“Would you microchip your child so that you could use the Lost Kidz app to give you an immediate location ID if they went missing or were abducted? Tell us what you think. Invasion of privacy or essential parenting tool?”
This was the controversial question asked by brothers Darren Fern and Stephen Fern, developers of Lost-Kidz, an app founded in 2012 and designed with the 'safety' of children in mind. The app works by sending an alert with your child’s basic information to anyone nearby who has the app so that a search party can take place. Its original intent sounds like a simple and relatively uninvasive idea - you can download it for free and registering your child will cost you 99-cents annually, but last year Lost-Kidz announced via their Facebook page that they are “looking at available technologies” to collaborate microchipping technologies with their app. That’s right, they now not only want you to supply them with basic personal information, they want you to microchip your children so that they can be instantaneously located if they were to go missing; this has raised much concern, and rightly so.
According to Lost-Kidz there are currently three options available:
1. Non tech (like the Lost Kidz safety pack)
2. Wearable tech (coming soon..a trackable smart watch for kids)
3. The implant chip.
Is the bigger picture being overlooked? Let's take gun violence for example: if a person were to wield a gun then use it to shoot and intentionally take the life of other individuals, a logical mind may conclude that it was the killer’s mindset that's to blame and not the gun itself - this analogy could also be used for any other object that can be used as a weapon. In regards to child predators and kidnappers, it is also the mind of the pedophile or kidnapper where the problem stems, so why do we overlook these important fundamentals? Would nipping the bud before it can bloom not rule out any thought of inserting a locating device inside an innocent child. Would this not be the most reasonable conclusion to arrive at?
We need to ask ourselves these questions:
1) How and why does the mind of an individual become so twisted for them to want to commit said crimes?
2) Does an implant chip really reinforce a child’s safety?
It's a sad state when the innocent start to become the victims of surveillance while the fundamental issues continue to be ignored.