this raises some serious privacy concerns as well.

“It’s important to remember that you can provide a service that is valuable and useful and still be violating people’s privacy,” Higgins pointed out to Wired.

The first round of invitations to pay to spy on family members will go out in April, with additional invitations being dispatched around June. The service will be publicly available throughout the United States some time later this year.

The Family Link service requires customers to already pay for their standard monthly subscription package, plus an additional $3.99 per month for Family Link.

I expect to see additional features to be offered in the future like monitoring of driving speeds, time stopped at locations, and more, as paranoid family members look to keep their thumb on spouses and children as much as possible.

It will be interesting to see if this technology draws any negative publicity, or if it will be willingly accepted and lauded like so much of the technology that invades our privacy like Silicon Valley’s data mining industry, the rise of high-speed facial recognition technology, and even behavioral recognition technology for surveillance.

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This article first appeared at End the Lie.