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Tracking Your Employees, Children
Mattygfunk writes "Hong Kong has launched what's believed to be Asia's first location-based service which enables companies to locate their employees via their mobile phones signals." And in a semi-related story, Son-of-a-Geek writes "The BBC is reporting on a new GPS device for kids from Wherify Wireless. With the new device parents can track junior or he can call for help by pushing a panic button. Available only in the US for one penny less than 400 dollars it is a pager as well."
So for just 399.99, I can have a little electro-gizmo that will do the job that I, as a parent, should have been doing all along (Tracking where little Johnny is, and what mischief he's been into)..
Lovely.
(Don't get me wrong, I'm all for electro-gizmos, but I also believe that parents should be responsible for just that... parenting.)
Now I just need to buy my wife a 'pager'. ;p
This system was availale in Japan, for a very high price, ages ago.
It was demonstrated on the BBC TV program "Tomorrows World", and I believe it cost about 40,000 Yen each time you used it.
I think it's excellent.
Is there an untapped paranoia market? Is there money to be made playing on peoples fears?
You too can have a device any smart kid would leave at home..
If the subjects of this monitoring know that the location of the cell phone/pager is being tracked, then they will merely leave their cell-phone where they are supposed to be. Unless the parent/employer calls every so often to ensure that the subject is actually carrying the device with him, then it is all but useless, as the subject can go anywhere he pleases while the device reports that he is where he is supposed to be.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
Pagers are so 20th century.
BLAH!
posted several months back.
I do think it's got it's potential uses; but I'm guessing it's too expensive to really get any kind of market and if that turns out to be the case how long will the service be around?
Or better, just drop one into a Greyhound bus bound for the other coast...
This technology isn't really new, but it is the first time that I've heard of it being used with humans. My mom, who breeds show dogs, has told me about people that "chip" their dogs with a small GPS microchip that can be used to track the animal in case of theft or escape. Unfortunately, the chips are not very strong (due to power concerns, one wouldn't want the dog to have to carry a giant battery on its collar), so the broadcasting range is rather weak. That is to say, if you want to find the lost animal, you already need to have some general idea where it went. And while I'm not too hot on the idea of "chipping" people, it probably wouldn't help if one of your employees went AWOL or your kid decided to join the circus.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
This is a good thing for emergency workers/medical staff etc. (if they'd agree to it first, not as spyware) As part of their contract (maybe with a bonus) they could agree to be on "location based call" at certain times, if an accident happens near them emergency services will know not only who is on call but who is nearest/most useful? An location based extension of a beeper. Cops could use it too, instead of calling all cars, call whos near on the Bat scan.
Think this is wild, what about the family down in south Florida that got CHIPED with the ADSX chips that hold your medical records. They also have batteries that suck the heat away from your body to produce energy to run. Within the they believe they will have GPS in them. All this in a chip the size of a piece of rice. They are putting them in everything from Dogs to Cattle, and people are next....Lost your kid? Here, that little rug rat is on your handy dandy webpage, via gps...
Anyway, as much big brother as this screams I think parents are going to jump all over the Applied Digital Solutions chip. It is just a matter of time.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Since as others have pointed out a kid would just leave it at home by "accident" or leave it where they are supposed to be the only good use I can see would be as a pet tracker if you have a dog that likes to run off.
Yeah, and within a month of this becoming popular kids will be able to hack their pager to always report them being at the library, the peach pit, or church.
For only 299.99, you can get a little electro-gizmo that will make sure that little Johnny stays in one place. Television, they call it. Just plonk your child down in front of one, and Hey Presto! the child will not move until it is switched off, freeing you from the bothersome problem of parenting (Including having to know where your child is!)
Modern Parenting Inc. Because You Can't Be Bothered!
1) That's pretty expensive, considering children loose EVERYTHING. 2) I could see children being mugged because someone wants to steal these watches.
...where Ace Rothstein (Robert DeNiro) gives his faithless, alcoholic wife Ginger (Sharon Stone) a beeper to keep track of her after she'd run out for the umpteenth time? Anyone who's seen the movie knows how well _that_ worked.
hyacinthus.
here. Still have grave reservations on using it on anybody competent enough to understand what it is.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
"Don't punch me again Dougy, or I'll push my panic button and my dad will come get you!"
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Why would children even have employees? This is very strange.
The next question is this. You can track where your kids are. But I wonder how long it will be before someone comes up with an alert system that tells you if kids go someplace you don't allow them to. Can you imagine going to a website and setting location boundaries, then getting a cell-phone alert if your kids cross those boundaries?
SL33ZE - Artificial Intelligence is No Match For Natural Stupidity -
Considering the rash of high-profile abductions plaguing the US of late, this sort of thing is a concerned parent's dream come true.
Stop thinking stalking your teens, start thinking Amber Alerts.
http://slashdot.org/articles/02/03/28/0432228.shtm l
/.'ers sharing anticdotes about getting lost as a child, and how this tool is a "Godsend". Others stated that parents want their kid to "handle themselves outdoors".
The disussion was mostly
but at the end of the day... repeat
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
Shouldn't parents just raise their children ? They wouldn't need these kind of devices if they were real parents.. Just like those parenting classes for mums and dads that don't know what to do with a kid. This is so USA. Just another sign of the US breaking apart ... in 25 years it will be just a country full of really fat dumb arrogant people with no education and no parenting skills because their parents were dumb as well. The US thinks it's all that but they've become a big fat kid. They think they own the world but the world is getting more and more fed up with 'em.. And rightfully so.
we've had that offered to consumers for ages in finland, don't even think it costs alot more...
anyway.. it has some potential when thinking that everyone here over 10 years basicly has a mobile phone.. so for them it can be nice that the parents can check where their children are..
Did anyone else read that as tracking your
employee's children?
I need more caffine
If people would read the information provided you would see that the thing LOCKS! onto your wrist and can not be unlocked by the kid. There would be no "leaving it at home" or "putting it were you are suposed to be". It can be unlocked by the parent remotely via the web or with the provided key fob device. Read people Read.
Since there seem to be two teenage girls missing in the UK, it really is an ideal time to market tracking devices for you children. Never forget: "Think of the children".
I had this same idea a while back... but then found the real problem:
GPS signals are way too weak to be of any use in real-life situations. Go inside a building and the signal dies. Go under some trees and it's one. Heck even state of the art GPS receivers require a 30-second interval to get its initial coordinates.
eTrade SUCKS
The window of usefulness for a device like this, IMO, is bounded by two things:
-the lower boundary being the age where a child can reliably keep this thing on all day without messing with it, taking it off, or letting somebody "borrow" it
-the upper boundary being the age where the child is savvy enough to put a bit of distance between him/herself and the device.
If your child is young and loose enough to warrant a $400 tracking device, perhaps your parenting techniques need to be reconsidered. If your child is older and warrants a tracking device, he/she will soon figure out a way to defeat it, whether by losing it, throwing it away, etc. Older children who do not want to be tracked will find a way not to be tracked. The window of age where this device will be an effective tracking solution is pretty narrow, as I see it.
There is at least one company, SAIC, that has been installing a similar mobile product in American utility trucks for a few years. It tracks the trucks 24/7. Utility Repair/Installation Efficiency has risen dramatically in response. The Union agreed to the idea only, if I remember rightly, after the Utility agreed to include (and require) an emergency call button on a seperate keychain for the Techs.
(Disclaimer: Used to work for SAIC.)
First off, despite the recent spait of publicity about child abductions, well over 90% of them are by family members. So, they either probably have the code to turn this thing off or it isn't on the kid when they're taken.
Second, GPS signals and wireless signals are quite easy to block. GPS doesn't work indoors and the most common place to lose a child is a large department store or mall. So, it doesn't do you any good there.
Finally, battery life. How long will this thing run before recharges? If it doesn't last long then you can just wrap some tinfoil around the thing to block the GPS signal and wait for the battery to die.
Though, you have to admire how quicly companies can market to the latest paranoia.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Just what my boss always wanted, an electronic leash.
Tracking your employee's children. :-)
I've already got something that can track my kids (if I had any) it's called a large network of friends in my city.
~ kjrose
I can strap these on my staff and find out how many times they use the bathroom! I wonder if I can write a script that will deduct that time out of the payroll system....
The chips placed in pets do not have GPS. They are passive transmitters that use the energy from the reader to broadcast back a simple ID. The range of the largest reader we have at the shelter I volunteer at is less than a foot.
That being caid chipping your pets is a "Good Thing" and is one of the most effective things you can do to help ensure you will recover your pet if it gets lost.
What do you know I wrote a novel
...in several asian countries your employees and children could be the same people! *ba dum bum*
We should have given one to Osama a couple of years ago as a gift... darn it darn it darn it
There are children out there with employees? And here I am, self-employed and contracting at 28, no-one working under me. Some days I just feel old...
deus does not exist but if he does
The main ISP/Phone Company here in Sweden, Telia, have had that service for a while now.
Basically you can enable a service which lets your friends locate your phone. The triangulation part is not working yet I think. But the location of the closest GSM station is usually enough to find someone.
It's SMS/WAP based and can be enabled and disabled easily. It could ofcourse be used by corporations also, they would just have to require the employees to have the service on at all times.
Never fear, though, a solution exists and it come from the vet. We must all be implanted with microtransmitters. The sales of receivers will strictly limited to parents and employers. The receivers will be set so they can only track the intended parties, and the settings will be protected with the latest quantum crypto chaos based advanced pseudo mathematical encryption that will keep all hackers at bay. The DCMA will be used to prosecute receiver hackers and surgeons that remove the transmitter.
Oh, how safe the world will be.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Get children used to wearing trakcing devices early. That way, it'll just be the norm when they're grown up.
Tin hats on people.
yes, www.dotcomforwardslash.com is my real URL.
Well this device may look pretty cool. But every technology has its double uses...
First we get it to the kids so they don't get lost or abducted... Pretty and nice toy that kids love to carry.
Then we keep track of teenagers and where they get lost by night and if they go to school... We stick a superminiature device to their shoes...
Later your boss keeps track of your wanderings and why you get late to work... All under a new fresh product "Window to worker(TM)" sold by another politically correct privacy corp...
Gone are the days of needless parenting, where watching your child's every move consumed most of your day. For a limited introductory price of $399.99 we will introduce you to a world of reasonability-free parenting, where a touch of the button will allow little Johnny's whereabouts to be transmitted to every paedophile in the area.
Does anyone know what kind of security is in place to prevent tapping of such information? The last thing I would want is some freak 'sniffing' the location of my children. It makes me think of a predator following the scent of it's prey.
Medraut
I read the title as "Children, Track Your Employees" and I wondered why children would employ anyone...
"Hong Kong has launched what's believed to be Asia's first location-based service which enables companies to locate their employees via their mobile phones signals."
You mean slaves.
AC wuz her
Japan's had phones with similar functionality for at least three years... there's a version for children that allows the parents to find out where the phone is via fax.
This is great. Put your kid on a leash, monitor him electronically, follow his every movement. Why be half-assed about it? Just tag your child like livestock so they can't just "forget" their tracking device somewhere. Are children really denied any human rights that interfere with their parents' plans?
A kid can't pursue happiness if their particular brand of happiness conflicts with their parents' wishes. Think of the standard example of a kid who is gay, and whose parents are religious or otherwise intolerant. Generally what happens is the kid either represses his normal, healthy urges and becomes miserable or rebels against his parents, often being punished for it, often hating his folks for the rest of his life.
A kid can't pursue liberty if his parents don't want him to. A kid (with this or any other tracking device) doesn't have the privacy that we all strive for all the time. The implication is that a child's life is not his own. He is free to live his life until his parents decide he's stepping on their toes or they decide they don't agree with the way he feels about stuff.
Kids' right to life is a whole big bucket o' worms, so I won't go into that -- but you get the idea.
There seems to be a pervasive attitude (not just in North America) that until we reach the age of majority we are not fully human. Speaking in American terms, two of the so-called "self-evident" and "unalienable" rights are waived or subjected to editing according to what the child's parents think.
:eof
Did you never 'get lost' when you were a kid?.... Was it your parents fault, or yours for 'wandering off?' - The fact is that parents can't constantly keep an eye on there kids - there attention needs only to be distracted for a brief moment for kids to disappear, and this gizmo is for when, the kids find themselves lost.
Duh! I hate to be the one suggesting it but what if - and believe me this is entirely hypocri^H^H^Hthetical - someone isn't using it "properly" ?
Serisouly, the concern would ofcourse be that it might allow tracking of people who are now aware of it. Although it doesn't mention much of the technical side in the article, I doubt that the technology requires more than software in the phone system. This means that in the wrong hands, any phone could be tracked.
Still, it'd be cool to install it in your car so you could track that when it's stolen.
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Maybe it will keep the cops from parking their butts for hours at the donut shop next to my freeway exit!
Come to think of it, Krispy Kreme could start their own network aimed at law enforcement. All you'd have to do is call them and ask for "Officer Jones" and in 30 seconds or less he'll be located at one of their branches. If he's not there, he can still get the message when he walks in within 15 minutes. Ah.. who needs this HK high tech thing.
...nevermind
OK,
So you are a good parrent. Please allow me to take a momment (before I go on a rant) to genuinely applaude you. If more people were like you, the world would be a better place.
However, the number of people who have invested the level of thought that you have, is uncomfortably low. There ARE bad parrents out there. They have problems that ARE their own fault that they then expect society to fix while they whine about how unfortunate they are.
It is no wonder that the children of these people have little feeling of accountability as they have never seen what that looks like. Take for example the kids that shot up thier high school and killed themselves. If their parrents had done that personally they would be on 'death row' right now, and I am not so sure that they shouldn't be there now.
And while there are situations where bad things happen to good people, more often than not, the story ends up being that half of what would be considered 'due dilligence' would have protected these poor children.
Allow me to sum-up the point I am trying to make. Bad things happening to children is not always due to the neglegence of the parrents. BUT when it IS, they should be recognised as the criminals that they are and removed from society just like all of the other scum.
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
As a parent of small girls, I welcome this technology. We watch our kids like hawks. They are never more than 5 feet from us. So why would I welcome something like this? Because it's one more level of security.
3 years ago we were at sea world and I was watching my 3 year old on their giant playground. She went behind a slide and disappeared. I immediately ran over to find her, and she was gone. My heart sank. 30 minutes later my wife and I found her 1/4 mile from where we had lost her.
So say all you want about "well, the parent should be watching the child." Blah. Things happen. Kids run. I'd love to have something to help me find them.
That said, an even better technology would be one that would use short-distance (0-5 miles) wireless and simply point in the direction of my child's signal. That would be even more helpful when they wander unexpectedly at sea world or wal-mart or...
Get off your high horses. After all we can do, parents still need help sometimes.
I can recall when VNC was still on the AT&T labs site and they had this other thing that I thought was really cool and also really disturbing.
You would wear a tag on your shirt, presumably part of an id badge system already in place (or not). In that badge was... something magic - I'd assume a chip of somesort and maybe a transmitter.
Then using the gridwork of a hanging ceiling, you would setup monitors at central places in each room (or several over large spaces).
Then this would talk to your servers... or maybe the servers would talk to it... whatever.
The end result was you could finger someone and it would say where in the building they were - even with the ability for a graphical system as well (technically could even tie into a camera system, but that wasn't something they showed).
So you could be sitting in a meeting, waiting for Larry (Larry is always late, that bastard), and then on your laptop there finger Larry and see that he is in the kitchen and has been there for 3 hours... perhaps Larry had a heart attack and is lying there dead (or just took off his id badge there and ran away, frolicking merrily in fields of poppies... you know, those fields that are near all offices).
You could also finger rooms and see all the people in that room - so you could finger the bathroom and see who is in there, or who is gathering around the water cooler.
That alone made me want to start a company. Just to dick around with that.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
An Icelandic company called TrackWell has a product that is in use in Iceland. It actually uses GSM signals....but it is close enough.
Sure wish I could have thrown one of these things into the (ex) wife's car when she was cheating on me.
"It's a very tangled subsystem." --Windows kernel guru
Forget terrorism and bio weapons. This is the new threat. We are breeding our own demise. In a generation or two, the entire northern hemisphere will be reduced to a bunch of pussies wearing nothing but sensible shoes with matchings outfits.
/Rumagent
With any luck I will be dead by then.
I always wound up in the book section, or the toy section. I knew right where i was and where I was going. ;)
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
Mike.
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
But it would be neat to have an automated program to track your movements in your can and have them display on say a secured webpage. I could think of uses for this while traveling/exploring. I know that the same thing could be accomplished with a handheld/car mounted GPS, but the size of the unit and the possible LoJack emulation might make it worth it.
Sure, they *claim* it won't be used for anything other than finding which employees are closest to the customers so they can reduce travel times, etc. but think of the possible abuse of this. Mind you, you could always forward calls from your work cell to your personal cell, leave the work cell at home, and then even if they do call you, you're covered.
do not read this line twice.
Sonera Mspace
More positioning things:
Locater guides you to nearest gas station Location finder locates the nearest services all around Finland
Where-are-you? service pilot launched
Extract from Press Release 20 May 2002
Sonera is constantly developing and testing new location-based services. The Where-are-you? service pilot now launched enables the users to locate the mobile phones of those users who have given them permission to do so as they have registered in the service. Where-are-you? is available to all Sonera's mobile-phone customers between May 20 and November 15, 2002. You can register as a user at Sonera Mspace's web site at www.mspace.fi.
The service allows a group of friends, for example, to check in advance where everyone is and whether they can be contacted at that particular moment. It also gives a sense of relief to parents who can easily check where their children are or where an elderly relative, for example, is.
Before the service can be taken into use, the user must give permission to those mobile subscribers whose mobile phones he or she wants to be able to locate his or her mobile phone. "We have paid special attention to observing privacy: the customer is connected to the service only if he or she allows it, and the location data are not saved for further use," says Director Ari Hakala of Sonera. Also, the Where-are-you? service includes a reminder, which reminds the mobile phone user, at regular intervals, that the service is activated," he continues.
Where-are-you? is based on GSM positioning. If you send the message "Missä Maija" ("Where Maija"), for example, you will receive location data as a response: "Liittymän +358401234567 sijainti: OULU, Linnanmaa, N65:03'39'', E25:26'28'' (ast:min'sek'' WGS84:ssä). Arvioitu etäisyys: 541.5 km, pohjoinen." ("Subscription 0401234567 is located in Oulu Linnanmaa, 65:03'39'', N, 25:26'28'', E, (WGS84), distance 541.5 km, north"). The distance indicated in the response is the distance between the mobile phone located and the mobile phone making the enquiry.
During the pilot, a location enquiry sent to the service costs 0.59 euros per positioning performed. The permission for positioning can be given on the service's web site. The customer can change the permissions he or she has given on the Internet at any time, or terminate the service by sending a text message to the service's short number. For other text messages controlling the service, the customer is charged according to Sonera's pricelist.
Sonera to launch mobile phone positioning service for companies
Extract from Press Release April 16, 2002
Early this summer, Sonera will launch a mobile phone positioning service for companies. By means of the service, a company will be able to locate mobile phone subscriptions that are in its name. Sonera has successfully piloted the service during the spring in conjunction with Securitas Oy, Service Center Helsinki Oy and Tecalemit Oy, who have very good experiences from using the service.
The strength of Sonera's positioning service is that it does not require the SIM card to be changed, nor are there any special requirements regarding the mobile phone. The service can be used with a conventional mobile phone and a Sonera mobile phone subscription. Positioning takes place over the GSM network, so the service can be used throughout Finland. The positional accuracy varies depending on the region: in cities, the accuracy is only a few hundred meters, and in the countryside, it is a couple of kilometres.
It all works. My favourite is just to find out the GPS coordinates of where I am (Missä = where am i?)..
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: The sole responsibility for monitoring your child's safety is yours. Technology like this is merely a false sense of security. In the case of companies using it on employees, it's a disgusting invasion of privacy, and I'm surprised that it's legal here in the states. (Of course, I'm also upset that companies, under threat of terminating your employment, can extract bodily fluids from you in the name of a "drug test".)
Even more of a kick in the teeth is the cost.. $400 bucks to lose all privacy of where I'm at at any given time? No thanks. If I run an errand during my lunch hour, it's nobody's business but my own.
Somewhat ironic, conisdering that part of growing up is learning to be indipendent from your parents.
Remember when you first got lost as a kid?
Tears... upset.... A learning experiance wasn't it! Maybe someone had to call a policeman for you? All turned out right in the end didn't it. (Kiddy fiddlers are few and far between)
Maybe parents dont want there kid go grow up or something....
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
This has been available in europe for quite some time now. In sweden the service is cheap (ca 15 cents per search), and you can access it through a web or wap interface. Using the web interface you will get a nice zoomable map that displays the location of your friends (they have to opt-in).
Last time I tried though the map indicted that one of my friends was in the middle of a lake when he in fact was miles away from the indicated position. I guess it will take some tuning to get it right.
Telia Mobile Friendfinder
I don't know about you but tracking an employee during the day seems to infringe on rights. I would never work on an employeer who implemented such a system, then again most people are a slave to the system and will happily do such things.
This seems to create a big brother culture, track all your employees, log their phone calls, watch there network usage.. it's 1984.. just a little later. This seems to create a hostil work enviroment rather then one geared towards a happy workplace. You don't want your employees feeling like prisioners while at the jobsite.
Than again.. if it's based on a cell signal, we all know how well they work.. just turn off the phone!.
Nextel is going to launch location based services before christmas.
For those of us who don't have cellphones/pagers/other wireless gadgets does that mean "the hunt begins"?
Seriously though, what would happen if carrying an electronic device that tracked your position became mandatory by law? Kind of creeps me out.
crazy dynamite monkey
Because if you can locate someone by virtue of their cell phone, (or at least locate their cell phone), then some missing persons cases could be solved with this kind of technology.
/. maybe (seriously, its been banned at my workplaces before)), you might find it an opportune time to start paying for your own cell instead of using one supplied by an employer.
If, instead, you're an adult with tastes you don't want the world to know (adult clubs, fringe politics,
The simplest solution is to just chop off your kid's feet and stick them in front of the TV until they are ready for college. No more parental worries!
Seriously though, people have got to stop getting their worldview from the media. 500 kids a year disappearing (the vast majority at the hands of divorced parents) out of the millions of kids is pretty small when you look at the number who die from such unglamorous fates such as car accidents or fires. People need to maintain perspective.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I consider these to be just field tests to get all the bugs worked out. When Aschroft,et al are satified it 'works' I forcast the time when it will become mandatory for everybody.
zenray
Video shot mostly in Japan... showed as being a hot idem for wifes whos husbands had a tendency to, er, stray...this way they knew if the hubbies were at work, or some bar.....
They also pointed out how (with two cell phones) you have have a cheap James Bond like tracking device [Turn one on; toss it into someones car; then track on your second cell phone]
Woooooweeeee !
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Just down the road from where I live two ten year old girls disappeared last Sunday. The police have just been reduced to making a public announcement to any abductor as follows: 'I've left a message on ..[one of the girl's].. mobile phone with details of how to contact me, please do so' as they have absolutely no leads. Whilst this tracking device is not an ideal solution (unless you absolutely trust anyone that can get hold of the tracking signal) to the problem of losing people, I can see it being very popular with parents.
Face it these things are going to be hot. The media ia hyping the SHIT out of child abductions like they are new phenomenon. Truth is they ARE DOWN from recent years! But you local news has decided that this ISSUE needs MORE coverage. Who knows maybe it does....
Point being you still need to be a parent. You can strap whatever you want on your kid, be it this a leash, a small ferocious otter, what have you, BUT you still have to parent your child.
Hopefully this will on be a tool not a solution. I don't want soccer mom trucking down Main Street in her 5000lb Ford Leviathan looking at the web page showing her that her kid is next door. I also don't want people to think this is some kid of auto pilot for resposibilty.
My daughter can't be pregnant! She has a GPS.
This
There are many issues that make these sorts of tracking solutions far from foolproof, or even relaiable.
First of all, for a tracking device to even be remotely effective, the recipient must either be oblivious to it, or be accepting of it's use. In young children this shouldn't be an issue aside from the possiblity it could be broken (obviously such a device wouldn't be a cell phone or pager, but something much simpler)
For much older kids, this becomes somewhat pointless, and also bordering on ethical concerns as I doubt many older teens would appreciate being tracked everywhere they go, even if the intention is security.
Tracking a Cell Phone or Pager is only useful if the device is on, the betteries are OK, and the device is within range of a signal. Extreme hikers/climbers have discussed this idea as well as a method of security for themselves in case of an accident, but ran into major issues due to lack of signal range in more remote places.
Lastly, tracking employees...in my opinion, if you don't trust your employees enough to do their jobs properly and be in the right place, then there is obviously something wrong somewhere. I don't think tracking of this nature would benefit anyone except for paranoid/control freak bosses. I am pretty sure employees would object to such impositions as well, most likely hurting morale and, to a lesser extent, productivity.
Good ideas, but very few viable applications that wouldnt be excessively invasive or ineffective. Monitoring babies and young children is the only application of tracking that would seem worthwhile, and I doubt many of them are running around with cell phones or pagers (ie we'd need a new device to track with anyway; that's nothing new to this field.
It's a great idea, but what happens when the first kidnapper cuts off a little kid's hand to remove the thing?
Abductions are down - don't believe the hype!
Jim - your name is Jim...
ATT Wireless has this now with their M-mode service. You give friends permission to locate you, and they can just go to "location services" on the phone, and it tells where you're at. It's accurate to within a block.
Their "find businesses" thing can use it too, so you can find the closest gas station, restaraunt, or strip club.
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Once all Amercians have them, then everyone will be safe and secure.
Its all 'for the children'...
yes this is sarcasm.. For those sheep out there that dont have a clue..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This could be useful in the sweatshops where you have children and workers at the very same time! They'll never run off after their smoke breaks again.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
...is that we let child molesters live.
I'm not talking about the 17 year old with the 15-year-old girlfriend, crossing arbitrary legal lines. I'm talking about perverts.
I'd like to see a government sting, where somebody fakes up a NAMBLA cruise to southeast Asia(they go there to fuck children), get them in international waters, and drown the lot of them.
Every conviction on child molestation should be a mandator death penalty. The law tries to take the well-being of the offenders into account. I disagree. There are some crimes which bring the forfeit of status as a human.
I can see sparing somebody for a crime of passion. There are murderers among us who are good people and will never do it again.
There is no child molester who ever was redeemed. I'm sure there are some who were never convicted again, maybe even never charged, maybe even never did it again, but they must never be permitted the opportunity for unsupervised access to children again. The best way to do that is to kill them the first time they reveal themselves. Yeah, they were probably taught by getting molested themselves. That really is sad, but it doesn't change the fact that they should be dead. If the certainty of death keeps them from acting on their desires, they won't spread the disease. I'm perfectly willing to spare people with perverted thoughts that never have been put into action, but it's better that a billion repented criminals die than that one child should suffer.
I keep close watch on my children. It would take overwhelming force to take one in my presence, or great stealth to get one out of the house while I sleep.
All right, so most likely the parents who'd strap this on wouldn't allow their sheltered little brat near anything pointy. Looking at this, though.. it would be sickeningly easy to snap the plastic band with small hedge trimmers/boltcutters/large diagonal cutters or any other common hand tool. Reasonably intelligent children and potential abductors will both figure this out.
The only REALLY secure tracker is an implantable chip, and I pity the poor cattle^H^H^H^H^H^Hchild at that point.
AMERICANS. Not USians. AMERICANS. Damn New Age crap.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
In Finland it's been possible for mobile phone user to grant others rights to pin-point their location or to search for services based on current location.
The fire departments, police and similar have access to the location information of a mobile phone when it is needed. ie when a person is lost or emergency call is cut before the caller is able to identify the location.
What's so great about this one?
Parents should not use this as a device "oh yeah let my kid run around all over .. he has the panic wrsitwatch" .. well first of all the device doesnt constantly update the position, second and worse .. a kidnapper or thats aware of the device can come up with ways to defeat it.
.. it has to a) keep constant track b) monitor vital signs to detect signs of panic c) Upon activation start recording the environment (audio at least)
For a device of this nature to have a chance of being effective
d) not easily removable, maybe implanted (and not in the same location in every child)
Anyway, this device should be used in COMBINATION with good parenting and keeping track of where your kid is, with who, and what he/she's doing.
Kids and parents should never ever assume that their kid will be safe because of this device.
Also, this device does nothing to prevent a criminal from doing his crime. It only helps the police catch him afterwards, and that doesnt exactly save the kid. Sure, if parentss use thwe device it will reduce crime rate, but if it's having a significant effect, then criminals will come up with ways to defeat it.
Parents should let their kids be kids. Enough of these overprotective soccer moms who have a heart attack if little Jimmy scratches his knee on the sidewalk.
Life is tough. Deal with it. Stop trying to child-proof the whole world.
I would buy one in a heartbeat. Unless you have kids, you have no idea of the worry of balancing letting your kids live their lives with maintaining their safety. This device helps achieve that balance. Some of the comments remind me of the calculators in the classroom discussions (I didn't have one and I turned out fine). This is a little different. Of course I wouldn't expect most /.ers to understand since you typically have to have a date before you have kids.
I think the real issue is that this will train a generation of kids to expect ZERO privacy and be ready to embrace big brother with open arms.
I'm a stepdad and I know how hard it is to keep an eye on kids. We worry when the 11 year old rollerblades the 1/2 mile through the subdivision to grandma's house, so there is appeal to this technology, but still, from a larger social perspective I think it's very, very dangerous to indoctrinate ourselves and kids into thinking that it's "normal" to be tracked electronically.
See someone's comment above regarding the all in one chip that is coming.
LBS has been out a long time. SignalSoft Corp now merged into Openwave Systems has had this a long time now. Just haven't been taking off in the US as of yet.
How long until someone tries to make these things mandatory? Better yet, someone suing the government so that we all have to have them implanted when we're born! Better still, having them wipe any part of our brains that may hold music we didn't pay for!
Slashdot presents: "Tracking your Employees' Children"
This thing is suspicious. It's not shipping until September, but they're taking orders, with "4-6 week delivery". That's a bad sign.
The pricing is terrible. The thing costs more than a cell phone. There's a $340 up-front cost (there's an "activation fee" hidden in there), plus a monthly fee of $25-$50 per month. You can get a good cell phone and cell phone service, maybe even with GPS, for that price. The service is way overpriced, considering that it is basically a 2-way pager.
It's also on a 1.9GHz PCS network, only. So there's a coverage problem. It doesn't have backup capability to go out to something with broad coverage, like AMPS analog cellular, or something cops have, like Lojak, or, ideally, a satellite.
It does, though, have the cool "locks on the wrist" feature, with remote unlock, no less. And if you cut the wristband, it calls for help.
This sounds like a market test. If enough preorders come in, they'll actually make some. Maybe. More likely, some cell phone manufacturer will do this better and take over this niche.
I'll bet Disney & other major theme parks love this. They can buy them by the gross, charge $50 a day and parents can attach them to their kids in case they get lost. It increases safety & makes them money. Everything Disney loves (especially the money part).
I doubt the average person would poney up $400 when 99.99% of the time there isn't any real concern. I'd be more curious how a 3 year old deals with a device being attached to his/her wrist. Mine would start screaming after a few minutes. He doesn't like paper wristbands from a local amusement park being on his wrist for more than 5 minutes, much less a device which is bulky & he can't remove.
And for the people who raise privacy concerns, get over it. Kids have no privacy, they never have and never will.
Before technology parents still spied on their kids. They put a phone in a central location, searched rooms when the kids were not there, watched the odometer on a car to see how far they've been driving. 20 years ago, few kids had a television in their room because parents actually cared what their kids were watching.
As a parent, the idea isn't to be a friend to your kid. When they are young you protect them. As they get older you give them more freedom. The difficulty is that too much freedom and a kid can hurt themself, too little and they don't learn what they need to survive on their own.
Sometimes the need to protect & the need to give freedom are very conflicting and, when in doubt, some parents go for the hyper conservative approach.
The Gamesters of Triskelion
Or maybe the Providers will start selling their collars in the US market.
Technically more accurate, but in this case it's still fair to say that ABOUT half of any sizeable population is below average intelligence. The bell curve is reasonably symmetrical for IQ.
but in this case it's still fair to say that ABOUT half of any sizeable population is below average intelligence.
In the general case perhaps, but NOT in this case. If the average /. reader is an idiot, that means you are on the left side of the bell curve. That would mean that you would have more people above the average idiot than below the average idiot, if you had a reasonably random sample of the population. In other words, let's say that no one above IQ 110 comes to Slashdot. That would depress the average, and you would have many more people above the average than below the average.
Reminds me of an article I read a few years ago about a similar system in Japan, except the information was made available on a website. It seems it was canceled after only a few weeks of service. A few irate housewives had checked on the husband's location when they claimed to be working late at the office.... they weren't even CLOSE to the office ;)
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
We here at the peak of the modern technology have had the ability to track eachother's locations via cellphones for some time now.
E
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
It is part of a bluetooth based home automation system. Push a button, Junior's location appears on a map. (of course the tracking device does not use bluetooth)
Anyone who thinks their kids are safe when they are at home in bed with you in the house has a false sense of security. In our area this past June a 14 year old girl was kidnapped at gun point from her bedroom. Her sister was in the room with her and was told if she made any noise or told her parents, then her sister would die. Her parents were sleeping down the hall completely unaware. (Should they have been in the room with her?) She still hasn't been located over two months later. See here for more info.
Don't you dare think that keeping your kids safe is simply a matter of raising them right. All the training in the world won't stop a determined but sick individual from harming them. Perhaps if Elizabeth had been wearing one of these her parents could have found her that same night.
is to use a special GSM sim card return signals to nearest 6 GSM base-stations. The central computer can determine the approx. location of this person within this 6 base-stations.
:)
:/)
The accuracy is only up to ~25M diameter. However it's still good as civilian GPS does not give accurate result due to the fact that US Government deliberately inserting noise in GPS reading for non-military use. (it's THEIR GPS satalites nevertheless.
However, it has several problems:
1) Special GSM sim must be made
2) It's very proprietary that different telcos have different implementations of it
3) The worker can always turn off the phone to hide his location(it can only be solved by firing that insubordinate staff
4) Last but most important, it does not work on the sea, because there are no base station there. The tracking system will always return the location of the nearest shore.
If look as if 4) is not a big problem, but don't forget Hong Kong has a pretty big harbour in the middle, and in fact people working on the sea needs this technology badly!
> BUT when it IS, they should be recognised as the criminals that they are and removed from society just like all of the other scum.
Last I checked, that is exactly what happens.
The question is, of course, just what you happen to believe amounts to parental neglegence.
People should raise their kids, and not everyone elses. Marketers and "Media" (as if there were a difference) should stop playing on statistically trivial fears with gadgets that bring exactly nothing to the table.
Then again, it's a free world. If you want to train your kid for a world of digi-bot social control, then feel free. Indeed, maybe they'll be better off never having learned about Freedom. They can't morn the loss of something they never had.
Some commericial laundries use RF tags (similar to those used to tag pets) in workwear to track them through their factories. This can quite easily be adapted to track each time the wearer of a garment goes to the toilet, has a coffee break, cigarette brake, moves from one area to another... , and this technology is mature and proven.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for electro-gizmos, but I also believe that parents should be responsible for just that... parenting.
Noooo! Their freedom are far more important than your parenting and all others, they're HUMAN BEING, not your dog!
For some years a similar service has been available for keeping track of elderly family members. You could get a fax of where they are on a map. Phone was shaped like a popular comic character, Doraemon (the 24th century blue robotic cat).