Nicolas at Pasta & Vinegar has a great posting, about a paper written by Wendy March (Intel Research) and Constance Fleuriot (Bristol University). Their research has been looking at privacy issues raised by new technologies and the reaction of some of the kids who might be on the “receiving end”.
They explored the concept by inviting the girls in the study to imagineer their nightmare technologies, although I think boys would share the conclusions. Their horrors included:
Family Video: A small video camera attached to a flotation device acts as a personal CCTV which sends back a constant video stream to home.
Constant Connection provides a continuous open communication channel for parents and children ( the home audio device, which is ideally suited for a kitchen counter.)
Ticker Text converts all communication from designated cell phones into an easy to read text format. Each text message that is sent or received on the phone is printed out on a paper roll.
Teen Monitor provides a simultaneous broadcast of all your teenager’s conversations through an audio speaker in your home.
Of course, spying on your kids isn’t necessarily entirely new. Indeed, some poor lady has left a comment on Nicolas’ post saying that when she was 17, she found her Dad had been bugging some of the conversations she’d been having, assuming (naturally enough) that they were private.
While these kinds of imagined devices will probably never happen - well, I hope they won’t! - we are beginning to see variants of them already in some of the Kid Tracking software on mobiles, key stroke recorders on PCs, so parents can monitor surfing and IM sessions, and ideas like getting other drivers to monitor and report bad road behaviour by kids.
It’s clear from this research that such parental spying, is deeply resented (the commenter on the post called it “betrayal”), no matter how noble the parental motives might be. And if it’s hated this much, teens will find a way to subvert it because that’s how things happen. Just as there’s no such thing as uncrackable DRM, there’s no such thing as an unbeatable tracking system and someone, somewhere will find a way to hack any device and quickly spread the word.
Actually, this is already happening with spare decoy phones, dummy email and IM accounts and tinkering with the family computer to get round tracking software - well, at least if our household is anything to go by 
Seriously though, wanting to keep an eye on your kids and protect them is deeply ingrained parental behaviour. But spying like this actually can cause more damage, by breaking down trust between the parent and child. The hardest thing about being a parent is letting go at the right time and trusting the child to manage that stage of their life in a responsible way. As spying becomes easier, many parents might be tempted, but just think how much you’d have hated your parents if they’d made a decision not to trust you.