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Making a Child Locating System
celtic_hackr writes "Well, I never thought I'd be an advocate for placing GPS devices on people. However, since it took less than three days for my local school district to misplace my daughter, I have decided that something needs to be done. By the school district's own admission it has a recurring problem of placing children on the wrong buses. Fortunately, my daughter was located, with no thanks to the local school district. Therefore, I would like input on a way to be able to keep track of my child. I know there are personal tracking devices out there. I have nothing against these systems. But I want more than this. My specification are: 1) a small unobtrusive device I can place on my daughter, 2) an application to pull up on any computer, a map with a dot indicating the real-time position of my child, 3) a handheld device with the equivalent information, 4) [optional] a secure web application/plug-in I can install on my own domain allowing me to track her from anyplace in the world, 5) a means of turning it all off, 6) a Linux based solution of the above. I believe all the pieces for making such a system are out there. Has anyone built anything like this? Is there an open source solution? How would I go about building my own? Has anyone hacked any of these personal trackers before, to serve their own purposes? How does a tinfoil hat wearer engineer such a device to make sure Big-Brother isn't watching too? Can these devices be locked down so only certain devices can pick up the GPS location of an individual locator? What other recommendations do you have?"
Holy crap- you are, what we in the biz call, an over-reacting parent. Calm down and take it easy before you destroy your daughter's life.
That being said- verizon has an application for cell phones that lets you track your children- it's on get it now. I'm sure other carriers have something similar.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
Buy your daughter a cellphone and have her use Google Latitude? Set up speed dial to call you, your wife, etc.? Just kicking ideas around...
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Police and insurance companies are familiar with the operation of these units. And a few brackets will easily and securely mount the unit to your daughter's undercarriage.
http://www.zoombak.com/
-- Chris Martin, System Administrator
... yields 36,9000 hits.
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
This one seemed to work pretty well at finding my wife, anyway.
At least in my country (Estonia) you can track any GSM cellphone's (belonging to you) location from the provider's webpage or similar.
When I was in middle school they gave all the kids a laminated bus pass with the bus number in big block type, and had the bus numbers spray painted on the sidewalk so everyone who had to ride the bus knew exactly where to line up. Nobody ever got on the wrong bus because nobody ever got in the wrong line. So why is this a recurring problem for your daughter's school district?
I say make them fix the problem instead of forcing you to shell out money to cover it up for them.
1. Hack an iPhone or other smart phone to act as a torrent server over 3G
2. Fill the drive with Metallica tracks
3. Duct tape the phone to your daughter
4. If you need to know where she is, just ask the RIIA
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=child+gps
Why not just drive her to and from school yourself? That would provide additional time with your daughter as well.
You wouldn't have to trust the school to not lose her on the bus system
You don't need a subcutaneous lo-jack.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
You probably don't want it continually transmitting. Easiest way would be to it respond to a 'ping'. http://www.mightygps.com/smsgps.htm looks to fit the bill perfectly. There are probably cheaper Chinese clones.
Get it a SIM card and you'll be able to track her anywhere there's AT&T Signal (so you're equally fucked anyway). Google Maps API kicks ass. It's not hard to write some code to take that SMS and turn it into a dot on a map.
-
However I agree with the other posters. Your kid's fine. How many kids have they PERMANENTLY lost? So the kid gets on the wrong bus. Teach your daughter English and she should be able to find out where she is at any time.
Reminds me of the mother who caught a ton of flack for letting her young son find his own way home (he asked to) from a big store in NYC.
The people that want to rape and molest your daughter statistically are yourself or one of your brothers(-in-law)
Having two daughters my self - the last one graduating from HS this Friday, I understand the OP's concern, especially if the child is still in Grade School. The Cell phone with GPS is your best bet, unless the school is banning cell phones (which my daughter's school tried to do). Another option is car pooling where a parent picks up several kids at once and then the next parent the next day - etc. Put your tin foil hat away, or your daughter will begin to see boogey men around every corner.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Your attitude is extremely unhealthy for your child, honestly.
However, most of the major carriers have child oriented cell phones that can be located in an emergency. Most of them will also allow the child to call you or 911, and be restricted otherwise. Real time monitoring is going to be pricey, however, and somewhat psychotic.
Not to mention, you would need to put a live transmitter on your kid.. Personally, I don't want to expose my child to 24/7 RF.
Teach them their phone number and give them a bracelet or something with their address on it.
You should also probably stop watching television. Give up on the news especially. It's just scare mongering crap.
Oh and watch Finding Nemo. It's got some lesson in there about being an overprotective parent.
Looks like it could fit in something smallish.
http://www.brickhousesecurity.com/theft-recovery-asset-tracker.html
You could make something with a smartphone I'm sure. The problems I see with that are, firstly that GPS wants line of sight to the satellites so the phone has to be obvious and secondly smartphones are desireable and expensive. Your child may now become a target for thieves.
You could hide the phone, or use a small computer like a nokia n series and use a small bluetooth GPS unit. It could be placed unobtrusively on top of a backpack with the phone/computer inside. Trouble is the battery life on my bluetooth GPS is only a few hours. Much less than a school day. Your daughter probably doesn't want to be lugging a big battery pack around all day.
Why not buy your daughter a cheap cell phone on a pay as you go plan and show her how to answer it. Next time you don't know where she is, you can call and ask her?
I'm curious though. Were you ever out as a child and your parents didn't know exactly where you were?
FP has it right. Calm down.
I pity the poor boy who brings her home 15 minutes late from a date 12+ years from now.
Not sure about size and power though.
Anyways, a SMS to the phone will let it reply with it's position. Wouldn't be hard to get this into Google Maps or something similar.
However, since it took less than three days for my local school district to misplace my daughter, I have decided that something needs to be done. By the school district's own admission it is a recurring problem of placing children on the wrong buses. Fortunately, my daughter was located, with no thanks to the local school district.
The problem isn't that you don't have a tracking device for your daughter. The problem is that your local school district isn't doing its job correctly and regularly putting kids on the wrong bus. Instead of posting on Slashdot for a technical solution, a far better solution would be a call to your local news organizations about how the school district is getting kids lost on their bus system and admits to doing that regularly. Raise a stink at school board meetings, PTA meetings, and so forth. Get other parents involved. You're talking about a school district's incompetence endangering not only your own child but all the children in the district.
Pretend, for instance, that you get a perfect tracking device for your daughter. That sorta solves your problem, in that you can go and pick up your daughter from wherever she was left, but doesn't solve your neighbor's problem, and doesn't solve the problem of what happens to your daughter when she's standing around in a strange neighborhood.
I am officially gone from
I have an easy solution, take your child out of the care of these incompetents and educate her yourself.
This is not entirely facetious. If the school can't even pay enough attention to your child to make sure that she gets on the correct bus, what makes you think they are paying enough attention to make sure that she is learning anything?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
If this question came up a generation ago, before GPS trackers and similar devices were available, you would be looking for ways to better plan school events and to hold the schoolteachers and other school staff accountable for these kinds of mishaps. I think that's the right way to deal with this, though it's not the easy band-aid solution that installing a tracking device would be. In other words, the technological development of a wrong solution doesn't change what the right solution was all along.
I just don't believe in this widespread approach of dealing only with the symptoms of problems. I might consider it (though wouldn't like it one bit) if it were a material object, but the fact that this is a human being should be all the more reason to address the actual problem. The irresponsibility of the school system and the fact that it has taken its obligations lightly is the actual core problem here. A tracking device only provides an incentive for letting them off the hook when they should have to answer for their failures. Yes, that would be much harder to arrange and would probably require political pressure from other like-minded parents, but it would be so much more worthwhile in the end.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Anyone who finds her can scan her and then send her home. An entrepreneurial person can scan her and know where to send the ransom note and where to also send the pieces afterwards.
Or you can just give your kid a fucking cellphone with a GPS in it.
It's really amazing how any of us, and humanity in general, ever lived past their 10th birthday without all the 'safety' gear that is available now. What a truly wonderful time to be alive, we now finally have the tools to live on past childhood.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I suggest you spend some time on Google or eBay.
and what about trowing such device in the back side of a truck and track your wife while is "going shopping"?
privacy concern people...
All you need to do is devise a complex computer with some decision making abilities and program it with information with destination coordinates in case it gets lost.
Program it to recognize a local authority figure like a policeman or teacher and provide them with the destination information so that they can help it find home.
I suspect the most effective hardware platform for such an application is some sort of fairly high-functioning biological organism.
So you have a high tech way of locating your daughter. Do you feel like going on a wild goose chase for here once a week?
Forget the high tech, change your school, that's where the problem is.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Hey there,
buy an android based phone and install the application " BuddyMob" .
It geolocates your position realtime on google maps (and allso your buddies that have the same app offcourse).
GPS Personal Tracker http://www.laipac.com/personal_locator_gps.htm No personal experience with the device but some with the company.
Have conjoined twins, they'll be difficult for a kidnapper to conceal, and nearly everyone will know who their parents are due to rampant media coverage of every detail of their lives. Of course, there are downsides...
My other sig is extremely clever...
Go get her a Disney cell phone. Parental managed GPS tracking from the web, call limiting, (you can lock it down to only being able to call home).
Google that.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Was this supposed to be some sort of abstract attempt at humor? Your GPS device does not send data back to the satellites. It's just a passive receiver. It doesn't matter one bit how many other people have GPSes. Might as well claim you're getting poor FM radio reception due to too many people listening to their stereos.
You would have had a point if you talked about your MOBILE not getting a signal or something due to devices that use that network had you said that.
Moderators: Before moderating a comment Insightful/Informative, check to see if a child post has already refuted it.
Your child will not be misplaced again...
Maybe they'll sell you one.
BTW, as a parent (I know, a slashdot reader that HAS had sex) I understand your frustration with your school district...
Ocean is land, covered with water.
STFU
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Try googling for "SPOT personal tracker". It may be what you need.
If she's old enough to ride a bus, she's old enough to remember a cell phone number and ask a responsible adult to call you when she's in the wrong place.
Teach her to take responsibility for herself, it will serve her better in the long run.
this is only slightly removed from one of those horrible child leashes. No child needs GPS tracking.
if you are that worried about your child's safety, move to a nicer neighborhood. you'll make up the cost difference with years of therapy averted in the future.
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun the frumious Bandersnatch.
Our school has a separate line inside the building for each bus. All the children know where they are supposed to go to get in line. There is an adult at the head of each line that makes sure they go to the correct bus.
I used Instamapper on my Blackberry to provide real time / historical GPS tracking of myself. It's free, extremely easy to set up, and has Facebook integration. Be warned, GPS is a battery killer. I set all this up when I first became interested in location aware apps, and its run fine since.
http://www.instamapper.com/
It's cheap, quick, easy, and for $10/m, you can't beat it.
You can always carve the chip out yourself, and they'll provide free room and board for her at the pound if she ever gets lost.
As others have mentioned, a GPS enabled cell phone is the easiest option. I think some of the responses were far less rational than your request. I live in a small-ish community of 185,000 and just yesterday read of a girl that has been missing for 8 years with no leads. If you live in a large community, it is even more common. Between pedophiles and girls being forced into prostitution I think this is a reasonable thing to do. I have even read stories of forced prostitution rings in Iowa, so the problem is pretty wide spread. Only you can decide what is an appropriate trade off between safety and security for your child. You know your neighborhood and naivety of your child better than anyone blasting you on Slashdot.
My daughter's bus driver knows all the kids on his bus and if someone is missing or extra the situation is resolved before the bus leaves the school. Another good advantage is the teachers and administrators also know each child personally and if they see something going on they can yell names across the schoolyard instead of just saying "hey you".
Your kid will hate you for this should you ever try to do it. And I wouldn't be surprised if you had to do a lot of explaining to child welfare agencies.
For a dedicated solution, you can buy a Falcom Mambo (http://www.falcom.de/products/personal-tracker/mambo/)
Dedicated GPS tracker with an emergency button
Long battery life
Very Open
#include "coucou.h"
I believe this "Making a Child" Locating System will be of interest to many Slashdotters.
Billy Crystal used to joke about wanting to install LoJack in his daughters panties. Its a sad day when someone in the /. crowd wants such a device for reals.
Can't you just give her a cell phone and call her if she gets lost? I'm sure she'll be able to tell you what cross streets shes on.
You could simply hire one of their devices for a small fee, input the details of your child, age, hair colour, eye colour etc and a dedicated team of "child lovers" could follow the movements of your child on a web site for you 24 hours per day.
You know this is going to happen.
Deleted
Tracking your child is a path you really don't want to start down, unless you want to drive yourself (and them) insane with constantly watching every thing they do. Threaten the school board with legal action. They'll get their act together.
How about the age of the daughter...are we talking about an 8 y/o getting on the wrong bus, or an 18 y/o...
I'll be in my bunk.
You're like someone installing a firewall when an unpatched service allows arbitrary connections, instead of patching the service.
Your school places your daughter on the wrong bus, that's the problem. Not that you can't track her. Solve the underlying problem instead. Either storm the principal's office and fire up a storm, get the PTA (if existant) to do something about the problem (since it's a "recurring problem" you're certainly not the only parent in that situation, get in touch with the other parents) and if everything fails, get another school to teach your kids (which is probably a sensible idea anyway, if they're not able to get your daughter in the right bus and didn't manage to teach her to choose the right one, it's likely they don't manage to teach her anything else either).
You're looking for the solution for the wrong problem. The problem isn't that you can't find your daughter. The problem is that she isn't where she should be in the first place. Don't cure the symptom, cure the sickness!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This happened to me when I was a kid. The school thought that I had signed up for Hockey, but hadn't. They sent me across town to hockey practice.
Instead of freaking out, I got there and started playing hockey. Then I called my mom and told her to come and pick me up.
Why? Because I didn't have psychotic over-reacting parents. I was smart enough to go "there is a problem here, I should fix it."
And I did.
Teach your daughter this same thing. Make her memorize your phone number.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Wow. Perhaps she was trying to get away from you.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
. . . and doesn't solve the problem of what happens to your daughter when she's standing around in a strange neighborhood.
. . . give her a shark, with lasers.
Forget that wimpy GPS stuff.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
the Pedobear seal of approval?
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
One solution is to get a good, programmable phone (a good nokia phone such as the n95, or any android phone) with a data plan and program it yourself. getting the gps data from the phone API would probably be trivial, but I'm not sure how to post this data somewhere where you can access it remotely. However, this would probably be an expensive solution for you, both in terms of CA$H, work, and convenience for your daughter (the n95 isn't exactly a child-friendly phone, and probably neither are most of the phones with open API's for GPS and data capabilities). Or, instead of a data plan, you could send periodical TXT messages from the phone to your email address. I'm pretty sure I've seen methods for this in the python API for SymbianOS (Nokia's platform). The latter might be easier and cheaper to pull off.
That being said, I have to agree with 99% of the other posts here, that lecture you on how you're overreacting. Kids get lost sometimes. Life isn't safe. They have to get used to it, and so do you. I'm sure your parents didn't have you tagged with GPS when you were a kid, and you seem to have survived (at least long enough to procreate)...
weinersmith
Duh-boy, cue debates on how much surveillance for your child is really necessary.
Child?! I want one of those for my girlfriend!
Why on earth you want to do it yourself? Didn't you child have default one prebuilt?
since you didn't ask if was a "good" idea, here goes: numerous tracking devices for hunting dogs are available which will do just about what you wanted. real time locations, on/off controls, small size (50-cents US coin). ALL use proprietary systems and expensive batteries. none interface with any cellphone/crackberry/etc. but they do work well within a 12-mile range of the receiver unit.
My wife got me a SPOT for Christmas. I like to think she worries when I go on long solo hikes.
Don't forget one of these.
Gouge out one of your daughter's eyes and install a webcam, pluck one of her ears out and mount an omnidirectional microphone, graft a microstrip antena on her forhead and replace one of her teeth with a GPS module. This system sends encrypted video through the cellular network of your choice that ssh's to your home terminal, which you can access via your favorite portable device. IPhone preferred, there is a relative app on the appstore
Maybe you can hack a python app that automatically notifies you when your child leaves designated areas without proper authorization. And when the brain is analyzed deeply enough, maybe you should think about remotely controlling your child.
Seriously, is there no limit to what people are willing to give up in order to achieve a false sense of security?
Imagine how YOU would feel if your employer installed a GPS tracking system on you to verify if you're really at home or in a hospital when calling in sick. Imagine how YOU would feel if back in the day your parents DID have such a system to track you down. Imagine what happens to a society whose members are taught that constant surveillance is OK by their own family. Seriously, take a chill pill and
think of the children
With such a tracking device, you'll then have to worry about bad guys abusing it.
There are people who would cheer for joy if you showed them exactly where every child was at all times.
Well, you know, since the demise of the 'ticky box' (like that thing that Doctor Who flies around in) everybody else just gives their child a cell phone so the child can call his/her parents.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I saw this awhile back and now it looks like it should be available soon. It can be personalized to fit you child's daily activities by letting you know if the child goes outside a given area that you have deemed appropriate for them. They call it a virtual fence.
It's a watch that actually looks like a child's watch making it less obvious and less intrusive to the child.
It may seem overbearing to some but perspectives change when kids go missing; especially when it's your kid. And into today's world you can never be too careful. A fancy new watch for my son and peace of mind for his parents... at any price is definitely worth it.
sudo apt-get lost
Security is not a product; it itself is a process. And if we're going to make our digital systems secure [sic and or loved ones], we're going to have to start building processes. If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology. ~Bruce Schneier
My phone company provides this service for $5 a month. One cell phone can GPS-locate another cell phone twice a month. There is a setup step where a confirmation must be send from each handset.
How about you just teach your child what bus to get on. Or pick your child up from school. In 20 years are you going to want your child to think it is ok to track a person? Will your child be one of the ones that says "Well my parents tracked me as a child and I was fine, so lets let the government track us". The buses have numbers written on them just teach your child what number theirs. Once you advocate tracking people as a valid solution to a problem everyone is doing it.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
The problem with tracking is that if you can track your daughter, so can a determined pedophile. The only difference is that the pedophile will be watching her movements more closely than you.
Or maybe it's your comma. Either way, a google search for "subcutaneous ants" has more hits.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
First off, write a letter explaining what has happened and send it to your school board, city council, and local newspaper-who-might-give-a-crap-about-this-kind-of-thing. Talk with your daughter's teachers, the school principal, and whoever else you need to to get some assurances that they're not going to do this again.
Then, if you're still worried about your children being sent to the off-world colonies while you're not looking, talk with your daughter about what happened and how she can make sure she gets home on the right bus. If you really want a technological solution then buy her a mobile phone, maybe something like one of these beasties which can be locked down to only calling a handful of numbers (not a product endorsement, just giving an example), and make sure she knows how to call you at home if she has trouble again. Keep it charged and have her stash it in her jacket or backpack where she's unlikely to lose it. There's no need to weld it onto a metal cuff around her ankle, just let her use it to call you when she needs to.
Hopefully you can both feel better about her security that way. You need to know that she is safe, and she needs to know that you trust her and that you are able to help her out if she has troubles. Strapping a prisoner restraint collar around her neck and monitoring her every move isn't going to do that.
You want (note that I didn't say need, that's being discussed elsewhere) a SPOT GPS Tracker. Here's some details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPOT_Satellite_Messenger. It's generally $149 for the unit and $100/year for the service. I got one for my father-in-law, who's in his 80s and still working a cattle ranch. If he finds himself in a situation that he can't handle, he just needs to press one button and help is on the way. No need to worry about cell towers, it uses the Globalstar satellite network to send messages, so your kid can use it even while crossing the Atlantic in a kayak.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
An option would be giving her an iPhone 3g with a data plan and install http://findmyi.org/ .
But then, who's going to protect her from interweb-predators?
I am reading a lot of 'just get a cell phone'. Problem is, true GPS requires clear view of the sky to work consistently. That means the cell phone would could not be in a pocket or a backpack, ever. One could use the cell signal's 'location estimator' which might be accurate or might be of by 100's of meters and also required a data plan, but that's not really GPS anymore.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Then so can every other pervert waiting to molest your child. Furthermore it can be used to help establish lifestyle patterns in which people get to know you without you ever knowing them. It is amazing that the vast majority of people just flat out trust technology on this level despite overwhelming proof that YOU CANT TRUST TECHNOLOGY!
It works like this. Someone GPS's their child. The trend catches on and then someone gets the bright idea that the goobermint should regulate it. Now everyone is forced to wear GPS so the goobermint can trak all of it's wayward citizen's and when someone stumbles into the wrong place without knowing any better the CIA/FBI or your favorite 3 letter organization like the DHS can legal come in and take you to Gitmo as a terrorist without any protections.
And all this to help protect you and your child. Meanwhile rampant kidknappings are taking place because some underground entity has managed to continually hack goobermint computers and locate all your kiddos. All they have to do next is cut out the gps chips with a chainsaw or a scalpel if they are friendly kidnappers.
Anyone who thinks I am nuts has obviously not paid much attention to the security forums that have tried to out the very lazy security with RFID implimentations. Technology is great, but it has allowed indentity theft to become MUCH EASIER to perpetrate, and strangely enough, more difficult to track down and catch.
Are we talking about a five year old? Eight? Ten? Fifteen?
The range of options varies with age. None of which involve tracking your child to a three-foot radius, btw.
By age 8, your kid should know which bus they're supposed to be on. (Probably earlier, but for the sake of argument.)
If younger, then you should be addressing it with the school.
www.accutracking.com Works on just about any GPS enabled device. Virtually real time tracking (you define how often the device updates it's location to the server.) It has google maps integration and has a "covert" install option for some evices. All that for $6 a month and no minimum contracts or autorenew subscriptions. Damn I sound like a salesman but I'm not, really. I've used it to bust my teenage son ditching class and driving off with friends in locations I specifically told him not to go.
Holy crap- you are, what we in the biz call, an over-reacting parent. Calm down and take it easy before you destroy your daughter's life.
Didja read the summary? His daughter went missing after she was put on the wrong bus. I'm not a parent, but even I'm alarmed at reading that. I don't blame the guy, and I think that the normal reaction of any parent in a stressful situation like that can hardly be called 'destroying his daughter's life.'
Drill baby drill - on Mars
I'm going to leave aside the wisdom of doing this, and focus on the practical aspects.
Has anyone built anything like this?
An Android phone hooked up to Google Latitude would meet most of your requirements - small, accessible anywhere you've got an internet connection, accessible on mobile phones, phone can be turned off, phone is linux based.
Is there an open source solution?
There's OpenGTS, an Open GPS Tracking System. However, it's not obvious from their website what trackers it works with.
How would I go about building my own?
People have home-made basic versions. GPS modules can be purchased which give a reasonably accurate location once per second, or on demand, over a serial, usb, or bluetooth link; many mobile phones have gps modules already built in. Most tracking systems communicate over the cell phone system, either by SMS or mobile data connections. Of course, many mobile data connections are firewalled/NATed, so the benefit of SMS is you can transmit a query to the tracker. The disadvantage is the per-message cost, especially if you want regular location updates, and that it's easier to program the PC end of a mobile data connection. Cell companies also offer "machine to machine" data plans, but it's unlikely they'll want to deal with you if you're making a one-off homebrew system.
You could get a separate cell phone and GPS and make a homebrew device, like the one linked above, but you're unlikely to get things much more compact than buying a mobile phone with both built in.
If you're a programmer, my suggestion would be a mobile phone running Android, and using the GPS APIs to read the location and send it off to your server.
How does a tinfoil hat wearer engineer such a device to make sure Big-Brother isn't watching too?
Pretty much every mobile tracking system uses the cell phone network for connectivity, because it's more widely available than WiFi, and more affordable than a satellite connection. If you're paranoid about privacy, you should be worried about cell phone triangulation, as that would be the most practical way for "big brother" to track people; so to be paranoid, you can't use a cell phone connection, which will make your design task substantially more difficult. It would be far easier to get a mobile phone, set it up with Google Latitude, turn it off, and tell your daughter to turn it on if she gets lost.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Remember folks, it's been said over and over and over again... First it will be tracking criminals, then it will be tracking children for their safety, then it will be tracking the general populous because they grew up with it.
With technology come vigilance on how it's used and how it could *potentially* be used.
Humanity, sliding down that slippery slope since 1984.
Have her repeatedly commit crimes (theft?) and local law will install an ankle bracelet. With this she should be either placed under house arrest andr hopefully be allowed to go to school. If she ever deviates from either location, law enforcement will contact you and let you know soon to be followed by them escorting her home safely.
from 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
to 45 2F 6E 40 3C DF 10 71 4E 41 DF AA 25 7D 31 3F
How about giving your daughter some money and teaching her how to make a phone call?
When I was young my parents made me memorize two very important phone numbers: my home phone and 911.
If I got lost (which I did once when I was 8 years old) I called home. If no one was home, I called 911.
Live in a rural area? No problem, get your kid a cell-phone and make sure they understand it's to be used for emergencies only.
I want something like this for one of my dogs.
One of our dogs is hard to see at night and will take off after a rabbit when on a walk that she will rip the leash from your hand. She will then get her leash tangled in a bush somewhere. Once trapped like this she will remain perfectly quiet for days even if you walk by the bush calling her name. If only she would bark for help we wouldn't have a problem. But she has gotten her self trapped this way several times, and on one occasion spent two nights that way until we found her. (Her silence probably did save her from coyotes, however.)
A locater would be good, but even something that made a noise would be fine. If we could get a very small cellphone with a ringer only, that would probably do the job. (Maybe we would set the ring tone to a bark.) Anything attached to her collar needs to be small and light enough that she won't try to remove it and cheap enough so that if she does lose or destroy it we will feel okay about replacing it.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
hopefully the kind that is hot, isn't camera shy, and releases videos in HD.
I can't believe it didn't even make your list of requirements, but I would think the #1 priority would be that nobody, and I do mean nobody, should be able to gain access to the location info/tools without your express authorization, except maybe a confirmed police officer with a stated emergency need for it.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
There's some suggestions for cell phones coupled with GPS options, but you really don't even need that. You can get her a cheap cell phone, and if you want to know where she is, just call her and ask. Get a little trust going, don't spy on her all the time with GPS. If you can't get a hold of her the cell phone can also act as a locator if it's really needed (cell phone companies are required to be able to pin point a phone's location for the police).
But I think constant GPS surveillance ability on a cell or some sort of other GPS tracking device is really too much.
...thousands of years ago when parents combined the naming of their children with yelling at the top of their lungs that dinner is ready.
Since everyone seems to be jumping on the "Slow your roll" bandwagon. I will offer a different suggestion for you. Battery + Arduino + GPS module + cellphone = really complex but possible (I think) solution. Good Luck!
we're talking about a CHILD here. no creeping big brother implied
it is perfectly ok to track a child by GPS. how can i say such a horrible thing? because we are talking about... yes, you guessed it, a CHILD. it makes a difference. there is no slippery slope: your average intelligence human being can tell the difference between an adult and a child when it comes to accountability and responsibility. as such THERE IS NO SLIPPERY SLOPE. you do not have a monopoly on perceiving common sense obvious differences
if a kid kills your prized rose bushes, who do you go after? the parents. why? because, legally, morally, and logically, a child's actions are the responsibility and accountability of their parents, because a child is not mentally mature enough to be responsible or accountable. sure there are rare moral savants, 8 year olds who are more accountable and responsible than some 28 year olds, and all children display moments of clarity and lucidity that are adult-level. but on the average, they tend to royally fuck up and make huge mistakes, especially in regard to peer pressure, panic, etc. thus the parent's role in this whole accountability and responsibility thing
but i await the typical fear-addled slippery slope arguments anyways
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is probably a bigger project than you want to take on, and you very likely won't get the result that you think you want.
There are a few essential parts to what you're looking for.
1) The GPS receiver, which must have a view of the sky. It'll be hit and miss inside many vehicles, and probably worthless if she's sitting away from the windows in a bus, and unusable in a building. At least you'll have an idea of the building she entered.
2) The transmitter. You can use a modified alphanumeric pager, but that hopes your modifications are perfect, and aren't prone to failure. You can also use a cell phone or other cellular device (like a USB EVDO modem). Pay attention to the rate plan that you pay for. If it doesn't allow for unlimited data, don't send data once every 5 seconds. If you send data once every 10 to 15 minutes, does that give you the resolution that you require?? 15 minutes is one mile of walking for a normal person (average person's walking rate is 4mph).
3) Something to process the data to send out.
4) Something to receive the data (your web server), map it, and display it to you.
5) Batteries. You'll have a limited lifespan on any device, so it will need recharging nightly.
I highly recommend one of the obvious choices. Get her a cell phone. Verizon used to sell a Chaperone phone, which only had 4 buttons that you could program. They could be set to say call home, your cell, your wife's cell, and a neighbor. It also sent GPS data up to their server, so you could either view from your Chaperone-Parent phone that was linked to it, or from their web site.
You could also get any GPS enabled cell phone (not Verizon, they're pissy about enabling GPS), and put a whole variety of applications on it to send updates to somewhere. Even Google Latitude may be an option, but I find sometimes it forgets to check in.
You could also use something like a Garmin DC 30. That's a GPS tracking device for animals. It has a 17 hour battery life.
If you're hell bent on building your own, consider this..
1) You could get an Openmoko phone, which has integrated GPS, accelerometers, and (obviously) cell access. You drop in any GSM SIM from the provider of your choice, and you're online. It does run Linux, so you can write your own script to pull the GPS data, and upload it to the server. It's cute and rubber covered, so it's less likely she'll break it by dropping it. I don't suggest trying too many times though.
3) You could tie together a Gumstix computer, Gumstix GPS module, Verizon Wireless EVDO USB device, battery pack, and your own scripting to pull the GPS data.
Writing GPS software isn't impossible. You can open the serial port and read the strings. You have to read multiple strings to get all the data. Then once you have a full dataset, upload it. Alternatively, you can use GPSd, **IF** it will compile for the platform. I've done both, it's up to you to which you use. it was fun writing my own. I'd probably go the GPSd route, since I've already done it, and don't feel the need to reinvent the wheel any more.
You're not going to find the mythical devices that they use on TV and movies, that are a thread like GPS transmitter to sew into her jacket, that has an infinite battery life, and always sends the exact location, regardless of environmental variables (buildings, clouds, distance from cell networks).
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Prepaid cellphone with long standby life in the pocket of her backpack or book bag.Recharge the battery a couple nights a week.Manage the lattitude account yourself to ensure only appropriate monitoring.
Here's an idea - TRY TALKING TO HER. Oh, nevermind, that won't work by linux. How about sending her a text message?
Is she old enough to be responsible with a cellphone? Just do that. If you want to know where she is, you call her, and if something unexpected happens she can call you. Simple.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Not only did you inadequetly answer the question but you added your own stupid (and very naive) comments that prove you either have no children or have never had that overwhelming sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when your child doesn't get off the bus as expected. Be glad you live in your nice.... relatively safe places... because where I live kids are often stolen and ransomed back to their parents. Every member of my family is geo-tagged and tracked 24x7. Evil lives in your neighborhoods too... you just cant see past the disguise yet.
Just think of when your kid gets old enough to realize you're tracking her every move. Do you think that's going to go over well with her? What if you want to keep it on her to make sure she's not going to any "unacceptable" parties? There's a BIG consequence in doing something like this, in the parent/child relationship.
I'd go w/everyone else and say "Get her a cell phone". There are plenty out there for kids that lock down so they can't call foreign countries and text 1000s of times to her friends. Simple. If she's in trouble or lost, she can call you. No need to go CIA on her.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Geeze, just about everyone commenting on this post are acting like total assholes.
Have any of you ever tried to 'just get the school to fix' anything? Good frikken luck.
Big brother? Perhaps he isn't trying to spy on his 17 year old. I don't believe he posted his daughters age. What if she is 8 years old? Just give her a cell phone and shut up?
I agree that people are too paranoid in many respects these days, but what is so unreasonable about wanting something you could sew into a backpack or a shoe for an emergency? Technology is supposed to help us with problems. Why should we worry about our missing children when a new solution might be possible? You do this kind of thing with cars, laptops, pets for chrissakes. But your kid? Stop whining. Just have another.
I could see a system like this for places like Disney. Get a bracelet for your kid and find them at the nearest locating station.
I have a kid and everything that he takes to school eventually gets lost. So far this school year its been 3 insulated lunch bags. I am glad it wasn't 3 cell phones or GPS trackers.
Having kids get on the wrong bus is pretty typical for the first couple of weeks of school. The teachers, staff and especially the kids are still figuring it all out. Once a routine has been set in place, there shouldn't be too many more problems.
The best solution to this problem isn't hardware, it's wetware i.e. people. The teachers and staff of an elementary school are your best resource. The part you are missing, as mentioned many times previous in these comments is some teaching and direction from you for your daughter. If you choose to use some technology in this endeavor, great, but just remember it's the people involved that will help you most and that includes your daughter.
I prefer my children to be more free-ranged. Ear tag and brand them to allow for quick identification should someone attempt to horn-in on my 'herd'.
Seriously.... This isn't a tech problem, this is a human problem. Get on the school district's case about this through any and all public means.
Excellent.
The time honored way of dealing with this issue is to have redundant children.
If you live in one of the red countries on this map you are probably not having enough children anyhow. If things don't change, in a couple of hundred years your culture will be gone.
Home-school your kids instead. Seriously. Not only will the school district not lose your kids, they can't turn their heads to mush with go-green (environmentalist) or go-red (socialist) or go-blank (subjectivist) drek, either.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Since you didn't say what grade your daughter was in, I'll assume elementary school. Spend a lot of time and teach her to get a Technician class amateur radio license. Then plant one of these "unobtrusive" things on her. Tada, you now have a mobile tracking system. Go to GoogleAPRS or JfindU to keep an eye on her. Or just do what everyone else says; raise a stink at the PTA meetings.
Just get the kid a cell phone, already.
There's a market catering to paranoid parents, but it's small. Disney bailed out of cell phones in 2007. Whereify, with a GPS watch and tracking system, gave it up a few years ago. (Whereify watches were for the really paranoid. They couldn't be removed without a signal from central control, and if the band was cut or the device damaged, alarms went off.)
The available devices all need charging or battery replacement. That's one advantage of getting the kid a cell phone. They'll keep it charged themselves.
As for the school, get them to put useful destination signs on their buses. Some schools get sloppy about that.
http://www.petsmobility.com/ perfect product for tracking and recovery. They will get smaller with time, but you really need the cell phone component in order to find the lost mammal.
It's really amazing how any of us, and humanity in general, ever lived past their 10th birthday without all the 'safety' gear that is available now.
Some of us didn't. I did, and you did, but some people died who could have been saved by modern safety standards and today's technology.
Homeschool:
... ... not sure about this ...
1) Not needed - just look at her.
2) Allows you to see the real-time position of your daughter in precision 3d detail.
3) All appropriate information available without using any devices
4) Take her with you anyplace in the world
5) Stop looking at her.
6) Hmmm
My daughter started carrying a cell phone in 6th grade for precisely this reason. It's paid off three times: Twice she got on the wrong school bus, and once we lost her in the press of the crowd during a parade. (That was really scary.)
Before GPS became common, I had to rely on her description of where she was. Once (the parade incident) she had to go into a store and ask the attendant for the address. (I discourage her from asking strangers on the street, and she's afraid of the police, due to an incident a few years earlier, so we compromised on convenience store attendants. It wasn't a perfect solution.)
Now, none of that is necessary. She carries a Blackberry Curve and I can check her location via Google Latitude on my own Blackberry. She knows that this is not because I don't trust her, but because I don't trust everyone else. Besides, she can also see my location, which forestalls "Daddy, when are you going to get here?"
There are other tracking services, but Latitude was good enough for our purpose, and free.
Hope this helps.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Honestly, your willing to spend your precious time, money, and resources due to the incompetence of the school system - which you pay for in your taxes to begin with? I can understand if your sending your kids to a school in a high-crime neighborhood, but I doubt that's the case.
Talk to the school district. Ask why these mistakes happen in the first place, and make sure these mistakes don't happen. You shouldn't need to put your kids under surveillance "for their own protection" if there is someone who is supposed to be responsible for the safety and well being of your children.
As for a "Child Locating System", a $20 prepaid cellular phone with call restrictions so the phone can only call home should suffice. That way, all the child has to do is call "HOME" or "MOM" and describe where they are (Or, if the child is actually in trouble, the police should be able to locate the child using the data from the phone).
Be careful about how much of this "side project" is being driven by a genuine need, and how much is being driven by a love for technology.
"Well my parents changed my diapers for me as a child and I was fine, so lets let the government change my underwear"
"Well my parents turned my television off at 10 pm as a child and I was fine, so lets let the government control our televisions"
"Well my parents spanked me as a child and I was fine, so lets let the government deliver corporal punishment"
etc., etc.
none of these things happen, or are widely accepted by the public, simply because, get this: your average person can tell the difference between an adult and a child and that different policies should apply to them. i sound like i am being pedantic, but i have to state the excruciatingly obvious because your entire slippery slope argument depends upon the idea that no one can tell the difference between an adult and a child conceptually except you. why do you think you alone possess some magic perception of the dumbfoundingly obvious and that you need to remind everyone else of it or else everyone will forget a child and an adult are different?
this shows a poor consideration for your fellow man. not of the general snobbish "i am superior to joe blow" variety of poor consideration, but more like the "i am the only sentient being" variety of poor consideration. sorry, other people can think and recognize the obvious too, and so no, there is no slippery slope because the boundaries are clear and the context is clear about how this is being applied. no, there will be no gradual acceptance of gps trackers in adults simply because they are in kids, just like there is no gradual acceptance of governments changing our underwear or turning off our tvs. and no, sorry, i already see the counterargument coming, so let me head it off right now: if you do find some policy that sounds like the government is treating adults like children, this is a failure of logic in its own right, NOT some consequence of how some child somewhere was treated by his parents
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I am not sure whether tracking your child is a good idea or not.
I don't tell other people how to raise their children.
If you wish to buy a tracker in a phone, here is some information.
Good Housekeeping expressed opinions
http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/product-testing/reviews-tests/appliances-electronics/kid-cell-phones-0306
loc8u ofers a GPS Watch
http://www.switched.com/2009/01/07/lok8u-launches-gps-child-locator-watch-at-ces/
Wherify has one
http://www.theinternetpatrol.com/wherify-wherifone-cell-phone-with-gps-locator-lets-you-gps-track-your-kids/
AT&T has one
http://www.gpsbusinessnews.com/AT-T-launches-child-locator-service_a1470.html
Here is a discussion of short and long range child locators
http://www.gpsfortoday.com/child-locators/
Amber Alert has one
http://www.gpschildtracker.net/child-gps-devices-systems-tracking-phone-chip-child-location
However, if you don't want to use a phone
and build more of it yourself,
here are some websites that may be useful:
http://www.tradekey.com/selloffer_view/id/2924121.htm
http://www.brickhousesecurity.com/gps-tracking-server.html
http://forums.coolest-gadgets.com/showthread.php?t=4079
http://www.ecplaza.net/search/0s1nf20sell/gps_tracker_%20gps_tracking_gps.html
http://5thirtyone.com/archives/876/comment-page-1
SERIOUS SOLUTION :
Have you verified with your cell phone provider to see if they deliver this kind of service ? Many cell phones today include GPS functionallity and some cell phone providers allow you to add a feature that gives you exactly what you need :
- Tracking from a computer of someone else in your plan
- Tracking from your own cell phone someone else in your plan
I need to just mention this to my wife and I am one step closer to Divorce, with a court order asking me to stay 10 miles away from both(wife and daughter) of them.
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
THUS, you are best served in this case by getting her a cell phone and teaching her what to do if she gets lost. Preferably a cellphone that already has some of these features available.
I have implemented such a system myself for my company, although for vehicle location rather than people. We use off-the-shelf USB dongles on a laptop, and we have a client app on the laptop that "phones home" every few seconds with the updated positions. A server side app allows plotting points on the map (research Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth). It's very neat, and I'm sure its exactly what you want for your daughter... but since you would want her carrying around a "small device" rather than a laptop anyway, you're looking at a cellphone.
-ZOD-
A) Yes you are overreacting
B) This is pretty easy to fix
As a parent in a city with 36 different schools and countless buses I know what you mean. But there is no reason to tag your little girl. All buses look alike, big yellow with numbers on the side. To make things easy and to avoid duplicate numbers from different bus providers they put a picture in the bus window on colored paper. So your kid might ride bus "Blue Hammer", So obviously the sign is on blue paper with a big picture of a hammer. If your kid manages to get on the wrong bus with that system, either they are not paying attention or they might need that "special" bus.
Why stop there? Why not put and RFID chip under her skin? In fact, I predict that within ten years you will be deemed an unfit parent if you don't.
Be careful what you wish for.
I am SO glad I'm not your kid. Yeah, its nice you care about your child and where they are, but this is so far above and beyond, I can't begin to express. Did your parents track your every move? If so, how did that make you feel?
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- L. Long
At what age is a child responsible enough to get on and off the correct bus?
Answer: 6 yrs old.
How did I come to this?
a) At 6, I walked to and from school over a mile from home.
b) At 6.5, we moved to a new state and I walked about 2 miles to and from school - including the first day.
c) In Iceland, I understand children take mass transit to school daily without issue. I also understand that most adults on MTR help to ensure the kids get on and off the correct trains.
d) As I got older, we moved again and I had to catch the correct bus. That came down to learning the bus placement in the queue, bus number and bus driver.
If this is a special needs child, perhaps writing the bus number on the forehead "BUS 32" would help? That would certainly be cheaper than a $10/month cell phone plan for a child.
BTW, I still can't believe all the parents who give their kids cell phones regardless of the age. For 10,000 years, children didn't have cell phones and seemed to get along just fine. Paying any amount, but especially $500/yr or more seems crazy to me. Put that money into their college savings plan instead. Please.
Just nick the Marauder's Map from Filch's office.
Would that be 9,036 or 45,000 hits?
"Come to our BBBQ: The extra B stands for BYOBB"
"What's that extra B for?"
"That's a typo."
Teach your child what bus she should be on. The brain is already there, you just have to program it.
...surely there's a Linux distro just for this sort of thing?
"We live in a global world" - Harvey Pitt, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman
Unless you're relentlessly geeky, don't try to build or assemble such a system. There are commercial solutions out there, pick one of those. Why depend on an amateur solution for your daughter's safety?
The simplest solution is to give the child a cell phone with GPS as a birthday present. I know, cell phones aren't allowed in many schools, but if it's a small one and she can put it on "ignore" and hide it on her person or in her backpack, for use before or after school, no harm no foul.
And -- this is important -- that cell may be key if there's ever an incident at the school. The most chilling text message I ever got from my daughter was that there had been a shooting and the school was in lockdown. (It turned out ok, but that's a message I wouldn't wish on anyone.) That's what brought it home to me. It's not just the news, it can happen to you too.
As it happens, my daughter's current school does allow cell phones, but they are absolutely forbidden at her summer camp. Screw that -- I tell her to put it in the bottom of her luggage and make sure nobody sees it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The problem with this type of thing is there's no end.
If your going to track at that young age... what's the cut off? At what age does this end?
Where does the over-parenting stop? When they can read? First date? First time they have sex (please don't take part in that)? Sometime after?
Seems the best approach is the one that statistically worked well for thousands of years: teach your kid to think on their feet and have good decision skills regardless of age.
Otherwise they will never become smart enough for a /. account. Stuck on MySpace for eternity.
movement with a new invention, Eyeballs. Use them. They're free, and meant for watching your crotchspawn.
why did it shut down? too early? too intrusive?
For the purposes of this discussion, I'm going to assume you're going to use a mobile phone. It's cheap ($40), easy, and the entire system can take you less than a few hours to setup. Taking this route, here's what you'll need:
1. A cheap GPS enabled mobile phone. I recommend the $40 Boost Mobile phone. Unlimited data for about $20 a month IIRC and you don't need a voice plan unless you want one. This will be the tracking device.
2. GPSTracker software from www.instamapper.com. This software is free and allows you to track phones in realtime from the web. It also offers an API that you could develop a web app against to extend tracking abilities if you needed.
3. Another mobile phone (Blackberry, iPhones, Windows Mobile, doesn't matter) that you can use as a mobile locator device.
Once you've got all the pieces in place, install the GPSTracker on your daughters mobile phone. This will now allow you to track her in real time from the web or any web/JavaScript enabled mobile phone. Because you might have a bit of trouble with the real time web updating on the the device you're using to track her, you might want to write an actual piece of software for your mobile that does real time updating a bit better than the web app.
That done, you're set to go and you can find your daughter wherever she is on earth from wherever you are.
Now, to address your 'big brother' question: forget it. The government RUNS the GPS system. They have complete access to it if they need it. There is no way make sure they can't track too. It's either an acceptable risk and you do it or it's not.
Overall, this is a cool project. Good luck with it and good job in wanting to keep your daughter safe.
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
Make the system so that only the police or a government agency can use the system (and only then during emergencies), not the parent. It should be illegal for the parents to use it. Think about what I'm saying before flaming me in response.
Teach your kid at home and don't rely on the government for any of it.
I have struggled with this myself since my six year old has diabetes. He is just starting to spread his wings and wants to go play in the park with his siblings and friends. We always make sure to check his blood before he leaves but we still worry. I purchased a G1 Dev Phone this year and have written a small program that if it receives an SMS message of "Ping" from me it will auto respond with his latitude/longitude. Now I'm just waiting for some cheaper/smaller phones to be released.
I could see a solution like the OP describes being useful for parents with special-needs children. Often children with autism or similar conditions are sent to a regular school, but with different conditions.
You would assume that this would be a great place to have a civil discussion on technology providing safety for children. Unfortunately that is not the case. It has been my experience that the readers of this forum tend to be paranoid. They are afraid of monitoring of any type, as you can tell from the many posts suggesting that you are somehow over reacting. Big brother is mentioned more in the /. forum than anywhere else on the planet... This is a group who really is afraid of having someone look at them without their knowledge and this overwhelming fear extends to others by proxy.
To actually answer your question; I can't help a lot. I did some research last year on devices for my children and decided that a cell phone is not a bad idea, but, in my case, it is going to have to wait a few years so that the little ones can appreciate the value of the device and not lose it. Check out what Verizon has to offer. That is what I did.
-I think a lot of the posters here have never known the heart dropping feeling of haveing a lost child (even for a minute)... If they had, the posts would not have been so glib. Good luck in your hunt.
Teach your daughter. If she can tell who she is, where she lives, maybe a phone number... then she can, with the help of someone older than her, find you.
You are looking at it the wrong way. Unless you inplant the device in her body (not something I advise, maintanance and stuff), she can/will lose it.
If she can find you, this problem doesn't exist.
A man/woman with the wrong ideas will probably plant the device in some strangers pocket when he/she discovers it.
Also, having to wear a tracking device is a punishment in my country. Only jailtime is harsher. If I had to wear such a thing as a child, I'd become paranoid. Or maybe I'd get a false feeling of security ("they will come and get me if I get stuck somewhere") and go on adventure trips on my own.
slashdotters start bragging they have compiled custom Linux kernel that runs on their kid?
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
Get your daughter a cell phone and a backpack. In the backpack goes a metal storm unit loaded with flares. Have the cell phone activate the unit and away you go.
I *swear* this is how one of Dr. Doofenshmirtz's schemes got started....
"It all goes back to when I was a child in Druselstein. My parents couldn't afford a magic marker and index cards, so they tried to get the school board to subsidize a GPS-based Child Locator System. And all the other kids laughed and laughed and laughed .... so now I have made my SchoolBoardAnalRapeInator to get my revenge on those idiotic school boards once and for all! Muahahahaha!!!"
It takes less than a few minutes for some deranged pedophile to snatch, rape, and kill a kid. FAR faster than any amount of technology can react.
Not counting deranged uncles and deranged neighbors, how often does this happen? Maybe 500 times a year in America, a country of 300 million people.
In short, your kid is much more likely to be killed in an auto accident than murdered.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Consider private education. Seriously.
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
I have 4 kids age 5 through 15. We've had kids missing for a bit (usually the oldest), but always found them safe and sound. No worries over here.
I grew up in Saginaw, MI and lived as a teenager in Detroit. Out of all of my friends and family, only ONE person has ever had anything happen to them as a kid and they're alive and still doing quite well. Saginaw is a hell hole, the only place in the country scarier is Oakland, CA, yet I have very young cousins that walk the street without incident on a regular basis.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Hi Blowhard66,
What happens when your kid says "I'm on the wrong bus" and the driver/proctor/whatever says "no you're not, sit there."
In 99.99% of the cases, the child will sit there on the wrong bus.
You have a grasp of childhood cognition that isn't so great.
I operate a business that may be able to help you: we're a group of seedy-looking middle-aged men who drive around in unmarked, windowless vans, following small children and offering them candy. For five dollars a month, you can call our dispatcher at any time to know where your child is, and whether he presently prefers sweet tarts or jawbreakers.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
Also allows you to restrict who can call the phone and who the phone can call.
http://www.kajeet.com/
And here I was thinking his sig made a great combination with his last sentence!
...as I am very very strict in my security, I would never go without the following:
Oh, and if you track your children without their approval or even knowledge, then you are a bad parent and a weirdo/stalker. Good parents have the trust of their children, and do not have to rely on such evil tactics. Additionally, using them makes your children trust you even less, and learn a bad lesson too. It's a slippery slope that you do not want to try out. :)
I think we all are perfectly capable to do it the good way. You are no exception. Use your skills!
(I made this post generic, so it's more useful.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
He is not over reacting but he is reacting wrongly. The problem here is that the local school are incompetent not that you need to track your kid. How hard is it to have lists of pupil's names associated with each bus and given to the bus driver to check off? In fact if they are really this incompetent do you really want to send your kid to that school? What is she going to learn? Since the school seems resigned to the problem take it up with the board of governors (or whomever is in charge of the school). If they will not fix the problem then publicise the issue to the other parents (chances are from your description though they are already aware of it) and then organize a few "fun" events like have everyone boycott the buses for one day and drive their kids to and from school (imagine the traffic headache that will cause as well as potentially give the bus drivers concerns of job security). Things like that should help address the root cause of the problem without having to resort to more Orwellian methods. The other advantage is that you'll also have improved things for everyone else at the same time.
Odd I went to private grade school and my bus driver knew every kids name on the bus. Never once did I ever here of a kids getting misplaced. Hell I even fell asleep on the bus once and the bus driver woke me up knowing I had got on the bus but hadn't got off the bus.
Sounds like a public school problem to me...
I heard the goverment is going to be making cars now. I wonder if they'll do the same quality job they did with public education....
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Stranger danger is vastly overrated. Bad things happen, yes. However, raising and indoctrinating our children with an attitude of fear and "playing it safe" spills over from walking home from school to applying to a highly competitive university.
The things you teach now will be applied to every facet of her life. Rather than to teach her to be afraid, you should teach her to balance risk with reward, to keep a cool head in unexpected situations, and to feel confident in herself because you trust her to do the right thing.
Actions like this perpetuate a sense that she is always incompetent until proven otherwise. You should teach her that she should know her own boundaries and trust her to be capable until she displays otherwise.
My own parents took this approach. Though, I will say that it did backfire a little. I was independent and living on my own at 17 as an emancipated minor. They were really against it at the time, but they trusted me to make that decision. I fell on my face a lot, but here I am, 25, done with my first bachelor's, excellent prospects for going directly into my Ph.D., and financially independent. I'm one of the most stubborn, self-motivated person I know. Most of the other people I know from my circle are in the 21-25 range, live with their parents, and can't even cobble together two jobs and move out. Not to mention I can easily bully them into doing about whatever I want them to do.
In summary: Raising a successful, independent child who thinks for herself is nerve racking and likely to result in a child that will do what they want how they want to do it. On the other hand, they'll never lie down and let someone else walk all over them, and you'll be able to brag to everyone that your kid's an astronaut/professor at MIT/etc. :-)
MisterHouse already does this and it's written in perl.
Sorry, this is a highly profitable sector, something where not having the nuts and bolts open to the world is in your self-interest and something that requires a substantially mature and solid niche technology, of which Linux is the worst thing in the world for. The best developers will be making money off of this, having it not on Linux; People like you should be wanting this to be kept as a more 'private' technology; and while Linux can be rock-solid in highly mainstream products, is not remotely close to it in niche technologies due to the nature of open-source, which requires a huge base with recurring interest, so that enough people have enough free time to burn to make it be stable and secure.
Keep on dreaming...
Here is what my wife and I use:
http://www.petsmart.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2751438
When they get a little older we'll go high-tech:
http://www.petsmart.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2753828
At java one I ran across this, http://developer.sprint.com/devplayzone , which is an open use, web service front-end to network level calls on Sprint's network. I.E. from this you can call the location service from a simple html page that feeds its data into google maps. Its a little limited, i.e. you can only call the service once every five minutes for an actual update of location, it only accurate up to 100 meters, and you can only call it 250 times per day. To keep you from freaking out about teh big br0th3r you actually have to agree to being tracked by the service for that user, and you can remove your access from your account, its still pretty rough, but what do you expect for nothing ;) Granted you have to give your daughter a sprint phone.
When I was in grade three (in 1975) I started taking public transit (by bus) to school. This included a transfer between buses. In addition to my bus fare, my parents gave me a dime to call home if I got lost or had a problem. I never did. Just get your kid a phone. If you've lost the kid, call them and say "Where are you?" or have them call you.
setup Britney Spears mp3s sharing. Then the RIAA & your two-faced service provider can locate her for you!
... it took less than three days for my local school district to misplace my daughter, I have decided that something needs to be done.
Your daughter's school starts in May? Where do you live, Thailand?
When I was in kindergarden, they went with the low-tech system. Every kid had a name tag that they had to wear all day. It had their name, grade, teacher, and bus number. Teachers aids were by the buses and would verify the bus number on the tag matched the bus. If they kid got on the wrong bus, they were turned away and walked to the right one.
How much does it cost for a 3x5 index card and a safety pin? A whole lot less than an electronic tracking system, and recurring cell bills for your kid.
Hrm, let's analyze that for a minute. High-tech solution embedded in a cell phone or similar device at $20 - $30/month vs. the $200-shrink bill you'll be getting every week for mutilating her social worth and standing by wearing a 3x5 index card until she's 18 years old...
I believe "unobtrusive" was one of the first requirements, rightfully and respectfully so. After all, your kids will be taking it about as well as you being tagged and tracked by your boss, so whatever "it" is for a solution should be rather stealth.
Seriously people, not one Michel Jackson joke yet? You guys are slipping.
I just thought of like 5 Michel Jackson jokes and I am not even trying. For shame slashdot, for shame.
... And try to resist the clarion call of fear, Fear, FEAR that causes many otherwise adjusted parents to think their child is on the cusp of being abducted. Constantly. Life is risk and, sadly enough sometimes kids are endangered. Statistically speaking, however, most citizens are good people and most kids are in more danger from "Uncle Ronald" than they are strangers.
Totally read this as "Chili Locating System"
I'd buy it.
53 49 47 53 20 53 55 43 4B
There comes a time in everybody's life where we have to recognize that we cannot (nor should we) control every aspect of our child's life. Every time a child leaves the care of his/her parent, both are presented with opportunity. The child receives an opportunity to navigate a situation independently, learning to evaluate and rely upon their own abilities. The parent receives an opportunity to begin that process of "letting go", in addition to developing faith in the child's ability to care for himself/herself.
While I agree that it is painfully horrifying to confront the "what could happen" scenarios, subjecting a child to a constant police state environment will cause numerous forms of blow-back, both for the child and the parent.
[Insert pithy line of moxie here.]
Why does a 4 year old need to go to an institution anyway? Soon they'll want 3 year olds. If they can't keep all their ducks in order for busing, what other errors are going to be overlooked?
Your post shows elements of learning and apologising. This just won't do.
GTA 4 made fun of you you now
First of all, I don't advocate tracking of people against their will, no matter what their age. My solution is not only cheap, but exceeding difficult to use without the child being aware of it, so I don't mind sharing it:
option 1:
http://www.instamapper.com/diy.html
option 2:
http://www.slashgear.com/open-gps-tracker-based-on-cheap-prepaid-phone-0340035/ (more work, but potentially cheaper)
Just stash it in their backpack.
Sigh...
Since when do we use technology to replace personal responsiblity?
When I was in middle school they gave all the kids a laminated bus pass
When I was in middle school, we were hacking the busses ourselves in a way. Neighborhoods would be served sometimes by multiple busses, such that walking 2 blocks further than your "scheduled" stop would put you on a bus that might be a shorter route, have fewer kids, or have that person who you just really want to sit by. But middle school kids should, at the least, know their own neighborhoods well enough to know if they are on the right bus to go home or not.
the bus numbers spray painted on the sidewalk so everyone who had to ride the bus knew exactly where to line up. Nobody ever got on the wrong bus because nobody ever got in the wrong line
That works well for kids who know how to read. However a lot of schools now don't really have "literate" children until 2nd grade. This is something that changed appallingly fast, too. When I went to grade school, I could read and write before I started kindergarten. When my oldest younger siblings went to school, they couldn't read and write until they were at least in 2nd grade - and we went through the same school system.
Hence even if the numbers are sprayed on the sidewalk, those numbers won't do you any good if the kids can't read them.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
While a cell-phone solution might work for a teen, I don't think that's going to get held on to by a kindergarten aged kid.
There are a number of wristwatch solutions out there. One that I saw (but couldn't locate quickly) made it so that you could not remove the watch w/o the right pin - the idea being that if the child was kidnapped you would not want the watch removed easily.
Here is one solution that I found: lok8u.com
Ah, here is another, which requires a remote device to unlock the wristwatch: www.brickhousesecurity.com/wf200.html
"What other recommendations do you have?" I recommend you sit down, perhaps have a nice glass of wine, and think this through for a moment. It's not that big of a deal. Your child is fine, right? Don't you think you are going just a little bit overboard here?
The company I work for is contracting to build a LAMP based customer management system for this new cool device. Clearly the smallest thing out there. Go check it out at www.amberalertgps.com. They have spent alot of time trying to figure out pricing, options, features, and I think they have good solution. Cheap on the low end, feature rich on the high end. The features real quick are, Safe-Zone, Destination Alert, Speed Alert, Temperature Alert, Monitor, Page, Current Location, and SOS. All the commands are executable from your cell phone, just send an SMS to the device and it do what you tell it to. Simplest feature is 'where', and a few seconds later the device sends back a link to a web page with the google map location of where the device is.
A while back when I had a blackberry I wrote a simple background app that went and updated the GPS every few minutes and made a HTTP request to my webserver with the coordinates. On the server, I made another page that simply overlaid the points on Google Maps. At the time I used it primarily to track where I was walking my dog (mainly to satisfy curiosity when I want to know where or how far we went). My wife actually pulled it up once while I was out on a walk when she wanted to come get us for something so she didn't have to go driving around searching for us (or so she says :) ).
It was a really simple set up (I think i had it working in an hour or so), and i'm sure you could put something together for a smaller phone if you don't want to get a berry for your daughter. I don't have the code anymore, otherwise I'd post a link... I'll look around for it, probably on a thumbdrive somewhere)
I don't like sigs... I don't use it...
You're upset that your daughter was lost, and everybody understands that. But you must consider what it means to have what you ask for become a trend, and to have the infrastructure built to make it easy to do.
Perhaps when your child is 6 nobody will claim she has any rights, and you are free to lojack her. But then we will have to ask the question, when does she gain some dignity and rights, at what age does it become a bad idea for you to do this? At what age should it actually be illegal for you to do this? We have not had to ask that question until you do it.
Location services all beg the question of what to do when one person is in power over another and can demand location data. You can over your young child, and more debatably over your older child. Can employers ask it of employees? On their breaks? Can husbands ask it of wives? Not demand it, you understand, but ask, as in, "Honey, what's wrong with me knowing where you are? Think how handy it would be. Don't you trust me? Don't you love me?"
This is the world you will help build. But it gets worse. You see, there will be flaws in the system. Not just hackable security issues, but mistakes. After a custody battle, somebody will forget to turn off the non-custodial parent's access to the location data on the child. This will assist in many kidnappings. (As you may not know, the vast, vast, vast majority of kidnappings are by relatives. The random stranger that everybody is afraid of barely exists.) Perhaps not in your case, but in many people's in this world you are creating.
A better idea? Teach your child, if lost, to approach a suitable adult, and hand them a card or show them her bracelet, which has your cell phone numbers on it. We tell children not to talk to strangers, but we forget to mention that means not to talk to strangers who approach *you*. It is perfectly fine to talk to strangers the child selects for help, more than fine, it's the right thing for her to do. Or sew the number in the lining of her coat, or shoes, or lunchbox or whatever. If you really think it's bad for her to approach strangers, teach her to identify police, teachers, people in uniform etc, but tell her that if she can't find one of those to approach any nicely dressed person.
She'll be fine.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Yes, solve the problem for everyone's child at the same time. Ask them what their current system is, and how they intend to fix it. Bring several of these suggestions to the table, including the low-tech ones, and let them know that it is not acceptable to lose children.
You can fix your problem, but in 5 years when your kid is safe and someone else's kid gets raped and murdered, won't you feel bad for solving it for yourself?
Retractable leaches comes to mind....
Have you considered talking to your local marine biologist? I'm sure they have already come up with something to track whales, birds, and other migratory species.
All jokes aside. Your phone company has thought of this. There are phones made for kids with GPS, and services for said phone that allow you to track the device.
Also, they can call you and you can call them. A virtual leash, which is a hell of a lot cooler than tagging an ankle.
Just give her a cell phone ? So that she can call for help ?
I must confess, when I read "Child Locating System" I thought that this would surely help pedophiles more than parents. I mean, a lost chil emitting a beacon, what more could they ask for ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
If she's old enough to ride a bus, she's old enough to remember a cell phone number...
If she can remember a cell phone number, why not have her memorize her bus number so none of this becomes an issue in the first place?
Treat the disease, not the symptoms!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Check out the BUG open source hardware/software platform. It would let you do something like this.
http://buglabs.net/
Don't Cell phones these days offer GPS capabilities and the option to let "friends" track them?
Make it a nifty phone loaded with the kind of games that children love and adults loathe, and you can rest assured that between the texting to friends and the accessorizing/customization of the phone, it will *never* leave her side. She'll probably think you're the coolest parent on Earth. Besides being able to call you in case of emergency, and you being able to potentially call her in case that she's out later than expected... and if you really get worried, I DO believe that some services make it possible to display the phone's location on an internet map.
... but if your kid is really in danger from a dangerous person, the perp will probably search them for such a device and throw it in a trash can. If she isn't in danger, then what's the point? Slightly faster to find her? That's a pretty small advantage to gain for the price you'll pay for going Big Brother on her.
In this case she simply got on the wrong bus. Attaching a tracking device to a child will just lead to a broken or lost tracking device and when you really need it it probably won't be working, the battery will be dead, etc.
I think the real problem is trusting a young child to know which bus to get on and where to get off, then again, I am not in your shoes. There's no way in hell I'd let a kid younger than 10 ride a school bus, but that's just me. I drop mine off and pick them up after work. When he hits 10 he'll get a "how to ride the school bus" class along with all the warnings, cautions, and test runs that I deem necessary to feel confident he knows which bus to get on, where his stop is and how to deal with strangers with candy.
I look at it the same way I do leaving them home. In my state it's legal to allow your kid to be by themselves in your house after age 8. Other people do it. He knows how to dial 911. He knows my cell number. He knows what to do in the event of fire (grab phone, run outside, dial 911, then call me). He knows not to drink the stuff under the sink. Am I going to go to the gym for an hour and leave him there alone? HELL NO!!! I live in the city. About all I do is unload the car, and let him fire up the xbox while I park. If it's longer than 5 minutes, he's coming with me. I trust him completely, I just don't trust the rest of the world.
At the end of the day you have to make a decision about convenience vs. safety and do whatever you feel is right. Attaching a device to your child isn't going to solve your safety issues or guarantee anything. Being in control of your child's transportation arrangements will solve this particular risk.
-Viz
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
I was quite little, maybe in 1st or 2nd grade.
My mother was a single mom with a single child and I had to go to a babysitters after school. Instead of going home, I'd be dropped off at my sitters.
I believe it was my first day at the new sitters. The sitter had a young child nearly my age at the time who attended the same school. The sitter asked him to make sure I got on the correct bus. Well, it didn't work that way.
The school put me on the wrong bus.
No one knew there was an issue, until the bus arrived at the sitters and the sitters son was crying saying he never saw me and thus I wasn't stepping off the bus with him.
On my side, I don't think I knew anything was wrong until I was the last kid on the bus and the driver asked me where I was supposed to be going. Again, it was a new sitters and I'm sure I replied that I wasn't sure. I had SOME idea, however. I know this because I was trying to instruct the bus driver as to where to go. Interestingly enough, my family later moved to the same area and became familiar with it. The route I was asking the driver to go wasn't too far off, only a couple streets away. Regardless, it wasn't me who got me "home".
I don't know the details on the other side too well. But my mother had gotten word that I didn't get off the bus and called the school. The school put her in touch with the dispatcher for the busses and they got in contact with my driver (whom I believe was in contact with them, but there wasn't a link between me and my mother yet).
She simply told them where to go and the driver got me there. A little fuss and I'm sure I was scared, but a simple phone call from those who knew where I was supposed to be and I was there shortly after.
GPS, cell phones, computers as we know them, the internet as we know it, etc, etc, etc, didn't exist. Yet I got home safe that day.
Sometimes you CAN trust the system to work. Just be informed as to when and where your child was supposed to be and you can pick up the trail quickly. Even if my mother wasn't going to find out about the incident for a while and I was stranded longer, I have no doubt the school would have looked up records and figure it all out on their own. At least they would have explored contacting the "contacts" list in my file, etc.
If it was a malicious attempt to abduct me, I don't even think a cell/tracker would have helped. Pretty sure someone will confiscate that quickly.
If your child has a cell phone to call you in case of emergencies, then you can track it. At&t has family Map, which costs $10 a month and can track two numbers.
https://familymap.wireless.att.com/finder-att-family/howWorks.htm
If money isn't a concern, get a G1 and enable Google Latitude. Underclock it to 128MHz to save battery life.
You're right.
Why waste those few precious moments with your children when ultimately it won't mean anything to either of you and your investment is wasted. It is much more likely that your posterity will live to see the world ravaged by depleted resources and pollution.
Besides, I *loved* riding the bus for the few years I did. It was *totally* worth waking up early for. In fact, it is why I woke up, I didn't even need an alarm. I still remember my bus driver's name and all the life lessons she taught me. Plus I forged a deep and invaluable relationship with all the people on the bus. Each of whom I contact daily even now. Unlike my resource greedy parents who did not respect Earth enough to give up their selfish desire to spend time with me.
I tried sarcasm to reach you. If it worked, your kids might thank me.
One last thing: Sometimes I wonder; "Is that someone's signature? Or do they type that at the end of each post?"
I like the solution of a linux machine with GPS and a GSM modem, mostly because of the added ~telephone~ functionality. but that's hardly cool at all, so then i thought - ham radio maybe? any mobile packet radio gear that weighs less then 10kg?
;P
but that requires a license to broadcast on.
What your kid really needs is a little board to speak your custom, encrypted, location protocol over the 900Mhz ISM band! i hear you can get 40mi range for 400usd
It's interesting because I was talking to my wife about this concept. For all of you telling the OP that s/he is over-reacting, what do you tell parents of Tori Stafford [google.ca]?
Ok, I should have looked this up first, http://www.tpl.org/tier3_cd.cfm?content_item_id=22900&folder_id=630 claims to be the Nation's Largest Elementary School with 1974 student. Not quite thousands and not exactly typical. Rarely in any other place than NY would you see a population density where that could even happen yet you speak of it as a common place occurance.
Actually, according to http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d05/tables/dt05_096.asp, there are 65k elementary schools in the US and the average student population is 476. Florida has the largest average size at 737 and that is still well below your "thousands" statement. Even then there are only 15 states that have average sizes over 500 and 21 have less than 400 students on average.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
I've thought a lot abotu this myself. Those of you who feel that this is an 'over protective parent' have not had a child abducted. I have nto either but I can only imagine the torture that a parent must feel when such a horrible thing happens. Unfortunately it happes all too often. If I had the opportunity to simply login to a site to find my child (if ever such a horrible thing happend), I'd be oh so grateful to be able to find him/her in a rapid time. Let's assume that the child's clothing and possessions are not with them at the time of abduction. If we can put a chip into a pet, why not into a child? Once the child is 18, they can remove/turn it off if they so choose. I know i am not the only person who feels this way.
Check out Xtify [http://www.xtify.com], it's a free LBS API for smart phones. It allows you to call a simple rest based web service which will return the lat/lon amongst other things of the device. It works based on cell tower, gps and wifi to gather location.
There is a sample implementation of it at http://seemywhere.com/marcy .
Here's a DIY solution since every other comment I've read said to buy a cellphone. There's also a link on that page to another project that did gps tracking and worked in the middle of nowhere using shortwave radio.
Give her a phone. When you want to know where she is, call her and say, "This is dad. Where are you?"
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
some people believe if we allow gays to marry, we also have to accept pedophilia, bestiality, necrophilia, polygamy...
or howabout: if we try to control assault weapons in the usa, the government is inevitably going to take away all guns in the usa
or: if we teach evolution in schools, soon everyone will be a godless atheist
no: all of this is retarded hysteria. but some people actually believe this. because they are letting their irrational fears overpower their logical thought
as you are:
you believe if we accept child tracking by gps, we're on an unstoppable slippery slope into a black hole of everyone being tracked by gps
uh... how about no? how about you are irrational and fear addled?
there is no such thing as slippery slope. your fears are unfounded. why? because people understand the concepts and can think about the differences between children and others. you don't hold a monopoly on that ability
really
please lose your irrational fears and develop the ability for coherent logical thought. the idea of the slippery slope is a tool for propaganda, nothing more
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Don't worry, kids always come back when they are hungry.
Monkeysphere
I agree with you, something *should* be done: You should call the school, and ask for an appointment with the principal and express your concerns to him or her in person, and ask what they are doing to ensure that it doesn't happen again. If you aren't satisfied with the response, take the matter up with the Superintendent and finally, if necessary, the School Board.
Which is why it's all the more important to address the source of the problem. Your proposed solution works only for your daughter, and then only when she becomes lost. A much more desirable outcome is that this not happen at all, and fixing the cause of the problem resolves the situation not only for you and your child, but for other parents and their children as well.
Regards,
dj
http://www.sermonillustrations.com/a-z/n/name.htm
"When the 1960s ended, San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district reverted to high rent, and many hippies moved down the coast to Santa Cruz. They had children and got married, too, though in no particular sequence. But they didn't name their children Melissa or Brett. People in the mountains around Santa Cruz grew accustomed to their children playing Frisbee with little Time Warp or Spring Fever. And eventually Moonbeam, Earth, Love and Precious Promise all ended up in public school.
That's when the kindergarten teachers first met Fruit Stand. Every fall, according to tradition, parents bravely apply name tags to their children, kiss them good-bye and send them off to school on the bus. So it was for Fruit Stand. The teachers thought the boy's name was odd, but they tried to make the best of it.
"Would you like to play with the blocks, Fruit Stand?" they offered. And later, "Fruit Stand, how about a snack?" He accepted hesitantly. By the end of the day, his name didn't seem much odder than Heather's or Sun Ray's.
At dismissal time, the teachers led the children out to the buses. "Fruit Stand, do you know which one is your bus?"
He didn't answer. That wasn't strange. He hadn't answered them all day. Lots of children are shy on the first day of school. It didn't matter. The teachers had instructed the parents to write the names of their children's bus stops on the reverse side of their name tags. The teacher simply turned over the tag. There, neatly printed, was the word "Anthony.""
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The biggest problem I have with giving expensive gadgets to kids is that if it can be taken off and left somewhere, then it almost certainly will be. On the other hand, if you built a GPS into her chastity belt...
My wife tried giving our daughter a cell phone in first grade, so we could know where she was and if she made it home from school ok. But my daughter got in trouble for not turning it off during school, and if she did turn it off, she couldn't remember to turn it back on.
Unless you can come up with a device that locks on, can't be removed, is waterproof, and is close to unbreakable, it's not going to be very reliable. Also, there are plenty of places where GPS receivers simply don't work, e.g. inside most office buildings. Heck, we couldn't even get cell phones to work inside multi-story Intel or HP buildings (they are built by pouring concrete onto corrugated steel, making for a fairly effective RF shield unless you are standing in front of a window.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I see tons of comments saying it shouldn't be done because of Big Brother and it's future impact on society...
Guys... tracking people with GPS devices is like an atomic bomb, you can't just forget it and it'll go away. Millions of people have already thought of this, it's coming. You can moan and whine all you want, in a few years they will be selling these at Walmart in a nice easy to use package.
So instead of going "I won't make it, that's just helping Big Brother", why don't you be real geeks and do it because it CAN be done? Then being the alpha males in this area of technology you can clearly demonstrate the dangers of it simply and publicly BEFORE the tech is widespread.
I mean seriously... now your politics is getting in the way of your geek cred, time to turn in your cards. I never heard "Don't make a potato cannon, the feds could use that tech someday". We do a lot of stuff that's dangerous and stupid, don't let your distopian fears prevent you from getting a handle on real life social issues when you can have the most positive impact.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Fortunately, my daughter was located, with no thanks to the local school district.
Then how exactly was your daughter located, considering she was placed on the wrong school bus. Friend? Relative? Concerned neighbor? Act of the Almighty Bob? Or is this really just a dig a public schools 'cause they are so crappy and all?
I think the district might have had SOME small part in finding her, don't you?
So if something happens to her she can phone you. Completely voluntary, so there are no ethical objections to this, and it works just fine in situations like her getting on the wrong bus.
Yes, but does it run linux?
1. Wait for your daughter to on the wrong bus.
2. Let your daughter get lost.
3. Sue the school.
4. Profit.
Works in the areas with no cellular signal.
For the trouble you are going through just take your daughter out of government run schools and put her into a private school. Not only will she get a better education but she will be a valued cared for client rather than a forgotten nameless child.
I have a revolutionary idea. It's an open source solution I found. It's called "go to the school and pick up your goddamn child"
Take her to school and pick her up afterwards yourself?
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Wouldn't it be more efficient to hire competent people in your school district that know how to put the child on the right bus.
In a word: NO.
Exactly - you must fix the staff the school already has, since even the most incompetent or negligent can't be fired.
The most effective approach is a bit old-fashioned. Let it be known that Guido and Luigi might visit the next time a child is misplaced. They have a baseball bat, and are keen to give "sports lessons" to any teachers in need of training.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
So lets assume you do have your child pinpointed, what would be the best way to identify exactly where the kid is? Preferably via webpage so you could use a phone with browser...
Im thinking some sort of web-service where you could just plug in xy coordinates?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I was mostly worried about my daughter losing her cell phone. She has a tendency to missplace things. So I tried enabling ATT FamilyMap (http://familymap.attwireless.com) hoping that I would at least be able to tell if she had left the phone at home or in her locker at school. Unfortunately ATT FamilyMap is not that accurate. It unfortuantely can only locate the phone within 2 miles. It can't tell the difference between my house, our school, or my brother-in-law's house as we are all within a 2 mile diameter circle. I turned it off because it was useless.
Doesn't Google Latitude or Twitter using a GPS enabled phone do just that?
Make magazine had this covered back a while ago:
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2005/10/diy_gps_tracking.html
http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2005/10/diy_gps_tracking_with_mologogo.html
Mologogo with a cheap $60 cell phone.
Before your kid leaves for the day, check her bag and make sure it's on and working properly.
When she gets home, put the cell phone on the charger.
In the event that you loose your kid, you check the website and Mologogo will tell you where the kid is at.
My phone can tell me where any of my friends are, yours should to.
Easy peasy.
CAPS LOCK: ITS LIKE THE CRUISE CONTROL FOR AWESOME
I dont agree with your logic, but I am not the right guy to pas judgement because I dont have any kids myself.
I belive APRS is what you want, if a cell-phone is not. Although I dont know it enough to know of any devices you can place on your kid.
When I was in the 7th grade or so, I got on the wrong bus home from school. Since I would read on the bus, I didn't notice that the route was wrong until I looked up 20 minutes into the drive. I don't know why, but instead of telling the driver my situation, I just got off the bus. I had NO idea where I was. I walked several blocks one way, hoping I'd see something familiar. Failing that, I turned around and walked the other way. Still unfamiliar.
After a half hour I just walked to the nearest corner house, knocked on the door, and meekly asked to use a phone. My mom came and picked me up.
That was before everybody had a mobile phone. If I'd had one, I would have just called mom.
I find it hard to believe that a school-age child could not understand the concept of calling home if they get lost.
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A SLIPPERY SLOPE
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html
if someone uses gps tracking devices in adults in the future, it will have absolutely nothing to with their use in children now. if you use them in children, there are no implications whatsoever as to their future use in future groups. to believe so is to think other people are unable to understand the difference between children and adults. therefore, your previous bloviating about gps tracking in children leading to gps devices in SPEEDERS for fuck sake is an example of fear-addled thinking on your part of the highest retarded order
examine how you think about the issue. retract your statement about speeders. otherwise, your thinking is EXACTLY the thought processes of morons who think gays marrying leads to legalized necrophilia and evolution taught in our schools leads to atheism
just admit you fucked up, and moved on, and drop the slippery slope bullshit in all future arguments, for the sake of your own lucidity
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Really, a school that handles children on the wrong bus regularly is MUCH better than one who doesn't have systems in place for dealing with an unpreventable (if rare) occurrence.
I want my kid to learn what to do when things don't go right.
Since everyone has already provided the various "child locator" links that are easily Googled, here's my high tech AND trendy alternative that will not result in a socially alienated child unit.
Start a Twitter account for your child, like the one of the cat with half a million followers, make it SO popular people will send out "Tweets" whenever they see your child.
Setup a search for @yourchild'sname
You then can receive SMS messages, RSS feed, emails, whatever, whenever your child is someplace new (since people who regularly see your kid won't care enough to bother to say so).
If you succeed well enough in this plan, your child will shortly be followed by a group of paparazzi photographing their every move! If your child is a daughter, you'll even know when she "forgets" to wear her underwear. You'll be able to share Youtube links with family and friends of your child "in action". Conveniently, anyone who makes a website about her and tries to contact her you can direct to police, therefore outing any untoward behavior.
If you REALLY succeed well enough, the merchandising and socialite earnings will cover their college costs.
I always wondering whats going on in the united states? Wouldn't it be better to teach your children to know her- himselfe which bus should be taken? In our country children know where to go an which bus is to be taken, or if the take the wrong one anyway there still is the joker to use a cellular phone and call the parents to be picked up.
What you a trying to do is, to lock them down like a felon, they get stolen their privacy, they live in jail, nothing anybody wants to do.
Think about it.
Have you considered home schooling?
What's needed is a cell phone with GPS (eg iPhone) and a button that is present during phone conversations, that when pressed causes the phone to send its current GPS coordinates to the remote party as an SMS message.
Then you could just call your daughter and ask her to press the button, and copy the result into google maps (or whatever)
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
This here little gem is $299. It's about the size of a pack of matches. Battery lasts for 5 DAYS, has a "panic" alarm that the child can press at her discretion. And also updates you through a txt message on your cellphone or email if the child leave a "designated" area that you get to control. And you can of course track the location of the GPS transmitted on in real-time on a map on the web (no software to install).
Spark Nano Child GPS Tracker
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Back in the .com boom I started a telematics company, we had five-figures of devices on our system that we could track and control over the cellular control channel http://www.thebentleys.com/televoke/, we merged it with Telcontar, they changed their name to deCarta (www.decarta.com) who spun it out to Lunar Eye who flipped it to Celevoke where the servers are running but it's about to move to a new home. In fact, the guy (Chuck) who ran Celevoke into the ground still owes me personally ~$20k for helping him keep the system alive, but that's another story. Here's what you're up against, it's a two part problem:
1) you need a device that knows where it is and talks to a wireless network
2) you need a service to talk to that device and display the info on web/phone/whatever interface you want.
Back in 1998 when I started Televoke there was only the analog cellular network and no assisted GPS (quicker GPS location times from cold start based on cell tower location information; basically allows the device to get a fix much faster because it starts out with an idea where it is). Analog cellular sucked because the standby current on the analog transceiver was too high, so, unless you were doing just a geo-fencing application (device goes outside of geographic boundary, then turn on and report the event and current location) the standby battery life of portable devices was too low and the devices were too big. We went after the automotive after-market industry instead of tracking people/pets, since cars are size/weight/power insensitive. Nowadays it's a different game. You can get tracking devices that run for a month or three on AA batteries and live on a GSM network. There are back end services out there too, the Televoke one is still running under a different name, but finding a product/service combo that will work exactly the way you want, and not cost a fortune, and be small enough to put on a kid, is hard. Some services wont transmit unless queried. Some can't take queries (no "forward channel") and only update every hour or so, or when in motion, or some other power/packet saving algorithm. I'll give you the shortcut:
Buy your daughter a cellular phone, put it in a teddy bear or backpack or something she wont lose, charge it for her every night and track her on Google Lattitude. That will seriously be your lowest cost headache and cheapest solution when it's all said and done. As she gets older she'll WANT a cell phone and then you'll never lose her because she won't go anywhere with out. By the time she's 16 there is a 0% chance she'll keep the kiddie-finder attached to her wrist/belt/whatever.
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
You must have some incredible vision to be able to watch your kids from over a mile away through buildings and trees and brick walls and everything!
And I have to agree with the comment that this stinks a little bit. Kinda like we are being used as a market survey.
My name is Sam Tyler. I was born in 1973, and my parents never fitted me with a tracking device. Were they mad, in a coma, or back in time? Whatever happened, it's like things worked out anyway. Now, maybe if I can work out the buses, I can get home.
This sort of extreme panic reaction to minor harmless incidents is how we wound up with things like the PATRIOT act. The kid is safe, school staff are stupid, film at 11. None of us had GPS locators when we were kids, and we turned out just fine. The world is not bursting at the seams with child predators and random faceless boogeymen.
If anything, getting your kid accustomed to 24/7 monitoring will only make them more dependent upon it, and less apprehensive when such invasive surveillance is employed by not-so-benevolent actors. Kids have an amazing ability to adapt to their environment, give them a hard time and they grow up stronger and smarter, make it too easy and you'll wind up with Paris Hilton knockoffs. They're your kids, but they will be society's burden if you screw up.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
but if they DID put gps on a child, it does not follow that that opens the door to putting them on speeders, as the parent post implied. but thanks for the threadjack. pfffft
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Quite apart from the problems which you face since you don't have a diversity of other kids for yours to socialize with, you do not have the depth and breadth of academic and educational experience to adequately challenge bright children.
While I would not challenge your _RIGHT_ to HomeSchool, I would strongly question the _WISDOM_ of doing so.
I would worry about the paucity of other children yours will meet and maybe befriend. As for teaching, you can not hope to compete with the best. Though an Athiest, at age 8, I was fortunate to be educated in a Jesuit school from 6 to 15 and I could never have gotten the breadth and depth of the 30 PhD priests who taught me. Only an Oxford Mathematics Wrangler taught me more.
So the danger of HomeSchool is that teaching of the less driven, by the mediocre, can be less than good, except if you only want to control your child.
Those who suggested that that you help your child to be street aware, and be prepared to look after helself have it right. She should be able to get you called or tell the Police where she lives ASAP.
Finally, do remember as sense of proportion, and do not damage your own child as you try to protect her, you also have a duty to nurture and help her to develop to the best of her ability.
or just ego stroking your knowledge without examining if it applies here
read his original comment about gps tracking and children... presto chango... gps tracking in speeders
now tell me his wording does not match the narrow qualifications you describe
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Seriously, if you're that worried just get your kid a cell phone. If they get lost, they can call you. I got my first cell phone at the end of Junior High, and I primarily used it for calling parents. For my parents it only cost $10/month (Verizon family plan).
It'll make a strong statement to the school and it'll take care of the problem.
And if they still can't get her to daddy, then maybe they can get her a new one...
Well, I created a system to track my car wherever it went, not quite tracking a kid, but to some people, almost as important ;-)
Navizon actually is a good service. You make money on it if you have GPS attached (yes, that is a referral link, but bear with me a sec), but that is besides the point... GPS doesn't work in an urban jungle, and from my experience, parking my car in a multi-storey carpark and near the edges (so the GPS is could sort of get a line-of-sight) still wasn't good enough for GPS to work constantly.
So the way I use Navizon, is that you can set it to output its multi-tracking (GPS, then WIFI, then Cell ID, in that order, as each is less successively less accurate) service to a port on your device, and let OTHER GPS-related programs access that port, so when GPS is out-of-sight and not working, your GPS application continues to get relatively accurate positioning based on WIFI, and then failing that, triangulation based on the Cell IDs.
They also recently added in Fireagle (the Yahoo service) so that you can update your location via Twitter and whatever else works with Fireagle. And Navizon has it's own API besides Yahoo's open API if you want to play with that. So since you wanted to write your own app to view it on a website/domain (which you can either use very simply on Navizon's own site, or if yo want to get fancy and update via Twitter or others services, Fireagle integration) then you can.
I even though, if people put my car into a warehouse or even inside a container, at some point during it's travels, even if its sealed, it hopefully would get at least a Cell ID or Wifi position, so even without GPS it'll be functional. It won't be hugely accurate, but it'll set you in the right direction at least. And it doesn't rely on any carrier either, so it's carrier neutral too.
Good aye?
**FREE** Track and view your phone's via CellID and/or WIFI and/or GPS
If you can get your hands on a cheap multi-media phone with gps, anything with symbian OS will work. Download the Google App package and install google maps. Then add Latitude. Google latitude lets you share your location with select friends and it can be set to refresh based on your cellphone's gps signal. For the first 3 months of this year I was commuting over 100 miles to work, each way. My wife could follow my progress on Google Maps and get a pretty good estimate of my arrival time. It isn't the most accuate but it is a free service provided you have a phone with a data package.
"Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most." ~Ozzy Osborne
no one has used a rocket launcher to rob a bank
therefore, drunk rednecks should get rocket launchers
pfffft
oh i'm sorry if "drunk redneck" offends your cultural sensitivities
the only truth about uncontrolled gun ownership is that rural folk benefit from them (police are far away) while urban people suffer for them (in urban settings they are the provenance of thugs)
hundreds die every year in urban settings for the sake of a legal framework which only serves rural assholes. a MINORITY enjoy a legal status quo to the detriment of a MAJORITY. not very democratic
it would be nice if guns could be made legal in the countryside, illegal in the cities, but of course this is impossible
well, guess what? the usa is not an agrarian society anymore when these anachronistic laws were set. it is mostly urban already, and this will only accelerate. in places where urban dominance is well-established, like europe, guns are seen as vile, not beneficial
so its only a matter of demographic inevitability in a democracy before the nostalgic antiquated rural gun owners are finally trumped, and guns are rounded up
and then rural folk will suffer for the sake of urban folk, killed by illegal firearms in home invasions, with no gun of their own and the police far away. you find that injust? what of the hundreds killed in urban settings by gun toting thugs you blind selfish asshole
instead of rural assholes holding urban folk hostage and allowing hundreds of urban folks to die every year at the hands of urban gun toting thugs, the reverse will hold true. welcome to fucking democracy, you fucking red neck
fuck you rural twatstains. i hope you understand how your quaint nostalgia results in hundreds of urban deaths in your country. if you do understand that, congratulations on not caring, asswipe
but don't worry about it. critical mass is not there yet. your gun will NOT be taken from you
but it will be taken from your children
or rather, your children will be urban, and recognize the wisdom you do not
tick tock tick tock
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Generate a unique barcode number and place it on each child in the school. Have teachers and bus drivers scan the barcode to match to a centralized database of where the children should be. Problem solved. Note: an RFID chip could also be planted on the children for the same effect.
I thank God I grew up before cell phones and this 24/7 parental obsession. My son has several friends in those last few years of parental control and it's driving me nutz. We can't even get together and watch a movie uninterrupted.
One friend, his parents will call to tell him they're leaving his dinner in the fridge. Then call to tell him that the potatoes were over cooked, then call again to ask about next weeks soccer game. And it's literally every 10-20 minutes. If he doesn't answer, they call, call again and again... We'll stop the movie while he takes the call only to find out it's his mom wanting to tell him that next Saturday he has to go to Grandmas or something just as meaningless. If he complains "I'm in the middle of a movie!" She'll bark back "Too bad!, that's why we pay for unlimited cell usage, blah, blah, blah... so we can get a hold of you when we have too. Emphasis on "when we have too" is mine as it's apparently very subjective.
It's absurd. And, yes, I'm a father.
If I can't go a night not knowing where my son is, I didn't do my job as a parent. The world is not that scary nor dangerous. My son has a cell and knows how and when to dial 911 if he needs too. And I can certainly go a night not following a red dot on some tracking web page. I am sorry sir, but your fear is way over the top. Of course, as with anything else, that's just my opinion. Is is however a fear that you do share with a lot of other parents. Fear of what I wouldn't know as I don't share it.
Even in this case of a younger female home late from elementary school because she got on the wrong bus. I still don't see the need for this level of panic or overreaction. But, that's just me. I suspect my son appreciates the levelheadedness of the home he grows up in. I expect his friends do as it's here they all congregate.
-[d]-
So when you don't like the question you decide to not answer it and instead you state that the question shouldn't be asked? Morons. So, just so you understand: your personal views on the validity of the question itself is not an answer to the question. You might think that those 'answers' are of interest, but they aren't. You are a moron for spouting your religious views on the topic. Yes I'm talking to you. Really. Yes you. Not the other guy that did the exact thing you did, I'm talking to you. Moron. Religious freak.
As for a direct answer to the original question, you should check out cell phones that have this feature built in.
The Zoombak device (http://www.zoombak.com) is about the size of hotel bar of soap. It uses AGPS to acquire fixes and GSM to transmit the device's location. It was originally conceived for use on pets, but was soon adopted for other needs. The "Universal" device is probably what you are looking for (although they can't market the device for tracking children, I'm sure plenty of people do). I put one on my kid with ADHD when he goes on his scout trips. He knows it's there.
There are other products on the market, but I think the Zoombak device is the most capable. And, unlike products, it actually exists.
It provides a fix every 15 minutes and the rechargable battery life is about 5 days per charge. You can log into their web portal and request "Find Nows" or enter a continuous track mode.
You can also access the device's location using SMS. They have several models, Pet, Universal and Auto. I'd recommend the Universal since it provides other attachments that make it useful as a generic tracker.
They also have special deal going right now - I think it's 3 months free if you purchase the device.
Can you hack one of these devices or build your own? Not really. A lot of effort went into designing the device to obtain FCC certification - cell carriers in the US require that the device meet their specs before the device is allowed to attach to their network.
I'd recommend you obtain one of these devices and then bug the company to provide the other features you request. Or, perhaps, ask if they have an OEM version and toolkit.
As someone that is actually in the GPS and child protection business, I can tell you a fair amount about the systems. first, what you are looking for is actually A-GPS technology, or "Assisted" GPS. The device will attempt to acquire it's position via GPS positioning. This requires a view of the sky, the more open the better. Some devices will be able to acquire a GPS fix from inside a building, but the quality of the signal will be much less and therefore the accuracy will suffer. Typically, you will have accuracy within 3 meters, but that can vary up to 50 meters depending on environmental factors. The "assisted" part is that the GPS device then uses cellular technology to broadcast it's position back to a server, which in turn then displays the information via a web portal. Obviously the device therefore also has to be within a cellular coverage area (most GPS devices on the market today utilize TMobile for a cellular provider, we are preparing to switch to AT&T for a much better coverage area). Additionally, since the devices are using cellular networks already, they have the ability to GSM location on top of the GPS location. This helps eliminate the issue of no coverage indoors, but most devices on the market today do not have this feature enabled. Then most device providers also offer additional services via their web portal when you access the tracking (though some companies try to charge more for these services). You can do things such as geofencing (you may want to find a provider offering polygonal geofencing, as radial geofences can wind up encompassing a vast area that is really outside of the safe zone you are trying to create), breadcrumbing, speed warnings, etc...
Get an Android G1 phone, turn on the GPS and install Pintail on it.
You SMS the phone, it replies with its location. Integrates with Google Maps
1) a small unobtrusive device I can place on my daughter,
Uh, where do you intend to put this device?
In your daughter's hand, I hope. Aka, a cell phone, right?
Or is this a futuristic chip implantation type question?
Why not just use a phone that supports Google Latitude? http://www.google.com/latitude/intro.html. All the work has been done for you.
I was once lost for a considerable time in a department store. Well, I knew exactly where I was. I was in the elevator, because I was 3 or so and elevators are awesome! And I wasn't going to leave the store without Mom. Mom panicked, store management had everyone looking for me and guarded the exits. Found me just fine. I wasn't abducted. I wasn't killed. Societal mechanisms are in place to return wayward children to their parents in the vast majority of cases. Yes, there can be a lot of panic involved, but I would be very interested in seeing statistics on how many lost children are recovered within a couple hours versus how many remain missing for longer periods. Unfortunately, I don't think such statistics could be properly gathered, given how many such incidents are resolved without ever making a blip on statistic-gatherers' radar.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
I'm not going to belabor the topic of paranoia, but I feel that there is a much more probable situation happening which I didn't see discussed:
What are the odds for the following:
Child loses GPS tracking system (most likely a phone):Child gets lost to the point that the police are called
Let her beat you up a bit then get her arrested. She can get one of those neat leg bracelets from the penal system. Then the cops would know where she was a bring her home if she strayed.
People are forgetting that this is not the same world that we grew up in. But I see no reason to panic. My daughter started walking home from school this year so I got her a phone with GPS. We already had Sprint so we went with them. Their "family locator" service costs $5/month and you can try it for free if you are already a Sprint user. I can track her via my phone or with a web browser. The service enables you to set up events that you are notified about. For example if my daughter is not home by 3:30 then I get a text message on my phone and my wife and I get an email with the details. If you already use Sprint, you should look into this.
He knows his daughter better than we all do.
Although I agree that using a GPS tracker is crazy when a mobile phone appears more sensible. I don't see any real solutions here to what the guy is asking, after 800 comments. Ignore the morality of it, and you're fairly restricted on options.
First though, something worth considering is the wikipedia article, and instead of it pushing her GPS location back to you, try a 'data puller' instead, so you can somehow contact the device and get her co-ordinates sent back to you.
Either way, unless you're looking at installing her with a satellite, connect a very long cable up, or some sort of elasticated wireless router rebroadcasting operation, you've gotta go with the mobile phone network. As far as I know there's only GPS trackers that use the mobile network, or using a mobile phone itself.
As everyone's mentioned you could use a commercial GPS location service from your network provider, or use a mobile phone and opt for writing your own software. Alternatively if you find the right dedicated GPS commercial device that uses GPRS and uploads it to your own server, then you can deal with it how you like.
If you're more willing to hack some hardware together yourself, DEFINITELY check out HackADay's section on gps hacks as a starting point.
I hope this is actually some help to you!!
http://byonics.com/microtrak/mtaio.php
I understand that you're concerned for the safety of your child, but you're really assuming the worst will happen. You're also overlooking the fact that your daughter is a bright individual and that she can take care of herself so much as finding her way home or reaching you. Besides, if you start tracking your daughter when do you draw the line? Are you going to make sure that all of her friends are ok to play with? Are you going to pick out what she eats so it's what you think is healthy? At what age do you stop tracking your daughter? What about dating in the future? Are you going to lock your daughter in a tower?
As a parent I'd rather trust my children and they'd rather have me trust them.
This topic is now about tracking remote controls, keys and wallets.
Put RFID readers on the buses, RFID tags on the kid's backpacks, and sound an alert when a kid boards who is not assigned to the bus? This ain;t the world I grew up in, where you could cound on the bus driver knowing you; this is the worst of the 21st, where you're lucky if the driver hablamos Ingles.
There is nothing wrong with yr Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission - NSA
"However, since it took less than three days for my local school district to misplace my daughter, I have decided that something needs to be done. By the school district's own admission it is a recurring problem of placing children on the wrong buses. "
Yeah... I can already tell you're going to be one of those asshole parents.
Grow the hell up. Put a dollar in change in your child's hands and a piece of paper with important phone numbers to reach you, it's what my parents did for me and it worked just fine. Problem solved and I didn't even need a cell phone.
Replace the bloody-rotten public school system.
Like everything else it's up to the end user to make sure the system is working property. I like to toss a SPOT Messenger with tracking mode ON in my son's (who is 7) bag before he heads off to play with his friends.
I am more then happy to answer questions on the subject, just contact me for more.
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
Do not deprive your kid of real-life experiences dealing with the unexpected. You can hover over your kid all you like with gps, but some day shes gotta go out on her own. When kids are on their own, unmonitored, they learn to be self sufficient, calm under stress, and resourceful. Just get your kid a phone so she can call you when she gets lost.
Hey Pops, wanna learn about how to spy on someone? Move to the UK!
and what makes you think that has any implications whatsoever as to them being put in my car?
ah, because you there is a slippery slope. that legislators and average folk don't know the difference between a parolee and a nonparolee's car, and don't care. that gps's are sentient beings that are out to take away your freedoms, propelled in an unstoppable force that proceeds without any human cognition involved. or, no: it is done by human beings. but they have no ability to tell the difference between a parolee and a nonparolee's car, and if the police put a gps on my car, i won't care, no fellow citizen will care, no legislator will care, no judge will care. or know the difference
please get your head out of your ass
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
from hatred for rural assholes who don't understand how their maladjusted view of the real value of guns in civil society results in hundreds of needless urban deaths every year, or don't care
and it is venom. and it is hatred. and it based on the inability to get the blind to see how their incoherent opinions lead to unnecessary deaths
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
you can stop yourself or someone else from becoming a victim of a crime. this happens all the time, probably every day
its just that for everyone of these virtuous uses, 10 other people get shot because of mistakes, overheated situations, knuckleheads, etc
so overall, guns just aren't worth the collateral damage. the collateral damage is greater than any benefit guns convey
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you ever lose your kid, just run around screaming "Anthrax! Anthrax!" Until everyone runs away except for your child.
Well worth the Psychiatry bills, IMHO.
I second (third?) the suggestion to use Verizon Chaperone. I wouldn't get the Migo as a few have suggested, the things just too likely to get your kid's ass kicked in school unless they are in like Kindergarten. But Chaperone will run on pretty much any phone. As the kid gets older, if they need discipline, kids will get hooked on text messaging (most likely..) and the threat of revoking text messaging will effectively keep ALMOST any kid in line. (Or, as we suggested in howardforums a few days ago, threaten to switch their normal phone out with a Migo -- this may be a worse threat than taking the phone away entirely.)
As a safeguard, teach your daughter about 1. How to avoid strangers, 2. How to find the nearest policeman (yeah I know, can you really trust them? But eventually you're gonna have to trust someone.)
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
how you can change the subject and think you have a point
sing with me
"one of these things is not like the other..."
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I know a cell phone is probably bigger than a RFID bracelet, but the kajeet system is made for parents like you and is fairly cheep (under 40 a month) you could even make it sound like a allowance or reward for her. But best part is you can track them on your cell (assuming you have a smartphone).
its the regurgitated nra playbook
do you have something to offer besides the usual stilted lying "numbers"?
do you mix your own propaganda or do you merely regurgitate what's fed to you gimp?
its a wonderful lesson in half-truths, dubious interpretations, partial context, creative conclusions, preconceptions...
asshole: more undeserving people are killed by guns in accidents incidents heated arguments and confusion than saved by guns in your boy scout fantasy life of red dawn and dirty harry
you really want to spin that rock of gibraltar truth you lying sack of shit?
maybe you are actually deluded and don't believe that. power to you, you paranoid schizophrenic little man. must be quite serene, living on lies and ejecting your human consccience
MORE PEOPLE ARE KILLED BY GUNS THAN SAVED BY GUNS
BY AT LEAST A FUCKING ORDER OF MAGNITUDE
understand that ironclad truth you lying turd?
i swear you guys are as brainwashed as the fucking church of scientology. its like arguing with a committed creationist retard about evolution, such is your blind deathgrip on lies
or do you really need me to go down the blind alley of battling statistics with your moronic propaganda?
ok
HOW MANY VIOLENT CRIMES WERE COMMITTED LAST YEAR
HOW MANY WERE DONE WITH FIREARMS
HOW MANY MURDERS WERE COMMITTED LAST YEAR
HOW MANY WERE DONE WITH FIREARMS
look it up you propagandized asshole
look it the fuck up and get back to me with your serene motherfucking lies. i'm sure the nra playbook addresses this on page 23. please regurgitate the play. why think for once, right?
blood is on your hands. obviously, not on your conscience, as it is doubtful you have one
but don't worry about it. the sun is setting on your reactionary retarded little world
your days are numbered you fucking dinosaur. its all inevitable demographic change from here
i look forward to the more progressive opinions of your enlightened urban children, as they will inevitably be. see what they see. see what they think the gun represents in their civilian lives, what it inhabits in the landscape: nothing but a threat, even and especially in their own hands
its sad really, to live as a bitter dead end
but you're almost reassuring dear nra zombie, to see history come alive, like visiting dodge city or davey crockett's home or seeing a pirate ship: thank fucking god we live in civil society, look how far we've come. even though some retards amongst us still cling to antiquated modes of living, thinking walking around as their own judge jury and executioner makes any fucking sense in the modern western world
go move to somalia if you want to be fucking relevant, you blind asshole
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
its obvious to me now that panty twisted hysteria always wins in your mind's eye
i apologize for trying to argue with you with some logic and reason. that gps in situatian A has nothing to do with gps in situation B. no, obviously wrong
the truth of course is: we put gps on kids. OMFG ITS AN UNSTOPPABLE SLIDE TO FASCISM
pfffffft
fucking fear addled moron
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The fact the he insists that it's a Linux based solution goes to show that he's dieing to get some new toys and having a kids tracker seems like a lot of fun. When my local condo complex started having problems with break ins in our garage, I used the excuse to hook up some infrared cameras and use an HTC P3300 as a tracking device for stuff I was sure would be stolen. Built it into an old shuttle PC which I also loaded up with a 3lb lead acid cell that would last for weeks.
Unlike what some of the other commenters here said about him knowing his kid or the school better than we do, it's more that he knows himself better than we do and he knows he's the type that spends all his time goofing with computers and electronics and recognizes that he is highly likely to lose track of his kid regularly, this way he can have a task bar icon that pops up a "kid location service" map every 5 minutes with an alarm when the kid is "out of bounds". Then he doesn't have to have a clue about his surroundings.
We were out somewhere in the evening, it was kind of dark and I recall a carpark...
I climbed into the back seat of the wrong car and fell asleep.
I woke up at a police station and the police asking me questions, I was able to recite my full name, address and telephone number.
I guess I am lucky I didn't get discovered by a paedophile, but that's another story altogether.
Because it is a cop-out. The problem is crappy schools. Since nobody wants to admit the schools CAN'T be fixed they whine and try to solve these ridiculous problems with "technology". Just like giving every kid a computer in school will "educate" them.
I'm very glad I live in the Netherlands, where children are happy (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6360517.stm), and don't have to be watched all the time. My children are, er, out at the moment. Yesterday they cycled to the beach.
Jesus christ. Do not go down the slippery slope of person tracking. Your daughter just learned a lesson: check for yourself if you are going to the righ tbus. This scenario will not play again because your unique biological learning device just got smarter.
I have a 4 year old daughter. I try to explain why I forbid certain things. In the end, I let her hurt herself doing something stupid, as that seems to be the most efficient way of bringing the lecture to the lasting memory. "See, this is exactly what I was talking about, remember?"
Bot Assisted Blogging
Buy her an Android phone, like the TMobile G1, and sign her up for Google Latitude. That should solve it.
Hi dude, This program already exists and is commercially available on http://www.ubiest.com/page_id_/lev_/lang_id_2/ctg_cat_id_--/index.htm it is an italian company who demoed such a sollution on one of the LBS fora I went to. Hopefully this helps.
Vrijgezellenfeest/Teambuilding klik hier
Number of posts: 951 Number of links to products: 4 Effective success rate: .0042
They had to pander to every dummy because they insist we're all equal.
The result is that the school district caters to dummies and alienates smart people.
If you value competence, you need to hear these two words loudly and clearly: PRIVATE SCHOOL.
Third worldish USA cannot educate your child well in its public school system.
Probably the easiest way to achieve this is to give her a cell phone and pay for the locator service. If she values the phone, she'll keep it with her. However, like several people have already commented, teach your child how to call you. Remember that your primary goal in parenting is to raise a self-sufficient adult. Ending up on the wrong school bus is only the beginning of the crises she will face in life.
Good luck!
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
putting gps on kids
has
nothing
to
do
with
putting
it
anywhere
else
understand, you ignorant twatstain?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
aka: people with 1/2 a brain;-}
Better teach her not to trust authorities and ask/doublecheck busses before going in. this way you will not make it normal for your doughter to be under survelliance from young age and make her more responsible, more aware person.
Applied Digital Solutions has had something like this for years.
I think it is in the "vapor ware" stage and always will be, the company seems to be going nowhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_Digital_Solutions
When I first saw this about a decade ago, I thought, "That is diabolical, I want in." So I bought some stock watched it tank and sold it.
- I live the greatest adventure anyone could possibly desire. - Tosk the Hunted
Not what the OP is looking for, but here's a commercial product that tracks buses and children using GPS and RFID.
Yeah, I know. Big Brother, etc.
The problem is in the way the school is handling getting children on the bus.
Fix that [roblem.
I is nice to see the Linux comes before your daughters safety, truly hard core.
Finally, you can NOT have your cake and eat t to. If you can track so can someone else, no exceptions.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Please take a look at this link www.smparentalcontrols.com and see if this product fits your needs. SMobile Systems Parental Control Edition has GPS locate functionality built in to the software application for smart phones. This application allows parents to monitor the daily activities of their child's mobile device. Additional features include call monitoring, e-mail and text message monitoring, remote lock, wipe and restore, etc... If you would like to discuss further please contact SMobile Systems at 1-866-323-0480
Using HAM radio, I can do this using APRS (http://www.aprs.org) A GPS receiver tied to a mini-computer that you can build as a kit that acts as a modem for a small pocket-sized radio. Byonics (http://www.byonics.com) sells the kits called TinyTrak's or they make an all-in-one package that does this: http://www.byonics.com/microtrak/mtaio.php APRS is the packet radio format of the radio transmission, and it's picked up by APRS users in the area and forwarded over to an internet gateway. Then you could go to http://www.findu.com/ or http://aprs.fi/ to locate your call sign and watch it's movements. I do this all the time with my car and most cities have really good coverage. The only downside is it would require you to get a HAM license (not hard at all) and you can not use encryption at all. You would have to accept the fact that anyone can track your call sign, you don't have to give out your callsign to anyone though.
Just do what I do... Have the limo drive pick up the kid and drop him off at the salon where mommy is spending his inheritance.
Findmyi.com
Check it out at www.zoombak.com. Promo right now is for 3 months free. Least expensive, easiest to use GPS tracker on the market. Thanks. Zoombak Guy
of a firearm in self-defense per year"
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
uhng
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
sweet, sweet delusion
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I used a summary that I'd read years ago. Here's what a quick Google search says:
Thirteen surveys, 800k to 3.6M defensive uses/year.
http://www.guncite.com/kleckandgertztable1.html
The author (Kleck) of the criminology paper where those charts originally appeared is a widely respected criminologist who is trying to find out which gun control policies might be effective for reducing crime and/or violence.
You'd like him as he's also pretty hostile to the NRA.
Step up with some numbers that substantiate your position or go away. As a reminder, you have yet to assemble a cogent argument for your position. So far, all you've done is assert wildly.
that is one of the sickest things i have ever heard
your biological child or not, whatever her age is, even you have no right to destroy her privacy like that
Do you even want to have a discussion? I honestly feel that (1) the NRA are a bunch of tards and (2) guns are a net benefit to society, most definitely including urban dwellers like myself. You seem to want to be angry and name call.
If you want to have a discussion, please step up. If not, I'm done. I feel that anyone reading this little exchange between us would feel that I've hugely substantiated my argument that gun ownership is a net benefit in the USA while you have not actually made an argument of your own nor have you refuted even a single point that I've made.
So, what's your goal here?
do you want to have a level headed discussion with me on that idea?
or do you want to laugh your ass off at me for being a total fucktard?
now you know how i feel
"Estimated 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 successful uses of a firearm in self-defense per year (unknown number of lives saved)."
well, i want to tell you about the thetans in your body put there by xenu because they were chained to earth volcanoes 10,000 years ago
not feeling me?
now you know how i feel when presented with your delusions
and of course, if i won't sit here and gently hold your hand and keep a straight face while you vomit bald faced lies and pure shit, i'm the party in the wrong
alriiiigthy then
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
i have it on solid authority
http://www.biblegateway.com/
wait, why won't you have a discussion with me? you say it's older? prove it. show me your numbers. why are you walking away? you're afraid your so called science will collapse under scrutiny? hah! i knew it!
zzz
dude, i have no respect for you. there's nothing to talk about with someone so deluded. you're an asshole with no human conscience
but please, by all means, take this as proof i won't debate you because you've won the argument
a creationist would do the same if i blew him off
like i have a chance to pierce your delusions on a discussion board in a few posts
delusional state: unpunctured and preserved
but here's a parting cluebat for you: maybe your numbers are WRONG you hallucinating fuck?
geee just maybe A LITTLE FUCKING OFF? maybe ORDERS OF FUCKING MAGNITUDE?
naaaaaaah
impossible
but of course, because i won't engage with you, you must be correct, right?
adios douchebag
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Several years ago, there was a company called "Wherify" that made a GPS enabled wrist-watch device for this purpose. You could put it on your kid, and it it locked on with a key so it couldn't be removed (it also had a cut-resistant band to help thwart would be kidnappers). You could see your childs location from any web-browser. You could set way-points in so that if you're kid was supposed to be home at 3pm afterschool, and they didn't show up, you would be notified by email. It also had a "panic" feature on it that would allow the child to activate if something bad did happen, that would cause the GPS coordinates to be sent to a dispatcher and you for immediate action. It was water proof etc. Sounds exactly like what you're looking for. Here is a link to it, but I don't know if their sold anymore... http://www.brickhousesecurity.com/wf200.html
I love how technology totally defeats the purpose of parenting.
If my parent made me wear a beacon, I would shatter it.
And I would shatter the replacement unit.
Save some money and just trust that your daughter is really at class, or volleyball, or the mall.
She's going to hate you eventually anyway, so why not speed up the process? Please do this.