“Now Available – the Worlds First GPS Locator that Locates Your Child… Not Just the Device” touts the ad copy. The device being referred to is the Num8 children’s wristwatch, by Lok8u (get it? “Locate You”), and it is a GPS watch that allows you to track your child wherever they are.
Explains Lok8u, “num8 is the world’s first GPS locator device that has been specifically designed with children in mind. It will tell you exactly where your child is, whenever you feel you need to know – at home or even abroad. All you need is a mobile phone or a computer to find their precise location. And unlike similar locator products, num8 has been cleverly concealed in a child’s digital watch that is securely fastened to your child and cannot be removed or deactivated without your knowledge. No other child locator in the world can match this.”
Let’s back up a minute: “All you need is a mobile phone or a computer to find their precise location.”
Which means that all anybody needs to track your child is the right information. The num8 (and what the heck kind of name is that, anyways? Is it “new mate”? “num eight”? “an ewe mate”?) includes an online portal through which you can track your child on Google maps. That, of course, needs a password, and so the system is as secure as is their password protection. We note that the portal offers the standard “forgotten password” system, which means that anyone with access to the email with which you signed up and your username can presumably hack it and gain access to your child’s whereabouts.
But you can also have the watch ping you by SMS to your cell phone with your child’s location. Which means that there is the potential for someone who has hacked your account – or who otherwise gains the watch’s code – to track your child with their cell phone as they are closing in.
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The watch also has a feature whereby if your child removes the watch from their wrist, you will be immediately alerted by SMS. Which means that every time your child removes their watch, you are going to panic. It also means that you will have to choose between telling your child that you can track them by their watch (thus ensuring that they will remove it), or being dishonest with them and not telling them at all (and still panicking whenver they remove it).
Lok8u spokesperson Steve Salmon says “Losing your child, if only for a brief moment, leads to a state of panic and makes parents feel powerless. The overriding aim of num8 is to give children their freedom and parents peace of mind.”
We say, do what parents for millenium before the invention of GPS tracking, cell phones, and even watches have done: pay attention to and watch out for your child.
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Hi Anne, I think you should check your facts on the num8 watch. It can only be removed when the parent unlocks the strap latch through the web interface. If the strap is cut, it will notify you of the event.
Regards,
Al.