News Regarding the Center
Big Brother: Selling Surveillance to Anxious Parents
New York Times
May 03, 2006
Next month, Verizon Wireless plans to introduce a child-monitoring service, joining Sprint Nextel and Disney Mobile, which started similar services this spring. Cingular is working on the concept, too. The systems track cellphones by satellite,
allowing parents to look on the Internet to make sure their children arrived safely, say, at school or at a friend's house. . . .
"These technologies reflect our neuroses by having to protect against very unlikely scenarios," said James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers University. The devices, he said, could "diminish the quality of life between now and when a catastrophe occurs, if it ever does."
For her part, Ms. Aftab is a consultant to Disney Mobile for its own child-monitoring service, a job she said she took only after the company agreed it would not use fear to market the service. "Under no circumstances should they be
talking about 'peace of mind,' because that's just selling fear," Ms. Aftab said.
But, perhaps underscoring the gray areas raised by the technology ? and putting Ms. Aftab at odds with her employer ? George Grobar, general manager of Disney Mobile, says "peace of mind" is exactly what the company is selling. "It lets parents follow up and make sure their kids have arrived somewhere," he said.
What is also critical is that some employees have been equipped with monitoring phones.
"We hardly have any privacy as it is now - you go to a gas station and there's a camera on you, there are cameras outside of residential homes," said Pam Dickey, a San Francisco resident who works in sales for a major pharmaceutical company, which has asked its national sales force to carry phones that monitor their whereabouts.
"Now you have a telephone that will potentially tell people where you are, too - when you're in the bathroom, and how long you're there. "It's too much an invasion of privacy," she said.
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