Ret. General Tommy Franks wants to help you track your teen
By Susan Mernit 
posted Dec 10th 2004 1:01PM
posted Dec 10th 2004 1:01PM
Yo, General, where's my kid? Just in case
answering to Mom and Dad isn't scary enough for a teen with the family car, Retired General Tommy Franks, who helped
direct the invasion of Iraq, has signed on to be the spokesman
for Teens Arrive Alive, an organization that wants teens to carry a
GPS-equipped cell phone while motoring so parents can keep tabs on their location and speed. It's great to know
Franks considers the safety of America's teens so important he's willing to be paid large sums of money to shill
something like this to their folks.
Hmmm ... funny how you don't have a problem with Michael Moore making a shit load of money off his movies to "get out the truth".
Ummmm...wouldn't turning the power off defeat the whole purpose? [Sorry Mom, I "accidentally" turned the power off!]
Also, in my experience, the more you try to control someone (especially a teenager), the more they find ways to rebel. What's next? Under-the-skin ID chips with GPS, to boot?
Jeez! I bet that some of the same parents who were appalled at Janet Jackson's "titillating" Super Bowl performance will be standing in line for these products :-)
- Brendan
Well, geez. It's nice that the General wants to save our teens life.
It's just too bad he didn't think about that when he was planning the war in Iraq.
Cell phones? That's not good enough. I suggest implanting a chip in their ears. The chip will alert any parents to the location of their children and, if the parents press a button on their teen-troller device, the chip will emit a shock that will overload the teen's nervous system and render them unconscious. We have to keep teens safe from terrorists! NWO NOW!
;)
kids will just play pranks on their parents by sleeping over at a friends house and leave the phone in a ditch.
Micheal Moore made a shit load of money by actually telling the truth. It turned out that people sorta like that kind of thing. Go figure. They get so little of it from the traditional media.
This particular idea is going to bomb so bad.
Now let's take a poll to see how many of the people responding negatively to this article have children?
My daughter isn't old enough to drive but I will worry about her constantly until the day I die. I worry about her safety and believe it or not, teens act unsafely against their own good judgement on occasion. Personally, I'm surprised I survived my childhood/teens and having my daughter doing what I was doing scares the hell out of me. I just want to see the blip moving so I know she's still alive. I would buy her that cell phone and pay the minutes, however many thousand that be, if I could just know she's being safe.
This site is a lot more digestable when you stick to commenting about technology, not editorializing on people and politics.
Aeo: OK, now that you've thought about *your* point of view, now think about your daughter's point of view. Do you seriously think she'd LIKE a GPS that would tell you exactly where she was at all times? Better yet, think of yourself at that age and think whether you would have liked it. Not in retrospect whether you think it would have benefited you or not, just what you would have thought at the time.
I'm still in high school and I can tell you neither I nor anyone I know would think that was a good idea. Granted, it's a parent's job to protect their children, and that sometimes entails quite a bit of worry, but there is such a thing as going too far. When you put a GPS on your kid, you are basically saying that you do not trust her at all. That is not a good feeling for a child, especially a teenager, to have, and I ought to know. In addition, it raises the frightening specter of parents overreacting to percieved misdirection - for example, say that you somehow have determined that your daughter's location is not safe. (Incidentally, how are you going to do this only using GPS? It's not going to sound an alarm if there's alcohol, sex, etc. going on.) So you decide that the only course of action is to go remove your daughter from the area. Whether you do this by calling her or by physically driving there, imagine the embarrassment you would be causing her! And what if you drive to this "unsafe" location, only to find out it is in fact a perfectly safe party? I would be mortified if that were to happen to me. And if my parents had a GPS tracker on me, it would. As it would to (rough estimate) 45% of teens. Most of the others would, as has already been suggested, yank the battery, turn it off, or leave it somewhere. And that sort of thing just leads to unnecessary arguments between parents and their kids.
So I ask you, please think of the children. But don't think about what you think we should do. Think about what WE think. It's something not many parents do these days. We're not quite as helpless as popular wisdom would have you believe.
If your teen is so out-of-control that you're actually thinking of buying this device and making your kid carry it around, then you've obviously failed as a parent and mentor. If can't teach your child to stay away from danger, then if he/she crashes into a fiery ball of mixed alcohol and extasy, then you deserve all the grief you get.
Yeah, they need to come out with one you can implant that conducts routine drug tests on the teen. If there's a positive result, the police/parents are alerted and the kid will hate you forever and probably grow up to be a serial killer.
Seriously, tracking devices? Are your kids criminals under house arrest or something? You might as well put an anklet on them.
Comments like this "If your teen is so out-of-control that you're actually thinking of buying this device and making your kid carry it around, then you've obviously failed as a parent and mentor. If can't teach your child to stay away from danger, then if he/she crashes into a fiery ball of mixed alcohol and extasy, then you deserve all the grief you get." Are
1) CLEARLY made by a teenager offended by the idea of being tracked. No parent would ever say something so incredibly stupid.
2) Deserve all the grief you get? I cannot wait until the poster actually DOES have kids. The idea that they will be nice and safe everytime they walk out of the house is absolutely ludicrous. You do what you can, but being able to do more is always a good thing. Only a teenager can have faith in the judgement of a teenager. It's too bad I won't be able to witness the comeuppance this teenage poster will have as an adult.