Slashdot Mirror
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
You too can have a device any smart kid would leave at home..
Or better, just drop one into a Greyhound bus bound for the other coast...
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
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?)
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.
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.
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
Oh yeah and I bet it has an uncuttable wrist strap too. Seriously, this thing is junk. I mean, I have one of those Casio GPS watches, but at least I know it's a gimmick...
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
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.
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...
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
Look at the statistics of car alarms and "The Club". They do not eliminate theft, they mitigate it. Professionals and people hell bent on stealing your car WILL steal your car. Joyriders will keep looking.
The same goes for the watch. I'm sure it isn't easy to cut the band, but I gurantee it can be done. If the motive is kidnapping for profit, then they are going to grab your kid no matter what. The random sexual predator however, is going to go for an easy mark. If you don't believe that just read your local paper and see how many aborted kidnappings happen because the kid squirmed away or started screaming. Most of these perpetrators are not persistent, patient maybe, but not persistent.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
Sounds like Bart's second-hand "Ultimate" belt.
"Help! Help! Help! Help!"
"Can't you read?! Call the police!" Thwack.
Maran
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 think, meaning I'm too lazy to look, that some Police departments already use GPS in their cars.
This made me think of another use, albeit a niche use. It could seriously aid rescue workers looking for a child in a burning building.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
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.
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.
This is great. For $400 you can make it more likely that the nonce will go for your next door neighbour's kids instead of yours. Which is nice. Pretty soon everyone will have to pay this $400 "protection tax"... At which point it will be worthless because your kids are now just as likely to be targetted as your neighbours'. Oh what a wonderful world.
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.
Do you mean American English chips or British English chips? I am guessing you mean the foil bag around "crisps" rather than newspaper... Anyway, GPS is much weaker than the mobile network, and I wouldn't be surprised if a few layers of newspaper stopped the signal. That's the main problem with this watch thingy. Most of the time it will just report "dunno where your kiddie is, can't acquire any satellites". It doesn't work indoors, it doesn't work near buildings... It's dead useful when you are walking around in the great outdoors, but in a city it is about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.
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!.
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
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
Too many people say, when confronted with this topic, that devices like this somehow harm or constrain children in ways that they shouldn't be constrained. What you said is exactly right. Children need freedom within limits. They don't need the capability to deny their parents knowledge of their whereabouts. It is a parent's right and obligation to set boundaries, their responsibility to provide a safe way for those boundaries to be explored. If I can have reliable assistance from modern technology, I can enlarge those boundaries. If I can't then they remain more constrained.
As for employees, I don't think this is useful in many cases, but perhaps in some. It's entirely reasonable, IMO, to GPS an armored car and possibly the drivers for the duration of their work day.
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.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Here have some information that will answer that question....
the faraday effect
and the faraday cage
I can block a 20 Bajillion watt transmitter with tinfoil.. I am sure that the signals from 6-12 sattelites overhead can easily be blocked by it.
so your answer is yes.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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 ----
...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.
The other application for this technology would be the tracking of personnel on the fire ground. Currently we do that with PAR cards, which is a laminated card you give to whoever is watching an "area" before you enter it. However, in this case we DO need pinpoint accuracy. So what we have thought about is on major incidents setting up two or three mini-towers around the building and tracking off of the radio that the firefighter carry.
All in all, I think this has some very good applications in the real world. Let's just hope the bad ones don't squash them.
Random Musings
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.
Same here! I wasn't lost, my parents were. They were the ones who didn't know where they were going. I was headed straight for Gi. Joe and the latest Hardy Boys book (circa 8 years old...).
And if some guy had grabbed me, I'd have had the common sense to scream my lungs out, bite the guy, etc.. etc... which may not have helped a whole lot to stop him but certainly would have had everyone looking at me.
Nowadays of course a child screaming at the top of their lungs in the store is no big deal, everyone just tries to ignore it...
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
The Gamesters of Triskelion
Or maybe the Providers will start selling their collars in the US market.
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!
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).
I'm curious, when did you start following rules because they're good for you? Have you yet? I disobeyed my parents until the moment I moved out, even when their rules were "good rules". I've been known to occasionally bend the speed limit and may have even run a red light or two at 3:00 am when the roads were deserted. Children make their own judgements on what rules are good rules. Generally speaking, their decisions are not the decisions they'd make as adults. They tend to underestimate risk.