Cell Phone Tracking

I cannot get sleepy for some reason. Well, I know that has something to do with the six hours I clocked early last night. I went to bed at about 6:30 p.m. and woke back up at around 12:30 a.m. I was just so tired from yesterday, from the whole week. I even done some homework about an hour ago. Yes, my life is unexciting and unstimulating.

The homework I did—believe me, this isn’t a boring topic—was a proposal on our ethics project for Technology, Literacy, & Culture, which centers on Cell Phone Tracking Parents. This has become a reality.

Katherine Albrecht, mentioned in the article by Barry Levine, discusses the factor that I see as the major problem with GPS Cell Phone Tracking Technology.

“I have a problem with any kind of tracking device, especially for kids,” she says, “because they will grow up with the expectation that tracking your every move is a normal part of life. It raises the hair on my neck because we’re training kids to be tracked at all times and they will think that some authority tracking them is fine.”

This is a real issue. People my age (22) may be some of the last people in the U.S. who believe it is wrong to have our every move tracked. Sure, our every move isn’t being tracked at the moment—I hope not, at least—but this is a future that could be real. Kids today, might not know that they have certain privacy rights when they become adults. Even adults now don’t know about their rights of privacy.

Cell Phone Tracking isn’t all a bad thing either. There’s E911, which is a great thing by all means. It provides emergency teams to get to an emergency quicker and more efficiently than before, in some cases. This is definitely a good thing if you’re living in a back-of-the-woods Alabama town. Parents can actually know where their kids are if the kids’ cell phones are on and not ditched at a friend’s house. Of course, what kid would turn off or leave their cell phone somewhere? Not many. This can also be a bad thing, which I went over before.

The real truth is, is that Cell Phone Tracking has positive and negative consequences. It depends on which viewpoint you’re looking at it from. This is a reality that is upon us all.