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Swedish Daycare Tracks Kids With GPS Devices
An anonymous reader writes "A daycare center in Sweden is testing a new system for that will prevent missing children by placing GPS tracking devices on kids while they are outside of the confines of the nursery walls. The transmitters will report to a synced mobile phone, alarming teachers if a child moves out of a certain distance. The tracking devices clip easily to reflective vests that the children of the Malmoe daycare wear when outside of the school."
Malmö is the most crimeridden place is Sweden, which might explain this move
How did my generation manage to grow up in the 70s and 80s without getting abducted every second day and constantly being ass-raped? I mean, we had no cell phones, no GPS - we should be dead by now, shouldn't we?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
If I am in charge of, and responsible for, another persons child - you can bet your fucking arse I am going to use every means possible to ensure that my own arse is not on the line for losing that child.
Children wander off - take your eye off them for a second and they are gone, they are worse than cats in that regard. And if they wander off, they can become vulnerable. Every child care place I know of have bars or very high walls around the play grounds, tightly securable windows, and double security doors on the entrances - not to mention all of the CCTV in place. Why do they have this? Because losing a child in your care is a serious issue, with potentially criminal consequences.
GPSing the kids? What are the actual downsides? Really, what are they? Tracking where the kid goes is an invasion of their privacy? Well you should be doing that anyway, GPS just helps you do that.
Saw this on the news a day or two ago.
It's worth noting that this daycare is a kind of all-weather-daycare, ie. outside activities the entire day, every day. Keeping track of kids in the forrest is not the same as regular daycare. The GPS beeps and warns when a kid goes outside the geo fence, and apparently the teachers felt that it was a second layer of security besides constantly counting kids, wich is what they are doing atm.
In theory that's a good idea. How do you judge an attentive teacher? By the number of kids they've lost.? 1-5 means attentive, 6-10 means poor 10+ don't hire?
My mother ran a large daycare in the 80s. She gave it up when one toddler was brought in from the parking lot by some parents coming to pick up their kid. Nothing bad happened but it very well could have. She was not willing to risk it from then on. No matter how good you think those teachers are you just don't know.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
The system is not in anyway meant to replace teachers or aids, but to simply enhance their watchful eyes and increase safety. Although it cannot prevent a child from running off, it can provide an alert to chaperones, who are outnumbered by their students.
I am the last person to defend GPS technology, or any of this other Orwellian bullshit that seems to be the norm, but this is a non-story loaded with buzzwords that the submitter knew would immediately rile us up (it was enough to get me to RTFA, at least...). The technology is being used to supplement the daycare staff's supervision, and alert them early on when a child takes off. This clip-on is not going to prevent the child from intentionally running off, and an abductor will just remove it (if he's not an idiot as some are). However, if the child wanders off -- which believe me it happens all the time -- they can find him/her more quickly and not risk another child getting lost in the time spend looking for the first one.
Looking after maybe 1 or 2 children and this is going to happen sometimes. Looking after several dozen and this kind of solution seems practical. It's not like they're implanting something in the children to monitor their every move at home or initiate them into our totalitarian surveillance state of fear or what have you. Yes it has controversies (what is the GPS company going to do with the data? how hard would it be for some predator to intercept the data stream?), but not on the scale that the submitter has everyone worried about. Congratulations, you all have been trolled.
The article link is to a scraper site that runs most of the major ad networks, from Amazon to DoubleClick to Fox. Slashdot's "editors" have been had. Again.
The article was scraped from Physorg, which scraped it from Google News, which obtained it from Agence France-Presse.
This is a commercial product called "ChildChecker", from Purple Scout.
Being Swedish, I can ensure you that kidnapping is not the major concern here. There is a big cultural difference between Sweden and USA regarding leaving your kids unattended, as seen here: http://news.yahoo.com/swedish-woman-left-baby-outside-restaurant-investigated-152033738.html. In this case, I think they just want to make sure the sure the children don't run away, as they are not staffed enough to keep track of all of them all the time.
There's a competing product that does a much better job of keeping kids from running away.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.