Slashdot Mirror
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.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
"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
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*.
... 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.
"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.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
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.