Parents!  Lojack your kids!

 

            Someday, thirty years from now, you will look back on a time when a car meant freedom in your teenage years – where you could roam the countryside driving wherever you pleased, content in the knowledge that nobody could find you.  And maybe you threw a little rebellious behavior in there, so what!  As long as you were home by curfew, you were good.  It’s all part of the bargain.  Perhaps it is a dying art, but we used to rely on trust and responsibility in my family, and if you violated either of those, you were punished.

            But now, a bunch of old fuddy-duddies want to ruin all of the joy of being a teenager and the new freedoms thereunto appertaining, while at the same time dramatically further our society’s decline into a nightmarish, Orwellian hellscape of surveillance.  And you thought the world was in such good shape, didn’t you?

            Meet “Teen Arrive Alive,” a ghastly new program that parents can load onto a GPS-enabled cell phone to track their teens and constantly know exactly where they are.  Parents will be able to go to a website and see their teenager’s last known locations on a Mapquest-style window.  Furthermore, it will sound an alarm if your child is driving too fast, as it gathers information every two minutes and can calculate the distance between the last two points. Sure, it’s neat.  But so is plutonium.  It is convenient parenting at the expense of personal privacy, and we are playing with fire tinkering around with this volatile technology.  Not that we haven’t already been tinkering – GPS tracking has been used by companies and governments for over a decade to track their assets.  But I worry specifically about the imposition of tracking devices on individuals.

            General Tommy Franks, the U.S. Army Iraq war strategist, has brought all of his shiny brass out to be the spokesperson for this affront to human dignity.  “As a parent, I know it is not only my right, but also my responsibility to keep an eye on and protect my children,” said Franks in an Associated Press article.  Parents will be able to rule their children with an iron fist, no longer needing to instill in them the desire and decency to make the best possible choices for themselves in their formative teenage years.  Now they can just play psychological games, putting a dark cloud over their children’s attempt at a lifestyle by making sure they know they’re constantly being monitored.

Morality and safe choices are not going to be learned by a climate of fear and mistrust, they are learned by example.  What does it say about your family if they distrust you so much that they have to know your exact position at all times?  The teenage years are a time in which life’s first freedoms should be tasted in great abundance, where blossoming adulthood is finally able to play a role in your actions.  Shit, even the Amish believe that – they let their kids run rampant at age sixteen during their period of rumspringa before they become baptized.  They get to taste all the fruits of the secular world so that they can make an informed decision about their faith.  Meanwhile, your secular, lazy, old fart worried-ass parents are putting a fucking Lojack on you?  FUCK that.  “Teen Arrive Alive,” my lily-white ass.  What’s the purpose of arriving alive if you have a broken soul when you get there?  If this becomes a societal norm, I just might give the Amish a call.  Or... er, write them, I guess.

This doesn’t even enter into the concerns about people using your information for nefarious purposes.  Organizations may start whoring data about where you’ve been to companies so that they can better sell you things, or nasty hacker types might borrow your data and sell it to the highest bidder.  All it takes is a little bit of fine print.  The more personal data we create about ourselves, the more there is to steal.

            Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, o my brothers, for the times in which you live may very well be the last gasp of true personal freedom.  I knew this was going to happen eventually, but we didn’t have to jump on the process like gangbusters.  There will be hundreds of companies that will take the technology ideas from this project and run wild with it.  The incremental products that spawn from the loins of this damnable hellhound will be equally incrementally more ghastly.  One day you will be hiding in a corner so that the telescreen can’t see you just so you can write about the awful world in which you live, and you will curse the day this technology emerged.  You laugh, but soon Richard Burton will have you on the rack and you will scream in agony for the times before General Franks cocked the whole thing up with his Officer Friendly bullshit.

My hope lies in knowing that kids are resourceful and smart, and they will find ways of thwarting this system.  Just give them a few months and access to the Internet.  Then we’ll just have to worry about the next step that asshole parents will take to micromanage their kiddy-winkies: GPS bio-implants.  Or maybe we’ll have to surgically replace our eyeballs to dodge the retina scans a la Minority Report.

But that is another story and will be told at another time.

 

Teen Arrive Alive: www.teenarrivealive.com

Slashdot (News for Geeks): www.slashdot.org