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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."
... 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.
> Kids are clever these days. They'll soon realize they can turn their phones off to go places parents
> shouldn't know about. Or let the battery drain, so they don't get blamed when they get home ("oops, I
> forgot to recharge it! sorry...").
Not if you parents are violent, physically or emotionally. You're a kid. You haven't grown up, you don't have experience, you're totally dependent on your parents in every way, you're scared to tell anyone what's going on, and you just don't know any better.
Roughly half the people I know, maybe somewhat more, had shit parents. I NEVER want to see such people having this sort of technological hold over their children.
It seems to me the benefits decent parents will derive from this technology is far, far outweighed by the harm and suffering that will be inflicted by it upon the kids who have awful parents.