Steve had this story, and this jumped out at me:

One Migo feature attractive to parents is the Chaperone service offered by Verizon Wireless ($9.99 a month extra). Using the phone’s Global Positioning System receiver, parents can keep track of their children through a Web site or on their own Verizon phones. For an additional $10 charge, the Chaperone service comes with a feature called Child Zone, which notifies parents when a child arrives in or leaves the vicinity of a specified location, like school or a playground.

First of all, let me just say that with all the JonBenet crap all over the television shows, this kind of thing sounds useful, like a Lojack or those chips you put in your pets to ID them if they get lost and sneak out of their collars. I’ve thought about that with Gozer the Destructor, otherwise known as Joey, but he has a brain the size of a walnut, so I can’t really expect him to get the whole “don’t chase that car all the way to Reno” logic most days.

But when I first read it this morning, the idea of sitting at your desk tracking your kid’s movements on your phone just freaked me out. I mean, I just … parents, enlighten me. Is this necessary? I’m a big girl, I live in the city, I know you have to lock your doors at night and watch your kids when they play, but do we really need some kind of electronic monitoring system for children, like Charles Xavier’s big metal helmet that shows him where all the mutants are? I don’t know, people with kids should tell me about this one, because is this seriously where we’re at, and is that okay??

From a practical standpoint, wouldn’t any halfway competent kidnapper dump the kid’s phone, and any halfway skilled teenager disable that feature so Mom would never know he was at the mall instead of school?

I mean, I’ve heard the jokes about school and prison, and how prison’s better because they can’t get out, but am I being a naive little Miss Happie Hippie Sunshine to be skeeved by this?

A.