What’s human cost of GPS, gadgets? (Mainly about tracking Teens)
John Kass
Published April 14, 2006
Should anxious parents give their children those new cell phones with global tracking devices, the better to conveniently track their every move?
Or should we just let them lie, the way some of you (not me) lied to your parents and ditched high school, drinking beer with your buddies, listening to Black Sabbath, doing other evil business, instead of studying comparative religion at the public library.
Now that I’m a parent–my Sabbath T-shirts are long gone–I’m thinking about those global-tracking devices and how best to ease my children onto the postmodern leash…
I get a lot of queries from folks who want to know more about tracking their children. I also notice a lot of the searchers that come to my business’s web site: www.satviz.com are about children and especially teen tracking.
I liked John’s article a lot, although whether it’s just editorial hyperbole or the true lack of tech savvy so prevalent on this subject, you can’t “track” dogs with chips embedded just beneath their skin. You can read those chips with a scanner at the vet’s office or the dog pound, but the effective range is inches or less … not very often what folks think of when they think of ‘tracking’.
To track people you need GPS technology. The cost effective way to track teenagers and monitor their driving is a high-resolution ‘black box’ wired into their car. To track them while they are out and about not driving, a cell phone with GPS is the next best thing. Bear in mind though that no consumer-grade GPS products work indoors, and if you give me a trackable phone to carry, I can leave it anywhere I want you to think I am while I go off to the places you didn’t want me to go to in the first place.
Limits of technology aside, though, I think parents should deficiently keep GPS tracking in mind as an adjunct to their overall ‘good parenting’ program. You only get one chance to keep them alive.