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.