AT&T "Family Maps" cellphone location tracking [telecom]

Nice concept, but it didn't get them anywhere near the market penetration they where hoping for, and they've been relegated to the dust bins of history.

I agree. If people wish to create the communities of the 1950s they can. It's a matter of moving to a smaller community. Case in point, the town of Brisbane, California, 1 mile south of San Francisco's Candlestick Park (where the 49ers play and the Giants used to play). Brisbane has about 4,000 people. It's located in a small valley. The residents know each other. When a kid is wandering around, neighbors know who they are. They know where they're supposed to be. People watch out for each other. No GPS necessary. Brisbane is but one such community. There are 10s of thousands of these all over America.

What's funny is that Brisbane is no isolated early 20th Century enclave. It's in the heart of the epicenter of biotech. It has better cell phone coverage than nearly anywhere in America. Any given outdoors area will receive a dozen or more Wi-Fi routers. Brisbane is the ultimate in high tech. And yet, people know each other, look out for each other. The crime rate is low.

Again, it's not because Brisbane is so special. It's because it's small. Even across crowded California (37 million people) there are hundreds of such small communities there 1950s style community still works.

I respectfully must disagree.

Certainly, as a parent you want to do everything possible to protect your children (not only as kids, but forever). But the reality is that you can't, even with new technologies. Very seriously--how far are you willing to go with technology? Put GPS in the car? Secretly wiretap their phone calls? Secret cameras in their rooms?

Summing it up, my feeling is that when there's a social problem, the problem itself needs to be fixed, not use technology to build walls around it. That is, if kids are facing danger, let's eliminate those dangers, not simply track our kids. Indeed, kids will turn their phones off, let the batteries run down, or simply lose them, eliminating the tracking ability.

Back in the 1960s the crime rate skyrocketed. For the decades the only solution was to put more locks on our doors, not deal with the crime issue itself. New York City had terrible crime by the 1970s, but managed to beat it back and is much healthier today as a result.

This is not to say I'm against cell phones for kids--they are an added convenience and safety measure. But if parents can't trust their kids to be truthful and resort to tracking devices, drug tests, room searches, IMHO there is a deeper problem and technology is only a Band- Aid, not the real solution.

I recognize times have changed, but times have always been changing. When "The Greatest Generation" were kids they horrified their parents by rejecting many Old World traditions the parents brought over with them. During WW II social moral values took a break for the duration. Moralists were outraged at the frank anti-VD measures the Army took, but those measures were necessary. None the less, the "Greatest Generation" managed to get through the Depression, win the war, and create the enormous economic boom of the 1950s.

Then the Baby Boomers horrified their parents. We thought the country would come to end in the 1960s from the riots, counter culture, etc., but things worked out all right.

IMHO, a great many kids today are better grounded and "together" than their Baby Boomer parents were as kids. High schools and colleges had plenty of temptations when the Boomers were there in the 60s and 70s.

There are kids today who screw up and fall to the dark side, but there were Boomers who did so and Greatest who did so, too. In WW II and the 1950s much of that stuff was kept carefully hidden from public view, it was taboo to speak of it, while today it's fashionable to share your troubles with the world on Leno.

The old Bell System used to employ thousands of women. True, many telephone operators were young just buying time until they found a husband. But women in the commercial section, such as service reps and billing clerks, and their supervisors, were older. Likewise, Western Electric employed women in its factories. How did all these women deal with their families in the 1950s? The Bell System 100 years ago provided matrons and support for the young girls who worked as operators, many of whom were away from the farm in the city for the first time. But I don't think family support existed in the 1950s.

The Cleavers were not a typical family, they were more affluent than most. A great many families required the women to work in factories or offices, even in the 1950s, to make ends meet.

They already have that. It's called FasTrak, and it's used for automatically paying tolls on bridges, etc.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, roadside signs in various places estimate how long it will take to get to the various airports, bridges, and major highway intersections. What most people are unaware of is that the FasTrak transponders are also used to track movements of specific cars to provide information to those signs.

Geez, Bill. Are you letting PAT use your PC again? :-)

Thanks --

David

No, I was just venting. My son is a developmentally-delayed adult, and he has always been easily manipulated by those around him, to the extent that I no longer allow any of his "friends" in the private areas of my home, because it turned out that when some of them visited, things tended to go missing. I could carry on for hours about the terrible lack of services and supports for kids like him, but that's not something appropriate for a telecom group: suffice to say that parents in my situation need all the help we can get, and we learn early on to put practicality ahead of theory.

As far as location-reporting phones go, I'm all for them: I'm also all for parents developing backbones and telling their darling little ones that they are not yet adults and that a cell phone isn't a toy, and that they have to make a trade in return for the convenience of being allowed the privilege of using one. In this case, the price is having their parents able to know where they are.

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