Danah Boyd, over at apophenia, blogs about a press release that has stopped her in her tracks:
You can now load software in your kids’ BlackBerry and/or cell phone that will be your watchdog (to prevent them from being approached by someone potentially trying to molest them) How it works — the program will send the parents a text message when a foreign IM, text message or e-mail comes into their child’s phone or PDA (anyone not on an approved phone contact list).
Like Danah, that phrase "your kids’ BlackBerry" jumped out at me (and not just because whoever wrote this press release doesn’t know where to put an apostrophe). I am clearly totally out of synch with a society in which children have BlackBerries. Mobile phones, I can just about grasp; but a business tool like a BlackBerry? What happened to childhood; who stole it?
And as Danah writes: Surveillance destroys parent-child relationships – technology does not solve relationship issues.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 
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