A while ago I discovered FireFly in a Manhattan store. Currently, 56 percent of 13-17 year olds have a cellphone in the US. But already 5 year-olds ask their parents for a cellphone.

Yesterday I came across another phone that parents can use to stay in touch with their kids if they are at school or out playing. This one is called Migo. Like FireFly it only allows for 4 contacts. Another popular option is TipTalk.

However, does an 8- 12 year-old child really need a cellphone? With these phones school-aged children ("tweens") get naturalized to mobile phones. The horrifying version of all this is Wherify, a phone that lets parents know (as in verify) exactly where their child is located at any point in time. The horror, the horror: is this going too far? The mobile child becomes an object of surveillance, a wireless version of the child on a leash. How about a feature that measures drug use by conducting a blood test of the child that uses the phone? The results could be texted directly to the parents. Wait a minute. Do children have any right to privacy?

Such tracking mania is only a few short steps removed from the office worker who gets a higher salary if she makes herself available via beeper or Blackberry. Wherify suggests a solution for social problems (e.g. .trust) with technical means (GPS). Just read this testimony in PC World: "I find this type of phone particularly useful since my husband and I are separated and on his custody time, he seems to take my son whereever he wishes without telling me where they are. I never know where he might be."

On the PC World site parents applaud Whereify almost in unison and I can definitely see  the use value of it in many scenarios (the peace of mind factor, for example). Children can get lost or get kidnapped and in these cases a cellphone is surely a great device. But the world may in fact be a much less frightening place than these cell phone companies suggest. It's a culture of fear that drives people to such technological fixes. Most public schools started to implement rules against cellphones (Michael Bloomberg, NYC's mayor, introduced this rule in New York and caused riots among parents). Ringtones in the classroom don't help. There is only one  commentator on the PC World blog that says: "What ever happened to being a child?"

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Yesterday  I wrote this post and today the New York Times has an article on child tracking with cell phones.