scoobynutta555

In the light of the recent case of the police trying to locate a possible abductor using the signal from one of the missing girls phones, how long do you think it will be that a company like tracker will launch personal tracking devices. I assume there would be a large market for this device, ie for locating lost children, or for expensive pieces of kit which are quite portable.

If for example the device was present in one of the girls shoes there would be a good possibility that they would be found by now, possibly even not harmed.

Assuming that there isnt already such a device for the general public right now, i certainly havent heard of any.

ChrisS/P1

Was on the news a couple of days ago, that you can get them in the US. They look like a very oversized watch.

ptholt

I was at a site yesterday that works like navtrack for fleet + company car drivers, the amount of information they can get is SCARY!

I would seriously resist owning a company vehicle on the basis of what i saw.

suffolkscoob

How does the tracking system for criminals compare - different system?

Neil Smalley

Unless they were implanted all a kidnapper would have to do is take it off and throw it into the back of a passing truck.

Puff The Magic Wagon!

iTrader: (2)

Vehicle Tracking

Human rights issue with implanted trackers - personal liberty, what age do you remove them etc etc. Implanted trackers (once available) may be scanned for and removed with a sharp instrument & probably not with anasthetic

SMS/GSM/GPS tracker like a watch should be available soon I would've thought. Regs coming in over must-be-trackable mobile phones in the US will filter over here or at least the technology will.

Pete

Traku are one step further than what you prob saw yesterday

cletterridge

The people who need the trackers should be the criminals. The first thing you should lose when you choose to undertake a life of crime should be your privacy - ie no big brother for the rest of us but plenty for those who demonstrate they deserve it.

At the moment I'm imagining something along the lines of ankle bracelets for offenders (nothing too obvious so as to avoid stigmatism for wearers). Contained would be a top end lithium polymer battery, a miniature GPS and several megs of memory to record the location of the person minute by minute. Every now and then an onboard mobile phone would make a data burst to a central tracking / logging computer when signal is good.

Of course there are three immediate problems with this idea. The first is that any hardened criminal is going to try to whip it off. Harsh custodial sentences for these offences might help keep this to a minimum (as might a bit of titanium wire? Who's going to put an angle grinder on their leg!).

Then there is the issue of recharging. GPS tracking and logging is going to take some juice, so the unit should have two alarm settings. The first is a vibrating alert which goes off when the batteries only have a day or two left. These get more insistent, until at twelve hours or something a beeping starts which gets progressively more obvious and, hopefully, embarrassing such that the trackee has to go home to recharge (an event which should be designed not to take more than, say, five minutes per charge).

Lastly there is the issue of Faraday cages. It's relatively easy to construct an environment that almost entirely eliminates all incoming and outgoing electromagnetic signals. The trackee could sit here for a long time until the batteries run out, then walk around untracked. This is a tricky one and I'm struggling to think of solutions, but one might be to include a motion activated self winding mechanism (as you get in some watches) that senses when the batteries are dead and charges up a secondary battery that produces a piercing siren noise.

Anyone got any further ideas?

Little Miss WRX

The criminals in desperate need of trackers are paedophiles.

sillysi

The company that make Carbug have a product called Kidbug that does the job but they can not get anyone to back them financialy, the technology is very expensive.

Si.

scoobynutta555

I would think that a tracker could be discreet on a person, ie watch, hidden in clothing, or perhaps ankle bracelet etc etc that was alarmed to a high pitch noise and alerted parent when devise was tampered with or went outside a permitted area. Im not saying that this proceedure will foil all attempts of abduction, but may do some way to preventing them and solving them.

After all a lot of high performance cars are fitted with them, why not the most precious thing in your life be monitored as well.

shunty

if you people are anything like me, you take them everywhere by car, I have 2 kids 13 & 11, they have phones, they get lifts everywhere, my 11 y/o daughter gets phoned regularly & is only allowed to play very close to home & only if she is not on her own. It is almost like paranoia, a lot more with my daughter for obvious reasons.

shunty

MarkO

Substitute 'trackers' with 'castration' in that sentence, and I might just agree with you.

Alpine

Substitute 'castration' with 'elimination' and you have my vote

Little Miss WRX

How about castration and tracking then view for termination if they dare go near a kid [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img]