From the perspective of a teenager in the 1990s, I think you must be very young indeed if you think the product you describe represents 'more freedom rather than less'
I was a teenager in the 90s as well. And I was raised as a free range kid.
It is all in how it was used. People pushed back on cellphones for the same reasons people pushed back on location sharing apps today.
A big part of our fundraising pitch in the early days was to tell VCs to "try it yourself for two weeks and see if your perceptions change." 90%+ of people have the lightbulb go off after using it for a couple of weeks. We truly are not used as a "tracker" in the majority of cases.
We have had over 100 million downloads - I'm not saying outliers don't exist. Nor am I saying there isn't some meaningful (10%?) of the base who have parents who go a bit too far. But the average family is really not using it nefariously.
We're getting somewhere. People who oppose tracking are not thinking of a rosy family. They are thinking about what an abusive parent can do when you normalize location tracking for kids and it becomes the expectation. I would hate to be a kid now if what it meant would be that my parents would have my exact location 100% of the time. Kids are kids but they still have rights.
