Directions Magazine offers this opinion piece from Jerry Dobson
Martha Stewart wears an ankle bracelet. Sprint announces a new “Business Mobility Framework” for employers to track employees. School officials in Sutter, California, order students to hang RFID tags around their necks; parents object and the principal backs down.
Already, school children in Osaka, Japan, are required to wear similar tags tucked in their belongings. The government of Mexico tracks court officials with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags implanted in their shoulders. Finland changes national laws to allow cell phone tracking of children. A woman in Kenosha, Wisconsin, discovers her estranged husband has hidden a GPS tracker in her car. All are current news items.
Once viewed as a futuristic nightmare, human-tracking is now affordable and available without restriction. For $200 plus a monthly service fee of $20, anyone can purchase an electronic device that puts George Orwell’s 1984 surveillance technology to shame.
They’re marketed as “kid-tracking” devices, though some ads also mention pets and senior citizens. In vivid shades of doublespeak, one company offers service plans named “Liberty, Independence, and Freedom,” but surveillance and control are their purpose.
At the very least, human-tracking devices will alter relationships between some parents and children, husbands and wives and employers and employees more dramatically than any other product emerging from the information revolution.
Ultimately, they offer a new form of human slavery based on location control. They pose the greatest threat to personal freedom ever faced in human history….
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