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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.
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.
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.
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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)
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.
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
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
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."
True. Why use a public, already-funded, low MPG-per-rider system when EACH parent can drive their SUVs to drop the kids off? In fact, why don't you just home-school your child and save lots of resources. And if you all buy hybrids, you can save the auto industry.
I hope I broke the needle on your sarcasm meter.
You do realize this is impossible for an increasing percentage of the population, right? Hence the existence of buses to begin with.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
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.
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?
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.