Big Brother Selling Surveillance to Anxious Parents
By MATT RICHTEL The New York Times May 3, 2006
KEVIN REYNOLDS, a real estate appraiser and father of two, is confronting a quandary: should he put his daughters under electronic surveillance?
It's a question more parents will face in the next months, thanks to new technology that lets them use cellphones to monitor their children's location.
Next month, Verizon Wireless plans to introduce a child-monitoring service, joining Sprint Nextel and Disney Mobile, which started similar services this spring. Cingular is working on the concept, too.
The systems track cellphones by satellite, allowing parents to look on the Internet to make sure their children arrived safely, say, at school or at a friend's house.
"If you don't do it and something happens to your kids, how would you feel?" said Mr. Reynolds, 49, contemplating giving such phones to his daughters, ages 4 and 8. But he is also wary of being overly intrusive.
"It's Big Brother on a kid's level," he said. "What's it like to live in a world where everybody has a device that tracks where we are?"
We may soon find out. Several new programs for consumers use cellphones to tell us -- and our parents and employers, not to mention advertisers -- where we are, how fast we're moving, what direction we're moving in and how close we happen to be to restaurants, movie theaters, banks and other businesses.
Soon our cellphones will locate, record and even herald us with digital precision: "You are here."
These location-based services take advantage of technology built into dozens of the newest phones. It can instantaneously identify a phone's location by using satellites and the Global Positioning System, or by determining the location of the cell tower connected to the phone.