Assignment 3

Our technological world is about to become and little less private! DEMO technology has invented a software program to prevent cell phones from being stolen. When you sign up with the software you give the company two numbers, yours and one of maybe your spouse or a friend. Once the phone is stolen and the thief replaces your SIM card with his the software gets to work. It immediately copies all of your information (phone book, pictures, and text messages) and sends them to the other number you have provided. It also hides all of that information so that the thief can’t access it. The phone also sends you a text message of its exact location. From this point the software gives you a number of possibilities. You can set off an alarm within the phone that will drive the thief crazy and you can eavesdrop on conversations and see texts being sent from the phone.

According to TIME, “The statistics are unsettling. In Am-sterdam last year, mobile-phone theft rose by 80%; in the U.K., it jumped almost 200% from 1995-2000.” Cell phone theft is clearly a rising issue in the world. I think that this new software is going to be great for stopping phone theft. It is innovative and seemingly successful way to catch or prevent people from committing the crime in the first place. The end of this article really struck a note with me though. It suggests that parents use the software to keep track of their children. Ideas like that really bother me, to a certain extent kids just need to be kids. Kids do need to be monitored but if they think or know that you are always spying on them or eavesdropping on their conversations there is going to be even more desire for rebellion. There needs to be a certain level of trust in child-parent relationships and it’s about time that parents realized this.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/someone-stole-your-cell-phone-tell-it-to-phone-home/?ref=technology