Afraid that the almighty government will sneak into your driveway, attach a GPS device to your car, then track your every move? Perhaps you should be more afraid of what your child’s school has in mind? A Chicago-area elementary school will keep track of students’ bus rides using GPS. This a move to ease parents’ concerns about the perils of bus rides! Children have been riding in school buses to school for how many years, and only now there’s an issue? What a world.
The technology in question here is called Z Pass, and it was developed by a Seattle company called Zonar Systems. It’s nothing more than a “luggage tag-sized” GPS tag that’s clipped onto the students’ backpacks. Once activated, the unit then tracks the students’ bus ride to and from school.
One parent actually said “a little piece of mind goes a long way.” It wasn’t so long ago that pioneer families in the West were fighting bears to survive, but now we define “peace of mind” as being able to track the whereabouts of a school bus as it makes its 20-minute trip around the neighborhood.
But, hey, if it makes some parents happy, so be it. I mean, I don’t know what kind of privacy case you could make out of this. What, school kids should be able to go to school without having their exact location broadcast to their parents?