Using Cellphones to Track Your Kids

David Pogue at the New York Times wrote this week about a new, novel use for cellphones: tracking your children. Several new ventures, including ones from names like Disney, Verizon, and Sprint, will offer web-accessible locating services by pinpointing the G.P.S. signal in their commercial devices. There's also some discussion of child-specific services, like the 'Whereifone', which is more 'Star Trek communicator' than actual cell. From the article: "To pinpoint the phone's location, you call up the Web site, enter your password, click 'locate,' and presto: an icon appears on a map -- either a street map or actual satellite photo. In the photo view, you can zoom in enough to see individual buildings. These are existing satellite photos --you won't actually see your child standing there -- but this feature is still creepy and awesome. You can even watch 'bread crumbs' appear on the map as the phone moves around (cost: one talk-time minute apiece). That could be helpful if you're trying to assist someone lost on the road, or in the kinds of emergencies encountered primarily in your nightmares."

Comments

Re:This is evil YES IT IS

[Unlikely_Hero]

I would like to bring up a specific set of parents which would be absolutely hellish with this kind of tech.
Evangelicals.
I grew up with one of my parents being evangelical and the other not really wanting to argue with her.
There is a particular oddity with this type of fundie. Unlike many other types of fundies, they believe that a big company's technology is never wrong.
This is the same type of person who quotes some marketing gab and then when questioned says something equivelent to "I think they know better than you do".
The same kind of person who warns someone to not fix say...a pair of glasses for chrissakes because one isn't "certified".
Now merge that with the fundamentalist mindset.
"Dr. James Dobson said young men being around women makes them crazed for sex and that they give birth to demon children! You are forbidden from seeing these harlots!"
Now...do we really want this kind of person to have this type of tech? And before a rebuttal is made of "they're too stupid to learn tech". No, they are not. Evangelicals and other fundies will learn it if it is to keep their widdle children "Safe", whether physically or safe morally however they define that.

This completely outweighs the benefits of this technology. To repeat what was said above. Shitty and insane parents happen more than kidnappings.