Affordable GPS-tracking available for over-anxious parents, scary.
While I was thinking that GPS tracking devices were only popular and affordable in Hollywood, perhaps by the Army as well, a company named Brickhouse Security offers various kinds of tracking devices in their category named ‘Fleet management‘. Alright, their devices aren’t even close to the ones they manage to hide in double bottoms of suitcases and such, but they’re somewhat mobile but yet mainly aimed at usage in vehicles.
One of their GPS tracking devices, the ‘LiveWire Real-Time GPS Tracking Device‘ caught my eye though, the reason why is the somewhat weird marketing applied. To quote their website:
Perfect for:
- Teenage Driver Monitoring
- Employee use of company vehicles
- Fleet Tracking of hundreds of cars or trucks
I have no doubts about this kind of devices being illegal or such, but it does have quite an ability to break all the privacy someone has. Is it actually morally correct to simply give up your trust in someone and simply ‘bug’ someone with a tracking device, so you can watch them live from your computer screen?
Personally, I wouldn’t be happy at all with my parents bugging me with such a thing, I even doubt it’d be legal to put one of these in a vehicle without telling the driver here in Europe. However, I do think there is a market for it: I’m sure there are plenty of over-anxious parents in the world who’d be glad to spent $460 and up to $50 monthly, just to see where you are on a satellite map, making sure their loved childs aren’t doing the same things as they used to do when they were kids…
One thing they did do right though; the interface of their demo works perfectly and the satellite photo’s are of a very high resolution , the quality of them is often better than the ones used on Google Earth – even though the watermark says ‘copyright Google’ -. This high quality does make the product interesting for usage in Europe as well, despite the moral trouble with doing so.
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