I have been thinking about how or if I would track my own children. I do not have any at the moment though.

I think the only system that would work with tracking and still be ethical is a system with accountability.

They need to know that I would never check unless there was an emergency. So we'd have to have some sort of immutable log that they can check regularly. So they know if I checked their location. It should not be like a panopticon. in which they don't know if the parent is checking their location or not. That changes behaviour. Even with the trust that I would not check, just me having the option would alter behaviour probably.

Youth and kids are independent individuals with their own rights to privacy, autonomy, right to select their own friends and acquaintences, right to freedom of expression and movement, right to make mistakes, etc. If they are thought right and have a high trust bond with their parents, preferably with little judgement, then it will probably be fine and most issues can be solved.

I share my location with my wife just in case I end up in a ditch dying while riding my motorcycle.

This is going to get DV victims killed. At least on phone tracking like iPhone's family sharing makes it clear it's happening and often has a way of disabling it when you make your final run for it allowing you to keep your phone.

Your toxic partner: "What were you doing at that cafe at 5:42 PM"

This is a useful feature. If you are in an abusive household, then yes you should have as much financial separation as possible. For those that are in a happy and functional family with kids that you want to allow freedom for, this provides a measure of safety if you need it for potential emergency's or if they aren't answering the phone or whatever.

Not a new thing, and I can definitely see good uses for this information. What they should have done is made it so that the one being tracked gets a log and real time notification any time someone is tracking them. This would alleviate some of the toxic spying behavior simply by making it transparent rather than covert.

Mmm I can see absolutely no way where they misuse this information

Daylight robbery... Who's still this mentally deprived to get another subscription based anything?

No Consent??

Find My and Google's device locator service exist, they're free and work without a carrier. Ik they're not that private, but you save money at least and they're more private than your carrier.

/s

This isn't new, cell tower triangulation is a fact of the network operation and is part of how your signal gets handed off between towers as you travel. Airplane wouldn't do anything unless it where to actually disable the sim entirely, and functionally even that doesn't cut it in the USA given that a device without one can still connect to emergency services via any tower in reach.

This is just the carrier giving a customer the data that would already exist, for a price, which I thought T-Mo actually used to give for free...