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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."
this kind of thing is horrible. how is a kid supposed to be a kid if they are continually being monitored by their parents? all i can think of is how bland and boring my own childhood would have been had i been burdened by such technology.
part of growing up is spending time away from ones parents, not being continually monitored by them.
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Yes I know the use of some vendors to use cock opposed to chicken is just asking for trouble.
"enter your password"
...yeah. So all that's standing between innocent children and the depraved preying on them is their parents ability to choose a strong password (or worse, the ability of the phone companies to do the same!)
For once, won't someone please think of the children and put a halt to these privacy invading schemes that are massively dangerous to the very children they're marketed to protect?
(I'll let someone else bring up the "once a generation of them have lived under constant surveillance like this, they won't fight it when the government implements the same for everyone all the time" slippery slope argument.)
That there every move should, will, and is being recorded. So that when they grow up, they can each have a GPS chip implanted into their arm and feel perfectly okay with it.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
to track YOUR kids!
Our daughters are becoming sexualized at an increasingly younger age; what used to be sex qua liberation is quickly becoming an enslaving self-prostitution.
You may notice an inconsistency: agitation about sex-crimes is coupled with sexualizing pre-teen-propaganda.
I am afraid that the abuse of this new service will outweight its benefits.
How many good parents are out there, and how many bad? how many parents who forbid their children perfectly normal and reasonable things?
You know David Millar, the disputed champion of the most recent Tour de France? his father forbad him to do cycling, because he didn't want his son to be a cyclist. David had to sneak out at 1am in the morning to practise overnight.
A friend of mine grew up with awful parents; they wouldn't let him have any freedom, see his friends, have friends over, have girlfriends, etc. He was badly repressed. He managed to work around it as best he could, by doing things secretly. Now he'd be watched, permanently, and have absolutely no way whatsoever of having freedom.
Another friend of mine had a very violent father. He used to beat the crap out of her regularly. What would her fate now be if he could also now know exactly where she was at all times?
How would you feel, thinking back to when you grew up, if your parents always knew exactly where you were?
It's not even so much that you were going to do things which were "wrong" and now you can, but rather, you knew that you *could* and you chose not to. Now, you know that you CANNOT. That choice has been taken from you. You have no freedom.
It's ironic. We're so concerned about our own freedom from the State, but apparently we're entirely happy for our kids to have no freedom from *US*.
. . .now that I have a daughter on the way, however, I have to find clever ways of curtailing décadence with a light hand.
Dear Poor, Ignorant Bastard (my daughter is 26),
Your daughter is going to simply arrange for her cell be where you expect it to be while hooking up with her "diseased cock" using a prepaid disposable, thus all you will be doing is impossing a financial burden on her.
Although the experience of learning to run rings around you will have some real life value.
Have a nice parenthood.
KFG
... kids who want to be tracked.
Any kid who doesn't want to be tracked has a number of options including:
(1) Turn the phone off.
(2) Leave the phone at home (one of my kids does this regularly when he's out of credit).
(3) Leave the phone somewhere harmless, eg at an approved-of friend's house, whilst off doing something less harmless.
Now, all these involve not having the phone with you, so the kid might also wish to:
(4) Get another phone for real-life use, which you don't tell your parents about.
Or, sometimes even cheaper, don't get a whole new phone:
(5) Get another SIM for real-life use, which you don't tell your parents about.
OK, so none of these work if the parent is phoning the child every five minutes and expecting them to actually answer - there's a limit to how often the child can "not hear" the ringtone, or claim that "I don't answer the phone whilst sitting on the loo", or whatever. But, as ever, such a family has people-issues to which a technological solution ain't gonna work anyway.
Light hand is the key composite; and I still haven't given up on pædagogy, I'm afraid.
(I'm sorry your daughter has HSV and HPV.)
Love, MI
There are none so blind as . . . parents.
KFG
"Our daughters are becoming sexualized at an increasingly younger age;"
well for starters "our daughters" used to get married and have children at 13 years old if you read your history.
what used to be sex qua liberation is quickly becoming an enslaving self-prostitution.
all i can say is, no, i completely disagree. please provide some substance behind your claim.
"You may notice an inconsistency: agitation about sex-crimes is coupled with sexualizing pre-teen-propaganda."
i'm pretty sure peole have always been extremely concerned about sex crimes. plus i think you're spinning conspiracy theories here.
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sounds great!
Lets track the position of every child, im sure no-one else other than parents would find this useful (perverts) and that the windoze boxes hosting it will be perfectly secure!
You're able to assist them, so you must be in contact with them. Therefore, you can call them and give them directions, as opposed to tracking them in this rather sinister fashion.
If, as a parent, you find you're rarely aware of where your child is, maybe you should start to question your relationship with them. As they're evidently unable to trust you with their whereabouts, following them around isn't going to help you get along, and will only make them bitter in the future.
The "lost child" scenario could be used to justify any level of surveillance. It automatically ensures parental support and, as most people are parents, this makes up a large proportion of the population. People should think about these kinds of things rationally, and not through such a knee-jerk, must-protect-my-young, decision. How much of your life would you allow to be videotaped for the sake of "ensuring" your kids' safety?
If you give a phone tracking device to your.....what? 10 year old? Then that will allow to do.....what precisely? Compare that with your 16-17-18 year old whose movements you will track and that will allow.....what again? Seems to me if you have a kid who refuses to callback or answer their phone you've lost either way. And if you want to use this as a passive device to track them in spite of their own behavior, well, let's just say I'm glad I don't have to sit down with your family at dinner.
See, let's just set aside the squishy implications of whether you think this is an ethical thing to do. That's your decision to make, not mine. Instead, as a practical matter, if your kid tells you they're at "A's" house and you doublecheck and discover they're not, then what do you do? And below a certain age if your kid is out of your sight and lying to you about it, then you have bigger problems than technology can solve, unless of course you plan on subjecting your kids to drug tests and lie detector tests the moment you drag them home. On the other hand, if your kid is almost 18, then the same behavior really says more about you as a parent and maybe your anal retentive, passive aggressive borderline paranoid martyr complex than it does about your kids.
Let's just say that as a parent of teenagers who routinely do not like to be interrupted when they are doing exactly what they told me they were going to do, that whether I can verify where they are at all times will just make them that much less eager to talk to me and answer their phone. As I've said many many times;
Sometimes the greatest revenge you can wreak on a control freak is to actually give them total control. It will piss them off and burn them out faster than resistance.
It saddens me that the product of the loins beneath a mind like this will some day be running around in my world. Hopefully your daughter will have some streak of willfulness or independence and defy your paranoid, degrading assumptions about her. Or perhaps she's lucky enough to have a good mother, though I don't see how one would be foolish enough to procreate with you. Please mod parent and his other posts down, they are egregiously off-topic and inflammatory.
When? You behave like children are disappearing left, right and center.
Children are most likely to be abused by someone they know: A neighbor, relative or parents. There are way more cases of domestic abuse then abductions.
Yes, there is a risk that something awful will happen to your child but it's stupid to live in fear.
> Considering we live in an age where kids under 14 have cellular phones, is it really so wrong for
> parents to want to know where they are, and for that matter, is it really an issue of "rights"? Sure,
> if it's being used for tracking adults, then yes, it is. But not in keeping track of kids (as opposed
> to what, implanting chips/RFID chips in them? At the least, this is the least intrusive).
What happens when the parents are abusive?
The kid goes to see a relative or a cop or a helper or whatever, to try and get help, to tell someone, and the parents will KNOW. And maybe beat the crap out of the kid for doing it.
Same problem with the State.
Say you do something or make a report which threatens a major industry. There's a LOT of money at stake. The State - or rather, a bit of it, maybe a branch which regulates this industry but has basically been compromised by that industry - starts doing things which are entirely unethical to try to suppress the report - perhaps discredit the author in whatever way they can. (Bit like with Lewinsky, where the Press Office deliberately and specifically lied about her and what happened and attempted to discredit her.)
They won't mind a bit getting hold of his position information and using it to track what he does, which journalists he visits, where his family is.
This technology is massively open to abuse, and humans are shit. It WILL be abused, and everyone who is in a position where they may be doing something which the State will object to will KNOW it will be abused, and it will flatly discourage them from doing what ought to be done.
Reading these comments, you'd think these kids circumventing their GPS tracking are straight out of some orbiting Battle School (Ender's game ref!), and not the standard, mind-numbing public schools that most people subject their kids to. Never mind that _parents_ are being cast as folks with IQs lower than your standard Fox sitcom character's. I attribute this to many Slashdotters feeling that they were much smarter than their foolish parents about computers, so, obviously, said Slashdotters were much smarter about EVERYTHING.
Will a few kids be smart enough to circumvent this, and the parents too dumb to notice? Yes. Clearly, it is not a solution for every case. But most of these supposed circumvention techniques (leave phone somewhere else, turn it off, pay someone to answer it, whatever) rely on parents being completely stupid, and not having some sort of verification method. I'm not sure if I think the entire concept of GPS tracking your kids is great (I'd like them to be able to provide their positions with their own free will via a button push), but it's not nearly as worthless and bankrupt as some Slashdotters have been ranting.
It's disturbing as all hell to see the kind of parenting mantra that's being espoused on here: "you'll never be able to stop your kid from seeing the real world, so let them run wild at 13!" I guess it's a relief that your average Slashdotter probably won't ever have kids anyways.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
What scares me more than the eagerness of the powers-that-be to use technology to further diminish our privacy is the willingness of the common man to use these same technologies to diminish our privacy of his own volition under the guise of love.
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
There ain't no rebel like a person who grew up under the thumb of an authority figure!
Blar.
I love the blatant hypocrisy shown in the replies to date. The Slashdot Hivemind is always getting all wound up about how parents are responsible for their children, etc... etc... But when a tool that can be useful to that end is proposed... It's instantly the worst child rearing tool since the Iron Maiden.
Freedom is great for adults, not for kids. As a parent, part of your job in raising kids is to keep them safe, and to keep them in line. A cell phone with GPS fits into my scheme of "Trust, but Verify" When the kid shows enough maturity, etc. to get a little more freedom, give them the benefit of the doubt, let them stay out later, let them stay over at a friends, but have something like this to verify they are where they SAY they are, if you are suspicious. You can't follow the kid around 24/7, and you would look like a nut to call the other parent's house every 30 minutes or so to make sure they are still in the house. (Believe me, there are other parents who, either through neglect, indifference, or whatever, let their kids and guests leave the house at all hours of the night during a sleepover) I have a GPS tracker on the car my daughter uses that you need to manually download the data, so it isn't real time, but it gives me where she drives, and what speeds she drives. We only use it to verify her story if she shows up late with some lame excuse, and was unavailable by cel phone for an extended time. Wait until you have a teen daughter, it is SCARY!!! The technology gives us the comfort level to give her MORE freedom, because we can check up on her if needed.
You just hear about it more these days. World-wide media just dredges these horror stories up from remote locales and brings them to you.
Blar.
There is one major hidden cost in these systems no parent realizes. The conditioning of your child to obey rules and never question continuous invasive surveilance, to bend over backwards and take it up the *** by the police state, and be conditioned never to stand up for their rights or freedom, but to be herded at will by command by anyone who presumes to be an authority figure. Whether this authority figure is a corrupt cop, a perverted school teacher, a gang leader, a shaggy haired band leader they look up to, a cult leader like Manson, their best friend with horrendous motives (most likely), a pimp, etc. You're basically training your kid to be a frightened scared timid trusting cow who follows, follows, follows, and obeys.
Public schools are horrendous for this. Indoctrination with the pledge of allegance, question / response type programming, regimentation, continuous testing and therefore continuous judging, on campus police force, metal detectors, barb wire, mandatory attendance, peer pressure, etc. From day one we are taught to obey... if we cry someone stuck a bottle in our mouth to shut us up. More than likely you have pounded this into your kid their entire life. Do what they are told. No you can't have that, because I said so. Sit down and be still. Do your homework. Eat your peas. And on and on and on. You've taught and trained your kid to obey every command given to them. Have you ever taught them to say "no"? Have you ever taught them to say "you do it!"? How about "go f* yourself?" How about how to physically fight? I imagine not. How do you think they are going to react when some bully tells them to give them your car, or their money, or to get in the car with them, or to go help them do some crime?
Eventually your kid is going to be on his own in the world no matter what with no supervision at all. And at the mercy of a viscious hustling world of corporate interests, spin, doublespeak, and out and out lies saturated in our media. You need to be teaching them basic skills... money management, how to get a job, how to cook, how to clean, how to avoid toxic products like softdrinks and junk food that will make them diabetic and fat, depressed, fatigued, and sick.
You can follow your kid around all you want with your GPS in the cellphone or car, and live with the false sense of security you're protecting your suburbanite kid. What happens however when they run into the streetwise black kid from the ghetto who's grown up taught by his ex-con dad how to hustle all his life, sell drugs, manilipulate people based on their wants, etc. You're sheltered kid is going to be like a fat loaf of bread and the ghetto crack kid is going to be like the knife.