Cell Phones and Privacy

Prepaid cell phones are very useful because they appeal to a specific market. Parents buying phones for young children, for example, as a means of staying in touch when they're walking to the bus stop or coming home from school would be very helpful in monitoring a child's whereabouts. As a parent you wouldn't have to worry about a child going over their minutes or racking up additional fees with data charges. For elderly people, prepaid cell phones could also be appropriate for the same reason. If they don't want to pay for all the extra stuff that comes with cell phones all they'd have to do is pay for a predetermined amount of minutes. Prepaid cell phones can also be useful for people traveling abroad, as they could be cheaper than changing your regular cell phones data plan to an international plan (so you don't receive roaming charges). I don't think prepaid cell phones should be banned because there are very good reasons to use them and specific customers that appreciate them. As far as criminals using prepaid phones so calls are untraceable, the fact of the matter is there's always going to be crime and criminals are always going to find loopholes to commit crimes. Eliminating prepaid cell phones would just encourage them to find another, potentially worse way of communicating without leaving records, such as deleting information from computers after they've been in contact (which could cause very bad damage). I can understand legislatures wanting to control cell phone registration, however, and I think that would be more beneficial and make much more sense than completely eliminating prepaid phones.

Location Tracking

Children are not animals. While they may wander it is a parents job to keep careful watch over them and teach them how to behave correctly. I don't think it's necessary to have a computer chip implanted in your child. Yes, it may be beneficial if the child gets lost, or in the horrifying case that the child is kidnapped. But do parents really need to have a chip in their kid when they are playing in the park or are at the grocery store? They should be responsible enough to watch their own kid, therefore I don't believe there is a huge benefit to it. The risk would be if someone that you didn't want knowing your child's location locked on to their GPS. Someone could easily track your child if they were after your child, or thiefs could easily associate your schedule and when your house is empty with the location of your child (for example, identifying when you're at the park so they know your house is vacant). In this day and age of computer hacking that could be very very possible. I wouldn't support a bill for this because, as stated earlier, I believe it is the parents responsibility to monitor their child and a GPS chip in children under five would just encourage neglectful parenting.

On the other hand, I would support the idea of having some sort of GPS device on seniors that might need it for their own safety. I still think that someone who has a habit of wandering should have proper supervision, be that by family or by being in elderly housing, but having a GPS device in a shoe or on a necklace could be very beneficial. One could run into similar problems though with thiefs tracking someone's activity, which could be an even bigger threat to the elderly because if they live home alone they wouldn't be able to fight of a burglar. As a whole though I do think that for elderly citizens the benefits outweigh the risks.

Hello!

My name is Caitlin Doonan and I am a nursing student at the University of New Hampshire. Living in a Networked World is all about the technology we use today and how it affects our lives. From computers to cell phones and everything in between, technology is has been integrated into our lives in such a way that survival without it could seem impossible. In some ways this is very good, and in other ways our reliance on technology could hinder our ability to function if we ever lost it. For better or for worse technology is always growing and developing as we live in our networked world.