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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."
Wow, this sound like a great idea. The peace of mind for parents is great. Not to mention not having to use one of those horrible Child Leashes that make it look like you are taking your child for a walk.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
[this is reasonably political - feel free to ignore]
Whereas this is bound to be a 'good thing' (the cry 'child in trouble' is just about the most instinct-driven response any adult has), the signature is somethinng to be wary of.
Consider that analysis of people-in-crowds is pretty easy these days. Consider that tracking (after positive analysis) is again reasonably simple (I was doing it 15 years ago - the key is to track in feature-space (region features: circularity, RGB, connectivity, 1st- and 2nd-order parameters) rather than just using image intensity. Using relations between features gives you context and thus more contextual information).
Consider that if you can track individuals within crowds, and given a covert surveillance system (eg: London, UK) you can track indivduals from locality to locality. You can start to (automatically) build circles-of-trust where individuals who meet regularly are automatically associated.
Consider that biometric information is now being put forward (eg: fingerprints, DNA samples, Iris scans, head ratios (eye:nose:chin parameters) and other observable information) and encoded within a compulsory identity card
Consider the amalgamation of this automatic identification, automatic relation of associates, and automatic recognition of individuals. Consider the implications. And yet a "Labour" government (the "People's" party!) is putting this forward in the UK.
I am fortunate. I am planning to emigrate this year to the US from the UK - previously I thought the UK (despite the lack of consitution) had a reality more responsive to the people and their ideals than the US. No more. I am one of the lucky ones that Joseph "Blunkett" Stalin will have no hold over. I feel deeply for my erstwhile compatriots. Freedom, after all, is a state of mind, and mind control is a tool of (this UK) government.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Its a nice step up from the Leash that some mothers seem to employ upon thier crying 5 year olds.
I wonder how they'll get a wifi tracker out of a kids stomach?
Thats where some of my sisters lego ended up.
I'm normally opposed to this sort of thing, but in a place like a theme park this sounds great. Assuming that the tag could be hired from the theme park, you need only use it while you are there.
When you are in a place which the parent or the kid knows reasonably well, you can easily arrange a good meeting place if you get seperated, and the kid has a reasonable chance of finding it. OTOH, most people only go to a theme park occasionally: even if you do decide on a meeting place, you could easily get lost en route to it.
It could also help if the child is with the other (custodial) parent: the first parent can quickly check whether other parent is still queueing for a ride, or has gone onto designated meeting spot. Dh and I have tried using mobiles, but as dh's mobile is his work phone he is too likely to get work related calls for it to be particularly useful on his day off.
Which may be precisely the problem. "Peace of mind" causing parents to be inattentive, incautious, and careless. And when the systems goes down, as it inevitably will? Will there be civil liability, or will the parents have to sign a waiver of liability when they rent the wrist band for their child?
When the system goes down, will a child be lost, kidnapped, hurt, etc. that otherwise would not have been because his parents relied on the system instead of knowing that they, and only they were responsible for keeping track of their child?
Perhaps the analogy is a bad one, but this reminds me a bit of the problem national parks are having with people who *rely* on GPS and/or their cell phones to keep them out of trouble. No wilderness or outdoor skills, no ability to use a compass or read a map, and half of the time no jacket. But they figure as long as they have their cell phones, they'll be ok. And when they can't get reception, the battery goes dead, or they drop it.....
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
The parent smells faintly trollish, but I will take it seriously for a moment.
"hey Ted"
"yeah Mark"
"I want to skip chemistry, can you take my locator with you to class?"
"sure no problem"
Unless you plan on implanting or clamping them on in some permanant fashion, this will not work. My opinion has always been that if a person can pass your class with out going to it, it is your fault not theirs
or you could just not have them wear the bracelet... this is OPTIONAL
I worked for Openwave, you know, the Software.com and Phone.com merger baby...
We worked with MMO2 in Britan, and they had a nicname for Fridays...SMS Fridays...
They would send SMS (Text) messages during the week, and the lost ones (which there were a lot of) would get delivered on Friday, when they system went through housecleaning.
So, send a text message looking for you kid at the park and MAYBE you will find out the location by Friday.
I wonder how hard the wristbands would be to remove?
What's to stop kids from switching their wristbands?
I can't imagine being unable to find my kid, tracking him down, and finding some other kid instead.
My first thought was, "What, a CF card on each kid with a little microcontroller where you have to cha[r|n]ge the batteries every day?"
Then I looked at the website for the tags - 5 years worth of service, regular MAC address, only transmits occasionally, never receives.
Way geeky, I think. I'd like to know what kind of 802.11 packet they're transmitting!
Then I read the comments. Are all you guys privacy geeks, or what? What happened to all the "Cool technology! How'd they do that? etc" comments, consequences be darned (as in fixing holes in socks)
Ah well. So much for *real* geeks.
-Adam
Not at all exaggerated. Like you said, they can already track mass usage patterns in various ways. But now they can track where you go, personally.
You get all kinds of great things out of that. "People who eat hamburgers don't tend to ride the Crazy Lego Ship. Maybe it makes them feel sick? We should put less mayo on the burgers." Or perhaps people who shop in store XYZ don't tend to also shop in store ABC. Perhaps there is too wide an array of popular items in XYZ -- leading people to forgo any further shopping. This tells you you should move some of the popular items from store XYZ over to store ABC, and hike up all the prices a little bit. Since people arent' buying as much per location, they are less likely to notice a 3% price hike.
Maybe you find that people who walk past a certain ride are more likely to want to buy ice cream. This leads you to put more ice cream stands in that location. Maybe you're asking "Why the hell would a particular ride cause people to want ice cream?" Believe me, the company doesn't care why, but they'll sure as hell cash in on it.
The only reason you can't think of uses for this is because you (obviously) aren't the one getting paid to do it.
More than a bit late, here's an article from July, 2000 which describes a similar system. This doesn't use wifi or text messaging, but that seems to be a bit overkill to me anyway.
IIRC this was discussed in
I don't know any of the specifics, but I can't think of any reason why they would need to assign public IP addresses to these wristbands. In all likelyhood, they've set up a wireless LAN and are dolling out private addresses set aside for self-contained networks. They could set up a NAT box with some nice interface if they really wanted external access to it.
So, your IPv4 addresses shouldn't take a hit. I do agree we should move to IPv6 though, but this instance is not justification.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
I don't think this is intended to solve the "usual" case. It is to help with the unusual case in which the child is not in the immediate vicinity of the parents.
Excuse my french, but BULSHIT!
There are simpler and more effective solutions that would not allow the park to gather data on folks movements, but the tracking-enabled solution is the one that gets implemented. Soerta makes you want to say "Hmmmm..."
Now, the solution I would use would be a pair of braclets (one for the parent and one for the kid) with some sort of simple proximity detection. If the two braclets get too far apart from each other (oh
If the kid is simply wandering off, the parents are alerted before s/he gets too far. If someone has grabbed the kid, then suddenly, everyone around knows that something is wrong. (as opposed to the system that they implemented where the parents would be working out the cell phone interface as the kid gets hustled into a washroom somewhere)
I'm certain that Lego will take security into strong consideration with this system. I am certain they will ensure that preditors of children will not be able to hijack the system and locate your kids as effectively as you can. Afterall, strong cryptographic authentication will be used and identifications will be universally unique, or some other such mechanisms will be in place... right?
Join Tor today!
Flame on: .. if not before then when the hunger sets in) and the kids mostly do as told. You see this as a lazy parent not wanting to look at their kid, people in that area see it as giving the kid it's freedom to play without having to have a parent along.
Well having learned how most US adults almost consider an unsupervised kid a felony, I can inform the USians here that there are other parts of the world which have a very different view on life. In parts of the world where *this* Legoland is placed it's very common to let your kid run around alone, or in small groups, so they can try the rides without the hassle of their parents. Parents trust their kids to come back at a set time (well, around that anyway
Young kids, which are too young to be left alone, will most likely not be the primary consumer of this "tag". Older kids probably have a cell phone anyway, so who cares.
Flame off:
I can remember two movies relating to this. The first one is The Running Man starring Gov. Arnie. The other one is a B-Movie, whose name is I believe "Deadlocked Escape from Zone 14". And in that one, the prosoners were 'married', with their collars, if they got further than whatever distance from their 'marriage' partner BOOM for both of them. The whole trick, IIRC is nobody knew who they were 'married' to. I would imagine this was done to prevent escapes.
This space intentionally left blank.
How about the parents get off the damn cell phone and spend time with your kids, if you are with your kids you don't need to know where they are.