Silicon.com reports that NTT DoCoMO have introduced a new “child friendly’ phone for use with their Imadoco service, one of the first child tracking services introduced about five years ago.
There seems to be a lot of comments about the potential civil liberty issues of tracking children, and in particular with the new SA800i phone it is very difficult for the child carrying the phone to prevent their location been supplied to the their parents, you can’t switch the system off without a password, it works when the phone is switched off, and it is only possible to take the battery out with a special key ! Of course you could leave the phone at home – but what child around town now wants to be without their phone !
Clearly for this type of technology to be imposed in a corporate environment would not in any way be acceptable, however as a parent of an eight year old daughter who is already nagging to get a mobile ( I’m still holding out ) I can see the benefits.
As a society we are perhaps already overly protective of our children, afraid to let them out of our sight to play in parks, visits friends houses etc. freedoms we had when we were children.
Maybe the use of this technology could rather than introducing big brother as a childminder, give back some of the freedom to our children they have lost because of our concerns for their safety ?
Written and submitted from Starbucks Chiswick, using the T-Mobile WiFi Network.