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Leader: Tracking children? Think like a CIO
Think like a techie, not a parent

By silicon.com

Published: Thursday 24 November 2005

Japanese mobile behemoth NTT DoCoMo has announced a location-tracking mobile aimed at worried parents who want to check the whereabouts of their children.

Imagine the day your son or daughter is a little late home. You think the worst. Then they show up, having forgotten the time, playing rounders with their mates.

Still, at such moments most parents would be glad to be able to turn on their mobile and use it to check their child is still on the playing field and nowhere else. No worried phone calls to the school, no nightmare scenarios playing in the back of parents' minds.

So there's no denying the child-centric phone will be popular among parents and considerably less so with children, who will – and let's be honest about this – lose a huge degree of their freedom should such devices find their way into the mainstream.

But take a step back from the concerned parent role here and think like a techie. Using the technology we're talking about is like putting RFID tags on penny chews – the technology may be great, it may work well but this just isn't the right environment for it. The business case just isn't there.

With really young children, there's never going to be an instance where an infant will be away from its parents for long enough to need to be tracked. An older child with more freedom can simply work its way around the system, whatever security features are built in to stop it.

The mobile tracking service can easily be outwitted by a clever teenager. He bunks off school but leaves his mobile with a friend in the classroom – mum's none the wiser. Or - she asks a friend to look after her handset and the device will happily report that she's doing her homework, all the while allowing her the freedom to wander off with a dodgy boyfriend.

So, what would a good CIO do in these situations? It's a problem that some are already tackling. Staff tracking services have already been launched and have attracted the ire of unions for their privacy-busting implications.

For both the boss and the parent, these technologies can have their place and be acceptable – although never popular – with those forced to bear them. If you really feel you must use this technology in either the business or the home, do it sparingly, do it with good reason and do it when and where it's appropriate.

And – to stretch this metaphor a little further – your kids and your staff will be crucial in getting this to work. If you can't get them onside and get their buy-in, you'll have wasted money on clever yet useless technology with no benefit to anyone.