Cell Phones and Privacy

Pre-paid phones are used in many different situations. A family struggling financially may use prepaid phones to avoid the expensive cell phone bill, a parent may give their child or pre-teen a prepaid phone because they are not very expensive and if they broke or lost the phone it would not be the end of the world. On the other hand, these phones could also be used by criminals who are trying to hide their identity. I believe that pre-paid cellphones should not be taken off the market completely. I believe that these phones are convenient and cheap for families who need them and are helpful to families who want to be able to have on-the-go communication with their younger children but do not have to pay an outrageous cost. On the subject of criminals, I believe that stores should be more careful about who they sell to and should have customers interested in buying a pre-paid phone fill out a form or application. Even though there may be criminals using pre-paid phones, more often than not the users of these phones are people who cannot afford a cell phone bill, younger children, or the elderly and it is not fair to ban these phones from them.

Location Tracking

I believe that implanting chips into children is wrong. Even though the parents benefit because they will know where there child is at all times, I believe that the risk of strangers being able to track the children outweighs the benefit the parents have. I think that if the child has the GPS in their cell phone the parents should not get the chips because the GPS in the cell phone is efficient and safe. I believe that parents have the right to decide what they want for their child but I believe that putting a chip in the child's body is going to endanger the child. If I had to decide whether to implant a chip into a young child or a teenager I would most likely choose the young child. I would not put a chip in my child in the first place but if I had to choose I would choose the young child because they do not have a cell phone and are too young to know their surroundings so if anything ever happened to them they would have nobody to help them find there way back to their parents. Teenagers on the other hand have cells phones and as they grow older they will get their licenses. Although teenagers are more likely to get into trouble I think that teens should be old enough to make mature decisions and it is an invasion of privacy if their parents have access to their every move. If there was a bill in Congress to require ID chips in children under the age of five I would not support it. I would not support this bill because as previously stated I believe that putting a chip into a child is endangering the child more than it is helping the child. I think that it is unsafe to have children undergo that procedure because you will never know who has access to the chip information and can see where your child is at all times. On the other hand I would be more likely to support senior citizens suffering from Alzheimer's because they are older and are less likely to have people watching them but they are also more likely to get themselves lost and they have no way of remembering any key information such as their name, their address, their phone number etc. Overall I do not support the idea of having chips put into humans because there are other approaches such as the GPS shoes that can be used to track people but also can be taken off and are not inside of you forever. In the future technology may produce a chip for humans that will not allow access to anyone other than family but as of right now I do not support the procedure of chips being put into the human body.

My name is Kate Maguire, I am from Boston Massachusetts and I am a Business and Administration major at the University of New Hampshire. I created this blog for my Computer Science course. In this course we learn about the internet and all of its pros and cons. We talk about the issues and ethics regarding the internet as well. So far we have talked about the history of the internet and how much the internet has changed peoples lives, some for good, while others for bad.