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Location-based cellular applications have brought a new level of comfort to personal communications, letting family members contact and locate one another with ease and convenience. Yet without adequate security measures, such applications can be exposing these same family members — especially the children — to an unprecedented level of risk. By including vulnerable components such as computer servers, many such applications provide a false sense of security while opening up safety-critical location information to spies and hackers. Such an approach to security is inherently self-limiting, as its own architecture places the system in jeopardy. Despite the best of intentions, claims regarding the security of such systems are specious at best.
To provide the level of security that parents and families need and want, a child-locator application must be inherently secure, from initial concept through final deployment. Simply put, security must be designed into the system, from the bottom up. Anything less constitutes far too great a risk.
"Where is My Child?" — Every Family's Nightmare
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 800,000 children are reported missing annually in the United States alone.1 That's more than 2,000 per day, or two children per minute, 365 days each year. More than 58,000 U.S. children are abducted each year in connection with the commission of another crime. However, child abductors don't always wear an unfriendly face, as more than 200,000 abductions per year are associated with custodial or visitation disputes. As for abductions of children by strangers, a U.S. Government Web site reports that 40 percent of these children are murdered.2
In addition to these tragic events, many children fail to arrive safely at their destinations through simple mishaps (for example, they got on the wrong school bus, or were lost or stranded because of a miscommunication). These instances, largely unreported and thus uncounted in government statistics, generally result in a happier outcome, but are nonetheless terrifying to the child and the parent at the time.
With the assistance of modern technology that has appropriate security measures built in, all of these incidents might be prevented.
1. U.S. Department of Justice, "National Estimates of Missing Children: An Overview." National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway and Thrownaway Children (NISMART), Oct. 2002.
2. U.S. White House, "Missing, Exploited and Runaway Children." http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/children/action.html.
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