Every child tagged and tracked?

Should every child be tagged and tracked?

CURRICULUM: Responsibility to Others: People Like You & Me

Summary: For more than 10,000 years, adults have cared for their children, and other people's children. Sometimes, children wander off, and sometimes, bad things happen. Modern technology allows adults to tag and track their children, to monitor their location, send and receive messages, even maintain history of their children's activities. Is this responsible parenting, or overprotection? Is the “creepy factor” significant? Or is this just a clever entrepreneurial scheme?

Basic Understanding:

Do children enjoy rights of privacy? (in U.S., and elsewhere)
Statistics: how many children are lost, abducted each year? Trending up or down?
Child development: how children's personal safety evolves as they grow up.
History of tagging people (including prisoners), pets, seniors, young children

Issues:

Public safety benefits, personal safety benefits

What is the new normal?

Distinction between public/personal safety and spying?

"You can't run, you can't hide" - how much freedom is enough freedom?
What is the job of a contemporary parent and contemporary community?

Children, freedom, neighborhood responsibility, "popsicle test"

Parent’s responsibility: keep an eye on your children at all times

Distracted parenting - do we "look away" more often than before?
Embedding digital devices into human bodies - medical, safety, psychological considerations
Cultural and political situation in other nations; International and cross-border issues

Open Questions:

"Your permanent record" - tracking, collecting, storing a lifetime of movement and activity
"Everybody must get chipped" - chip seniors, at-risk youth, babies, felons past and present, etc.
Data collection, storage, analysis, ownership (short- and long-term)

Combining tracking data with other (consumer, medical, etc.) data; profiling
Should tracking be a public (government, nonprofit) public service, or a business opportunity?