What is striking about the moral panic over teenagers, social networking sites and the general perils of life online is that British parents do not yet seem to have resorted to American solutions.

Allow me to introduce you to a whole new world of specialised electronic surveillance of young people - teen tracking. Nothing illustrates it better than a device called the SnoopStick.

The SnoopStick looks like a memory stick. You plug it into your teenager's computer when they are not around, and it installs stealth software on to the machine. Then you plug it into your own computer and can sit back at your leisure and observe, in real time, exactly what your child is doing online - what websites they are visiting, the full conversations they are having on the instant messenger (IM) service, and who they are sending emails to. It is as if you are sitting and invisibly spying over their shoulder.

The child has no idea their computer is being monitored. And you, the parent, need not worry about missing any salacious, incriminating detail, because the software records everything, so you can download and view what your child was doing earlier on. At any time you can call up a screen capture to see what they are looking at. Or - oh clever SnoopStick - the software will take screenshots on its own when the user lingers for five seconds or more on any web page.

And what a control trip this must be! It gives you the power remotely to cut off internet access, log off all users, or shut down the computer. There's no revealing message when you do this - the teenager supposedly (uhuh!) just thinks it's a network problem.

Significantly, the £37.50 device comes with the warning that, if you use it to monitor an employee's computer without notifying them, you may well be in breach of employment laws. But install it secretively on the computer of your teenager, who has absolutely no rights at all, and no one can touch you. The moral argument doesn't come into it.

SnoopStick is part of a positive stampede of parental control products. There are sinister programmes such as Net Nanny, Safe Eyes and Sentry At Home, which all spy to different degrees. For those parents who cannot decipher the abbreviations online, there is something called a Teen Chat Decoder.

And surveillance of young people does not end there. Worried what your teenager is getting up to in a car? There are lots of creepy solutions. DriveCam, for instance, is an American system in which a small video recorder is mounted behind the rearview mirror to captures sights and sounds inside and outside the vehicle.

DriveCam, which is used as part of the Teen Safe Driver Program, is marketed in the manner of a horror film, bombarding parents with lots of paranoid-inducing facts. Once a parent leaves the vehicle, it says, seat belt use goes down to 40 per cent and the crash rate increases 700 per cent. In other words, spy or they die!

The driving data is centrally monitored and parents receive a weekly report card that compares their teen's performance with their peers. In 2006, DriveCam made the top 500 fastest-growing, privately held companies in the US for the second consecutive year. Tragic, isn't it, that the removal of personal freedom should be so commercially successful?

Internet car-tracking devices marketed specifically for teens mean you can watch where your children drive, on real time on your computer. Given, that is, you are a sad, mistrustful person without a life. A covert GPS tracker can store 250 hours of travel; a covert in-car camera records what happens inside the vehicle.

For if you really want to catch them out doing something inappropriate, then it is time to move on to a higher level of personal surveillance. The following devices, please note, are not just being marketed to private detectives to catch errant spouses; they are being targeted at parents of teenagers.

You can get clothes with tracking devices fitted into them. You can fit such devices covertly into mobile phones. For $149 you can purchase a mobile spy data extractor, which reads deleted text messages from a SIM card. For $79 you can buy a semen detection kit, to test your teenage daughter's clothing. And for $99, if you really want to ape the mad ex-Marine father in American Beauty, you can buy a drug identification kit which can detect up to 12 different illegal drugs.

There are real warnings for hand-wringing British parents here. Online teen tracking amounts to a form of internet child abuse even more potent, I would suggest, than the kind which parents seek to prevent in the first place. Once upon a time foolish mothers betrayed their children's trust by reading their diaries; now, prurient and paranoid parents can invade every aspect of their children's private lives.

How tragic it all is; how belittling of the adults involved; and how deeply disturbing the apparent lack of moral outcry.

The SnoopStick symbolises the modern obsession with control. The American psychologist Robert Epstein, who wrote the controversial book The Case Against Adolescence, estimates that young Americans are now ten times more restricted than adults, and twice as restricted as convicted criminals. He says teenagers are infantilised and deprived of human rights. As well as the obvious legal bar to prevent them smoking, drinking, marrying, voting and gambling, teenagers have no privacy rights, no property rights, no right to sign contracts or make decisions regarding their own medical or psychiatric treatment.

It is a strong argument: that by increasing restrictions upon children, and denying them civil freedoms and responsibilities, neurotic parents are in fact facilitating the very thing which they seek to prevent - they are driving their offspring even deeper into the toxic world of online teenage culture.

Above all, teen tracking compounds what has gone wrong in the first place: the lack of time and communication parents have given their children. And that is not just an American problem.

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