When I received an email from Taser with the subject line “TASER’s solution to kids “sexting” and driving while texting debuts at CES” you can imagine what I was thinking. Unfortunately, as entertaining as the concept was, the company was not advocating electroshock treatment for the nation’s teens. However, what they are offering seems just as threatening to the youngest of our generation, albeit in an entirely different way.
The Taser Protector program basically gives parents the ability to actively monitor everything their kids see and do with their mobile phones. It gives smartphone wielding parents the ability to both see every text sent and received by their kids and view, block or even answer any incoming call. It is possibly the most backwards technology I have ever seen and certainly the worst idea at CES.
My brother Rob spoke with Taser spokesman Steve Tuttle about the program.
I’m no parenting expert, but if you think you need to screen your kids’ calls and text messages, I think you’ve passed a point of no return on the whole “trust” thing. At that point, good luck eliciting any kind of respect.
And to any parent thinking this is a good idea, forget about it. Trust me, if your kids want to talk about drugs or send explicit photos, there are many ways around this. All it takes is a Google Voice account and the kid can both bypass the text message screening and route any calls they don’t want you to see to a cheap throw-away prepaid phone.
In case you haven’t heard, we millennials are pretty tech savvy. If you erect a wall, you’re only begging for it to be hurtled.
And for a little bonus material, watch for the fear in Rob’s eyes as Steve shows off the consumer level Taser stun gun.
I wonder if many parents that might already say, look through their kids phones after they get home, have any idea what’s going on even with all the texts right in front of them. Depending on the social click, kids these days use varying degrees of very high context language. Memes have certainly taken the idea of slang and text abbreviations to a new level. We’re still a long way from something like A Clockwork Orange (save maybe the “chans”), but start “wire tapping” your kids and I’m sure their own communication will just evolve faster.
Hahaha! Rob was getting sooo nervous with that taser!
But yeah, seriously bad idea. Matt’s right- with Skype and AIM and Facebook and Google Voice, etc, etc, if kids really want to send sexts or coordinate drug exchanges or something, it would be rather easy to do it without a phone.
And it’s also creepy.
Hahaha! Rob was getting sooo nervous with that taser!
But yeah, seriously bad idea. Matt's right- with Skype and AIM and Facebook and Google Voice, etc, etc, if kids really want to send sexts or coordinate drug exchanges or something, it would be rather easy to do it without a phone.
And it's also creepy.
[...] The Worst Idea At CES [...]