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Missing Children Alerts Go High Tech
from the the-story-of-the-season dept
Last year it was shark attacks, and this year, it was missing children that got all the press attention. Apparently, it helps technology companies that are in those spaces, though. Today a company has announced they're teaming with police to offer a system that will automatically make phone call alerts whenever there's a missing child in a certain area. The system will call every phone number in the area and issue an Amber Alert-style message. While I think it's good that people are creating systems to help locate missing children, I wonder if this goes a bit overboard. When the police, themselves, become telemarketers, it does make you wonder...
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Reminds me of...
when I lived in rural Japan in the 1970s, they had a legacy closed-circuit communal phone system. Whenever you had a call, the PA speaker would say e.g. "#3, you have a call." (So everyone in town knew you had a call.) The phone had no dial tone, but an operator (a middle aged woman) answered instead. The PA speaker also made communal announcements, which were sometimes 15 minutes long. Technology of a culture that doesn't value privacy.
This was also where the sight of airplanes flying overhead was considered really cool, so when it happened, class would stop so kids could run to the window to watch it.
So is the same thing going to become the "revolutionary new techonology" of the 21st century?
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