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Legoland Introduces Wi-Fi Tracking for Kids
mindless4210 writes "Lego announced today the successful deployment of a full-scale child-tracking system within Legoland Billund in Europe. The tracking system, deployed by Bluesoft, Inc and KidSpotter, allows park visitors keep track of their children using one of the world's largest Wi-Fi tracking networks. The children must wear a wrist band with a Wi-Fi tag on it, and if they become separated, parents simply send a text message from their mobile phone, and receive an automated response giving them the accurate location of their child."
No, I didn't RTFA.
I hope these things have some sort of security mechanism. You wouldn't want just anything being able to instantly locate your kids would you?
Given the history of these types of deployments it wouldn't surprise me if there were more than a few holes in any security (if any) they have.
Does your 8 year old need alot of privacy at Legoland? What would they be doing which would warrant the parents not knowing where they are?
At Legoland?
Seriously? What could an ADULT do at Legoland that would require privacy?
This works only WITHIN THE GROUNDS at Legoland.
Privacy concerns, anybody?
None what so ever. You pay to borrow a bracelet, don't want it - don't rent it. And you hand it over when you leave. Only thing someone can do is track the kid while in the park, and usually most of the kids are with their parents. There are hardly anything underhanded you can do in an amusement park anyway.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Eh?? Wouldn't a Paedophile follow their target around waiting for a moment of parent's in-attention? How would knowing the coordinates help this? Besides the parents could always register their cell phone numbers upon entry to the park. Not to mention only the parents are going to have their childId to lookup the location.
See my sig for why I think this kind of paranoia about technology is rediculous.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
We plop kids in front of TVs and now we let them run around amusement parks alone? Yes, I understand that this is probably intended for kids who get away from their parents, but you know some parent is going to sit somewhere with a laptop tracking their kid and not actually keeping an eye on them. I'm horrified.
~~Guildencrantz
Penguin Trivia #46: Animals who are not penguins can only wish they were. -- Chicago Reader 10/15/82
I see no privacy concerns at all. I fact I think this is the PERFECT application for this type of technology that keeps the Tinfoil hat crowd up all night:
-It doesn't work everywhere, only in the park
-It's temporary
-You have to opt in
-It's actually useful
The only drawback is that someone who is already a "Bad Parent" might use this as an opportunity to not keep an eye on their child.
My only problem with this is the tendency some people have to rely on technology. In other words, I'm afraid some parents will think that they don't have to watch their children because the tracking device will do that for them.
But that's a problem with people, not the technology.
People's desire to believe they are right is much stronger than their desire to be right.
Thus this is a nice way to get parents to consent to having their motions tracked as they move throughout Legoland, under the guise of helping "the children."
Imagine it... If you had a giant database of people's movements as they go through the park, you can more strategically position the food vending carts, move the rides and displays around in order to maximize the "candy aisle effect," etc.
Most kids have cellphones anyway. What about the old-fashioned method of meeting like calling the kid and asking "can we meet at the X building in 15 minutes?" An even older fashion would be to tell your kids "if anything goes wrong, we meet at location X every half an hour" or "Talk to a park official if you get lost, so they can help us finding each other"
Sometimes I wonder how I have survived a youth without being tracked in a theme park.
The alternative is usually tighter, not looser, control. Do you say the same thing every time you see a child strapped into a buggy? In a dangerous environment, children *will* wander. A hand-hold is *not* safe enough - parents can get distracted (assuming lack of superhumanity). For a certain age-band a leash, while harmful to a dignity the child doesn't yet have, allows the maximum of freedom consonant with safety. I call not using a leash, for that age band, either overprotective (if you keep the child tied up) or underprotective (if you let them stray into roads, over drops, out of sight) and hence bad parenting. I do not see how the child suffers from the leash, and hence how it can be bad parenting.
BTW, do you have children?
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
I take it you haven't been in a place like that with 4 kids.
Gutless AC.
And it has the added bonus that Lego can know exactly how long children spend in each area of the park, what to concentrate on in their ads, what to rip out if its underperforming, etc..
Not that thats a reason not to track kids. I just think its a 'side effect'.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
>"...giving them the accurate location of their child."
Actually, it will give them the location of the wristband.
The biggest problem I see is that this service is subject to a perfectly legal denial of service if anybody were to flood the place with any other WiFi signal...
That's the advantage that licensed frequencies have, they'd could be jammed, but then the jammer would be transmitting without a license and in trouble. Here the DOS wouldn't quite be covered by that.
Both political (which is fine), and as far as I can tell, completely off topic :) But that's Slshdot.
As someone who recently did the same move from UK to US - if you value your privacy this really is not the place to come. It starts when the Immigration official takes your photo and fingerprint, and just goes downhill from there. I'm not saying the UK is great, but things like identity theft are much easier and more rife here, and there no useful data protection laws meaning companies share all their data about you. You would be happier I think somewhere like the Netherlands.
Just my 2p.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Unless little Wally realises they are lost and has been reduced to tears, knowing where they are this instant will be useful for only a few seconds. I'm sure the mobile phone company is gleefully aware of this.
Why not fit the rugrats with something like those electric dog collars? If their squeals exceed X decibels or they move more than Y metres from their parent, they receive a little reminder from the collar... >:-)
Am I the only one that thinks that its useless if a) the kid takes it off or b) A bad person takes it off the kid? What type of measures are there to prevent this?
OK, having actually taken a child (my nephew) back in 1999 to Legoland (California) I can comment on why I think this might be a good thing.
Legoland has a number of "playground romper room" style attractions, which are very much kid-sized for kids. While they centralize the exits so you can watch who's coming and going from them, I was constantly pacing along the edge of it, trying to keep him in sight as he climbed around in the tunnels and bridges and such (some of these things were very large) and watching the exits as well...
While I doubt something like this would have kept me from trying to eagle eye him all the time while he played in there, it would have helped MY peace of mind for the 5 minute periods where I wasn't sure exactly where he was...
As another example, but going back farther to when I was the little kid. Many years ago, I was at Six Flags Magic Mountain (I think, its hazy, it could have been Knotts) when some of my family wanted to ride a roller coaster that I could not (probably would not, being the wimp that I was) go on. So my aunt and I waited at the exit for my sister and the rest of my family to get off the ride. I was impatient, so I ran to the exit ahead of my aunt, where I got swept by a crowd of people coming off and got confused (hey, I was maybe 5) and ended up following a group into a gift shop across the way. Of course, both my aunt who had tried to keep up with me and my parents when they got off the ride got fairly frantic in searching for me, but they found me fairly quickly (not before I had gotten scared and bawling of course. I told you I was a wimp.)... Having something like the finder wristband would have been great for them.
Inevitably, if you have a kid, they are going to get lost at a department store, park, amusement park, etc, even if you are the most attentive of parents, unless you're all about the smothering. While I don't think its a good idea to use this stuff as a substitute for paying attention to your kids (and contrary to the likely childless respondants here, I don't think that really would be how they're used most often), I do think the option of having it is a good thing.
Granted, neither countries are utopic. It seems that both UK and US are adopting the control model of government in different ways.
What I find more deeply disturbing however about WiFi child monitoring is the further detachment it may cause between child and parent. Marketing to children is dangerous because of the long term effect it might have to create or further increase a generational gap. Divide the consumer, create demographics, and the corporate fat-cats line their pockets selling different brands of the same products and services to a wider variety of market groups at the expense of Human History. In fact it wouldn't hurt us to take a step back and evaluate how we perceive kids today.
Of course, I could be completely overreacting. But try not to blame me too much, it's just that I have a hard time putting full faith and trust in the good intentions of ANY corporation that has been around longer than I have. And Lego certainly qualifies.
As someone that once lost track of his niece at a crowded park for a minute or two (blink and they're gone) after spending a lot of effort to keep up when a lot of parents didn't, I can tell you that the added piece of mind is probably worth it even if you're a good parent. (Probably especially if you're a good parent.)
In my experiences with backcountry search and rescue, the major cause of disaster is delilberate, repeated, acts of stupidity. It is almost never just one thing that leads to grief. Reliance on a battery opperated electronic gadget just adds one more thing to a long list.
Do we know if they will be using the tracking to evaluate park use? Compiling that information? I think we need to evaluate each new technology to see if the balance of our loss in privacy is outweighed by the benefit. In this case, I think as a parent of a child who may have wandered off before that I'd opt in, but
Years before I made my first tinfoil hat, someone showed me an article about a tracking device for pets.
It was placed under the skin and if the pet was ever lost it could be located. I was so naive, I never once thought anything like this would ever be used to find human beings.
So now here we are, just over a decade later and people think it's a good idea to track their kids using computers.
If your kids aren't big enough to understand the words "check in" and "meet up area" they shouldn't be away from you in the first place.
another thing to have to cut off while they are shaving the kids hair and changing their clothing in the bathroom.
I would agree with that parents can get distracted but leash or no leash it should not be for long enough for the child to have wander out of site. If your a little kid in the time you take to wander away you can have put a thousand bad things in your mouth you should have put there or bumped yourself or end up pulling the cat's tail and getting scratch. Your right a hand-hold is not safe enough. A leash is not safe enough. Children require supervision! I personally think leash do hurt the child. You have to wonder how the children grow up not really been taught right from wrong, for instance when they start to wander and the parent comes and grabs there hand and gives them a strict talking to. Parents do get distracted, but when they get so distracted that they must tie their kid to them, you have to wonder if they really can give the kid the attention they need. FYI, I do not have kids (too young).
Parent: OK John, what color wristband you want?
John: Green
doo dodoo dodoo...
John: hi, my name is John, I'm 10
Jim: hi, I'm Jim and I'm 9
John: I like your wristband it's blue
Jim: I like yours it's gween
John: Let's trade!
Jim: OK
for a kid to get freedom from his/her parents to go explore legoland by themselves. False or not, it gives the parents a sense of security that is likely to loosen their hold on the kid so they can really go have fun. I remember going to parks and lands like this but being unable to do what I really wanted to because of paranoid parents over my shoulder at every turn.
There are no real privacy issues here, except I suppose the old slippery slope argument that we are being slowly conditioned to accept radio tracking tags. As it stands though, this development seems pretty harmless.
Privacy concerns? Not really. Paedophile concerns? Yes.
It's posts like this that will probably bring to life a new abbreviation:
RTFP: Read The F---ing Post
I mean, sheesh. I can understand not RTFA but not even reading the text in front of you?
Perhaps, when you post, there should be a "I'm feeling lucky" option where your post is inserted randomly into any article that's currently on the home page?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
And if you're worried about said paedophile cracking the (presumably) secure system to somehow tie a unique braclet ID to a person, I'd be more worried about said cracker breaking into the billing system and getting the credit card data I used to buy the tickets.
As the parent said, the biggest risk is that some negligent parents will decide that such a system obviates the need to actually keep an eye on their kid. As the saying goes, if you make it idiot-proof, someone somewhere will just build a better idiot...
... and I can see a high-tech ransom outfit using this data to know where one certain child would be for quicker in-and-out kidnapping. Or knowing when that child might have been separated from it's protecive older siblings.
Or how bout this: 5-year-old son of European royalty is playing at legoland, taken out by a sniper from a huge distance based on his location from an SMS query to their wristband system...
OK, I'm being dystopian, and hopefully the crypto on those wristbands is bulletproof, but if the potential is there it will be abused and to think otherwise is naive.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
I'm willing to let some usage statistics be collected if it would help improve my experience. With what I look for on the web, that's different, but if I'm running around their theme park and my activities can be tracked down to when I got on a ride and when I got off, where I just hanged around, and such, as long as it isn't tracable back to me. Unless you're one of those paranoid types, there's nothing wrong with them knowing that much.
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is living in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann