One evening a few weeks ago, I was pottering about alone when I became aware of a feeling of great relief, of joy almost, without quite knowing why. When you spend every waking moment with a seven-year-old, it often feels euphoric to be alone, but that wasn’t it. By mistake, I’d left my phone behind, but that wasn’t quite it either.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t be contacted, I realised, so much as that I couldn’t be tracked. My iPhone, with its inbuilt GPS, was at home logging only its own dismal existence. The ‘Find My Friends’ function, which, at my family’s request I keep switched on, was defunct. I was unfindable. It was joyous.

You’d have thought any teen would baulk at being followed by their parents – from pub to club via GPS

I’m aware that I’m making this sound dramatic – as if I’ve narrowly escaped a hostage situation. And I see that for most rational people there’s nothing to object to about an app like ‘Find My Friends’. All it does is to allow a group of pals to share their locations with each other and – as my husband and nieces patiently point out – it saves a lot of angst and effort. Just by opening the app and looking at its map, you can see if your friend or family member is stuck in traffic or held up. No need to call, no fumbling to answer in the fast lane. We all find each other in shopping centres with ease. And if I dawdle on the way home from work, or divert into Waitrose to fondle the £3 avocados, my husband, spotting my location, can (and often does) text: ‘How come you left work so late? Can you pick up some wine while you’re in there?’ The horror.

It’s interesting how completely divided the different generations are on the subject of being tracked. Most men and women over 40 understand my unease, but for twentysomethings, it’s incomprehensible. They grew up inside the Snapchat app which has a ‘map my friends’ feature called Snap Maps, and so it’s not just a few family members who can constantly see where they are but often almost everyone they know. In Snap Maps they can watch little cartoon avatars of all their pals wandering about in real time. It’s handy, they say, and fun. If, for instance, you are in the London Library and you see that a friend is there too, you can meet up for a matcha latte.

But what if you don’t want to meet up? Well, I’m afraid you have no choice. The friend can see exactly where you are and they know that you know that they know. If you tried to walk away it would look like Snap Maps Pac-Man, one ominous cartoon figure slowly gaining on the other. I think about my student flat and how back in the day if a passing friend rang the doorbell, I’d often lie flat on the floor, head below window height, making no noise until they’d given up and gone away. In the Snap Map era, the friend would think I’d had a heart attack and call 999. So what? It keeps people honest, says a Gen X pal.

Even the young admit that the live tracking can lead to difficulties. Because it’s considered rude to remove a person from your network, couples who split up still seem to share their location with one another. So you watch as the little cartoon avatar of the guy who broke your heart travels over to your friend’s house at midnight and you watch when he leaves in the morning. It’s a wonder any of them are still sane. You’d have thought any decent teen would baulk at being followed by their parents – tracked from pub to club via GPS, yet if I suggest to a twentysomething that they might want to go dark, I’m met with blinking non-comprehension. It feels reassuring, they say, for people they love to know where they are.

But why? Surely Snap Maps only makes life more dangerous. You’re infinitely more likely to be pounced on in a dark alley if you’ve broadcast the fact that you’re walking alone in a dark alley to everyone you’ve ever met. And how does it help that your parents know where you are? Is it reassuring to think that they will at least know where to locate your geotagged corpse?

One of the reasons my moment of untracked euphoria felt significant was that it felt familiar, and it occurred to me then that I’d felt just the same way sometimes as a child. And these moments, when I was not just unobserved but unfindable, were some of the most important of my childhood. The world comes into focus when you’re unseen. What does it mean about the internet generations that they’re uncomfortable when not observed?

Just in the last few years it’s become normal for people of all types and all ages to be tracked wherever they go, via iPhone or Fitbit or smart watch. A constant stream of data flows from them out into servers worldwide. It’s quite normal now for parents to track their young children without telling them, and hypocrite that I am, I’ve done it myself quite often. There is many a Mums-net thread devoted to where best to hide an Apple AirTag in your child’s clothes – avoid the school bag, as it’s easily left on a bus and you’ll give yourself a heart attack. I have in the past cut a slit in the hem of my son’s school jumper and sewn a tag in. Just to be safe. What’s the harm?

But there is harm. I’m sure of it. Once you’ve started to track, there’s no going back. The more you track, the more dangerous it feels not to. Why risk now what you didn’t risk a few days ago? It feels like tempting fate. And if your child did go astray, and you had chosen not to track them, how much more culpable would you be?

I think now about my son and about how I’d feel if I discovered that I’d been tracked without knowing it through my childhood: all those moments when I thought myself undiscoverable a lie. I’m not sure we have any idea what we’ve lost.