Could you clarify what you meant in the quoted statement? Thanks. This seemed like it could be addressing implants in general and not specifically in minors. It seemed like you were saying any procedure is illegal if it “involves a surgical procedure yet serves no theraputic purpose”. This is not true.
It may (or may not - I’m not sure but I doubt it is illegal) be illegal to perform such surgery on a minor (which seems to be the point you are now trying to make), but I don’t think so. A 15 year old girl could have a nose job for cosmetic reasons. Now you’ve got me wondering: Can a child have a breast job with parental approval? What are the laws concerning elective surgery on minors?
Yeah, I could’ve made it clearer in that post, but I was referring to juveniles (the whole thread is supposed to be about tracking children after all).
I’m not a lawyer so I might be drifting out of my depth here (and in any case the position probably differs either side of the Atlantic), but I have heard of cases here in which girls of 15 have asked doctors for breast enhancement surgery and found that nobody would perform the operation in spite of them getting parental backing. The same might apply to nose jobs.
The doctors’ argument seems there to be “I’m not cutting your kid open and exposing her to unnecessary risk just for the hell of it, you should at least wait until her natural growth pattern has evened out or until she’s voting age and can sign the papers herself”. Reparatory surgery in cases of injury or disfigurement would be seen differently of course, as would cases where the child is suffering mental stress on account of her appearance, say when one breast is developed much more than the other.
“Minor” procedures such as ear piercings are OK, tattoos not OK - but of course they don’t involve doctors anyhow.
I’m not qualified to say whether a surgeon would be breaking English law putting a transmitter in a child’s body, but it’s the sort of thing I’d expect the British Medical Association and Royal College of Surgeons to say either “we don’t think our members should be doing this” or “we don’t have a problem with it”. The BMA and RCS are advisory bodies; they don’t make our laws, but registered doctors tend to follow their advice.
Oy. No matter how many lives might be saved, we should never ever allow this procedure. The technology enabling this should be destroyed, the scientists who thought of it should run away and live in seclusion, the company that would have funded this should purge itself. This is absolutely disgusting, horrifying and repugnant.
It manages to combine everything we fear about the “National ID” card with the horror of technology’s attack on liberty. Once we’ve done this, how long before politicians decide it would cut down crime if we put these chips in released criminals? We need to cut this idea short right now to make sure it never gains acceptability.
I like these much better. Easier for the kidnapper to dispose of, true, but no surgery is involved and it has a panic button.
If any US lawyers care to drop in and tell us about surgery laws in the US (regarding minors) I would appreciate it very much. Thanks, everton, for the following paragraph was very interesting as I was unaware of the existance of these organizations:
I think it should go without saying that this device will be useless if a parent or family member abducts the child. They will obviously be aware of the device and take precautions to disable or, if it’s one of the parents, discontinue the service before the abduction.
My problem isn’t with the intention of the parents. Instantaneous identification of the position of their daughter if they believe something has happened to her is a good thing. Here’s my problem with the deal, this device could do nothing to prevent the abduction, or even start the search for her, on it’s own. There is the HOPE that the abduction will be noticed, by conventional means, early enough that they can be found before the abductor assaults/murders her, and it’s a decent hope. The article in the San Diego paper mentions that the odds of a stranger-abducted child being murdered is about 1/10,000. If the abduction is reported and tracked quickly enough there is a decent chance they’ll find her alive. But the device itself is pretty much useless as a preventative or even pro-active measure for her safety. I argue that it gives little to no practical benefit to offset the necessity for surgery and/or it’s upkeep. The devices like the Wherify watch that dj linked to, but less obvious, would be a better choice.
Here’s the reason. Computers are stupid, devices even moreso. I see no way for the device to know if she’s in trouble. Let’s say she’s kidnapped by a neighbor tied up in their house. Her position is close to her home, so why would that raise any alarms? How do you set up the rules? How far away from home triggers an alert? What if the family wants to go on vacation and they travel out of the home area. Will the parents/police/whoever get calls from the monitoring agency saying “SHE’S BEEN TAKEN!”? How fine grained do you make it? Do you say, well, this area is a creek, if she’s in this area then it means she’s been mugged/raped/killed and her body dumped?
It doesn’t work with the current state of the art. In order to protect the child it needs to have some type of pro-active role. Otherwise it’s no better than the watches. A passive tracking device that can be removed/disabled by an abductor. The theory works for property, but it doesn’t work for people. There is no need to recover property immediately and the tracking devices can be more easily secreted in the property(like the LoJack technology for stolen car location). To pro-actively protect people you need a device that is aware of it’s surroundings and has the ability to analyze the environment for threat levels. It can alarm based upon that. The technology simply isn’t there. I’m not sure it ever will be.
The problem goes beyond simple rules based on geographic guidelines. It would have to be tied to her biological systems so it could tell when she’s asleep (and therefore not moving around much) so it wouldn’t alarm thinking she was tied up and couldn’t move. Then it would have to be able to tell if she was actually asleep or drugged/knocked unconsious. It would need to know when she was supposed to be asleep so it could alarm if she was moving around when she should be sleeping(a midnight snack craving that brings the policemen by wondering if you’ve been abducted?). The list of conditions is enormous. By the time you had defined the parameters for what a program would and would not consider indicative of possible abduction the poor kid would have no possibility of privacy, ever.(She’s spending too much time in the bathroom, wonder if someone’s in there with her?)
So we’ve eliminated the possibility of being able to immediately determine if she is in danger through automatic means. What other purpose could the device serve? Well, if they determine she’s missing by other means they can look her up and start tracking her. If they determine her missing soon enough they might catch up to the perpetrator before the dirty work is done. Is this chance significant enough to IMPLANT a tracking device IN HER BODY? The alternative is the simple precaution of getting her a GPS-enabled device with a panic button that she could hide or wear. Keep in mind that although we don’t know the exact nature of the device they intend to use(it hasn’t been built yet) it will most likely be linked to a larger device she will have to carry. Close to cell phone size. The implant will not have enough power to transmit signals without the companion device. This makes it every bit as vulnerable to an abductor tossing the device in the ditch as the Wherify watch is.
Are we so desperate to integrate technology into our lives that we’ll do surgery when the benefit over a non-surgical technique is so small?
Curses. This piece of ignorance simply will NOT die.
The satellites do NOT track the RECEIVER. Get that word through your heads, folks. GPS receivers RECEIVE the signals from the satellites. Based on those signals, the GPS receiver then computes its own position. The satellites don’t know where you are. They don’t care where you are. They cannot find out where you are.
Aside from that, the idea of implanting a GPS receiver in a person is ridiculous. Simply standing under a wet umbrella is enough to block the signal. Standing on a narrow street with close set building is enough to restrict the number of satellites that the receiver can detect to the point that it can’t figure its position. Standing in the woods with a canopy of tree leaves over head is enough to block the signal.
Once the receiver has the position, you have to send that information back to the parents somehow. Shall we implant a cell phone in the kid, too? That sounds good.
How about a power supply? A GPS receiver that continuously tracks will draw around 100 milliamperes. 100 milliamperes, 24 hours a day. You need a battery of 2400 milliampere hours just to run the receiver continuously. You can cut that considerably by letting the receiver sleep most of the time, but you can only let it sleep so much. If you are lucky, you can probably cut that down to 200-300 milliampere hours - provided that you stay out in the open where the receiver can detect the satellites easily. If reception is poor, the receivers usually stay on longer trying to get a fix - this will cut into your standby time.
Still on the power supply, how much juice do you think a cell phone is going to need to transmit continuously? Think of the actual talk time on your favorite phone as opposed to its standby time. There’s a whale of a difference. Modern phones can run on standby for as long as a week, but actual talk time is limited to a couple of hours.
Since we’re using a cell phone, have you considered the cost of continuous postion updates? A 24 hour cell phone call would be just pretty damned expensive. You can cut costs by updating at intervals, but that wasn’t what the articles were talking about.
What about the antenna for the cell phone? Does it stick out of the top of her head? Does it retract automatically between calls? The same goes for the GPS antenna. It needs a “view” of the sky. It has to point upwards, so it has to go on top of her head, too. In the arm is no good. A flat antenna would look out to the side if her arm was down. She’d have to hold her arm straight out parallel to the ground all the time. If the antenna isn’t flat, then it is going to make one hell of a knot on her arm. Likely to hurt like a sumbitch if she bumps it, too.
To make this work you need the following:
A GPS receiver (currently available at about the size of a postage stamp, but not as a single “microchip.”)
The hardware of a cell phone (Minus display and keyboard and stuff. These are available without batteries as PCMCIA cards.)
A rechargeable battery with enough capacity to run cell phone and GPS receiver continuously for at least 24 hours (you could shorten that, but then the kid has to recharge a couple of times a day.)
Speaking of recharging. Do you propose to install a plug in her butt to connect to the charger, or should an inductive system be used? An inductive system would probably be more comfortable, but would take longer to fully charge the batteries and would require the installation of a fairly sizable coil to pick up the current - and the induction coil could get rather warm too, therby cutting the comfort factor severely.
All together, you are talking about a considerable amount of hardware to be implanting in the kid’s arm - for a device that may not function when you need it because the batteries might be down, the GPS receiver might not be able to get a fix, or the kid wanders out of range of the cell phone net.
Continuous tracking would seem to be pretty much impossible, IMHO.
The company I work for is developing a GPS tracker mounted in a hand held microphone for portable two-way radios. We have had to jump through hoops to get power consumption down to something manageable that won’t reduce the radio battery stand by time to less than seven hours. This not using continuous tracking, and the radios have 1800 milliampere hour batteries. The GPS receiver wakes up periodically to keep somewhat upto date on the current location, but sleeps most of the time. It only transmits its postion to the controller via the radio when queried by the controller, or when the user pushes a panic button to call for help. We could put a larger battery on the radio, or put one in the tracker. If we put a larger battery on the radio, then that is more bulk and weight. If we put a battery into the tracker itself, then it is more weight and more crap for the user to have to fiddle with. The users in this case are forest fire fighters and city policemen. Neither type is exactly whimpy, but they have enough stuff to drag around and enough stuff to worry about as it is.
Having re-read the articles, I see mention of cell phone systems but no mention of GPS. That says to me that they are using some form of location based on the cell phone service. This would most likely be a distance measurement system in a GSM system (which are standard in the U.K.) As a matter of course, the base stations measure the distance to the phones as a function of the signal travel time. This is needed to properly synchronize the transmit time slots of the phones using that particular cell. It is possible to combine the measurements from multiple basestations and compute a position accurate to within a few tens of meters.
GSM service providers can provide this information, but I think it highly unlikely that they would do it for free. This would make the continuous mode rather expensive.
Given the size of the device, I think the continuous mode unlikely for technical reasons as well. A device one inch long just wouldn’t seem capable of containing a battery with enough capacity to transmit all day long.
I really don’t see how the device mentioned in the articles could be of much use, except as a warm, fuzzy, fell good talisman for the parents. “Looky how concerned about my kid’s safety I am. I’ve got the most advanced technology to keep my kid safe.”
Technology won’t do it. Teach your kids what to do in a bad situation, and make sure there are no repeat offenders.
FTR: I have two kids of my own, and I worry about their safety a lot. I also know that it is my resonsibility to keep them safe and to educate them so that they can look after themselves when I can’t do it for them.
:o Sorry about that. I didn’t phrase that very well did I? I actually know quite well how GPS works and what I was trying to refer to is a case like what you pointed out here
GPS receivers can only triangulate their location based on certain satellites. Satellites which emit GPS signals. In the US, with the virtual saturation of satellites placed by the military the chance that you won’t be able to pick up signal from ANY satellite is rare. There are usually enough satellites broadcasting into your area that your signals may cut in and out, but will be fairly reliable. These GPS devices are not picky about what satellite’s signals they listen to. Some satellites have orbital patterns/signals that are better suited to precise position triangulation than others. The danger in one of the promiscious GPS receivers is in it being inaccurate. Conventional GPS systems have a margin of error measured in meters. You may be 15 meters to the left, right, above, or below the position of your GPS unit reports IIRC(there are technologies that compute differentials and help reduce this error margin, but I’m not sure they’re mainstream/cost effective. We’re talking about an implant the inventor claims to be able to sell for twenty pounds.). If you just want to know what part of a city you’re in this is fine, but a 30-meter radius is a good amount of buildings/rooms to potentially search in a city looking for a person. Are you going to sent SWAT teams into every apartment on three/four floors?
Anyway, what I was actually getting at was that I would expect a system which would help identify something as important as a kidnapped person’s location would use the most accurate GPS technology around. In the US that probably means a system using signals from the WAAS satellite. Of those there IS only one and interfering with the signal from it would be much easier than shutting out the signal from the numerous other satellites which could not be used to pinpoint your location as exactly as the signal from WAAS. Most systems that claim extremely accurate results use signals from certain satellites instead of just anything that is broadcasting a GPS signal. Or they use differential calculations which require more equipment/power and larger antennas.
So, in the US at least, there is currently a trade-off. Either have highly reliable, but less accurate GPS, or have highly accurate, but less reliable GPS. I was assuming they were taking the line of using highly-accurate GPS signals. This may be a bad assumption.
We won’t know until the device is actually implanted, but current speculation is that the implant will be linked to a small unit that would be carried/worn. I’m not sure how the main functions, position determination and position transmission, will be split between the components. I’m assuming power would come from the external piece so they don’t have to continually perform surgeries to change batteries.
My apologies for mentioning GPS in the original post - Mort Furd is right that the proposals intend to make use of terestrial cellphone technology, not satellites. All the other points you’ve made about comms technologies are worth airing nevertheless.
I’ve mailed various medical and child welfare organisations for their thoughts, by the way, and will report back when/if they reply.
It never ceases to amaze me the way people will react to the perceived risk highlighted by a single high profile incident while blithely taking much higher risks in everyday life without a qualm.
I haven’t found UK figures, but assuming that the US is roughly comparable, the the chances of a child being kidnapped are about 1% of the chances of being killed or seriously injured in a motor vehicle accident. And I strongly suspect that even that is an exaggeration, because I suspect that most abductions are minor and do not result in death or serious harm to the child.
And yet imagine the if you were to say “I have decided that rather than instal a tracker device in my child’s arm, I will protect my children by cutting down on driving them in my car by 2%” people would think you were nuts despite the fact that the latter would reduce overall risk by twice as much use as the former.
There’s one other thing about this that I haven’t seen mentioned in this thread or the original article. At what age will this device be removed? I’m not sure what age legal maturity is in Britain, but sooner or later, this girl is going to become an adult. This tracking device will be removed then, right? If not, the ramifications are disturbing, if not terrifying.
Right now, child abductions seem to be all the rage as far as the US news media is concerned, despite the fact that there have been fewer stranger abductions than this time last year. Yes, the world is a frightening place. What others will do to impose an artificial sense of safety is one of the things that makes it frightening.
Great. So the last recorded position is at the junction of two busy roads, so the abducted child was probably bundled into a vehicle but where is it now?
Well, if you are going to have part of it outside, then why bother having any of it implanted?
If the damned thing only works when the external device is present, then you could just go with a completely external device and be done with it.
If they are using the GSM locating method I mentioned in my previous post, then the device itself doesn’t know where it is. That information is determined by the GSM network and is only available from the computers involved. The device itself just does the periodical GSM updates that let the system know it is still logged in and active.
This thing is still a bad idea.
I have been beating on it from the technical view, but consider that a person kidnapping a child with the intent of sexual assault or murder is going to be a pretty ruthless and cruel person. Should implanted devices become possible and common, then criminals will simply start carving them out of the kids. More pain, more torture. It simply makes it more likely that the child will not survive the kidnapping. Even if the kidnapper doesn’t do anything intentional to kill the kid, brutally removing the tracker greatly increases the risk of death.
Bad, bad, bad idea.
Mort Furd I think we’re on the same wavelength. I’ve made many of the same criticisms. I think the inventor is a crank and the parents bought into his nonsense.
Someday what he envisions may be possible, but right now he’s playing with fire and it’s a problem because other people, like this little girl, may get burned.