Walt Disney Stalks Your Child - Mark Morford

Walt Disney Stalks Your Child
Now even kids have GPS cell phones. So much for running away from home
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, June 16, 2006



It was time to do something drastic.

It was summer. It was a weekend. It was a mild suburban Spokane middle-class upbringing and I was perfectly fed up with it all, but especially with always being told what to do: Clean your room, eat your asparagus, sweep the driveway, unbury the dog, quit touching yourself there, stop dealing heroin and Pop Rocks in the school yard and mowing lawns in the shape of a skull and crossbones. You know, typical.

I was about 8. Maybe 9. Our painfully idyllic young lifestyles bearing heavily upon us, my friend Paul and I decided to make a run for it. To split that crazy nightmare suburbia scene and get the hell out, once and for all. Enough of the endless chaos of raking leaves and the anxiety around the eating of peas. Enough, you know, working for the Man. Let's do it. Let's run away from home.

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But this isn't the sad part. It's this: The big telecoms are now offering a new service to parents wherein, for an extra monthly fee, you can log in to your PC and actually track your child's movements based on the location of his/her kiddie phone. True. And one of the biggest new providers of such happy creepy family surveillance? Disney. Shudder.

But it doesn't stop there. Not only can you check your kids' whereabouts, but for an extra fee, you can have the system alert you whenever your kid goes beyond preset boundaries. That's right, you can be sitting there innocently surfing hard-core German fetish porn when -- beep-beep-beep -- an alarm goes off letting you know little Dakota has crossed the half-mile radius of the house and might be ... I don't know what. Smoking. Playing with matches. Joining the Taliban.

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Riding bikes with no helmets. Watching Bugs Bunny. Swinging off a vine into the river.

Sure we got banged up and bruised and broken, but, most of us anyway, look back and laugh.

Seriously. If the kids are going to go somewhere they don't want their parents to know about, they'll turn the phones off. Or take the batteries out (if that's what is required). Or -gasp- leave them at a friend's house before they leave. And then it's just a matter of,
"Gee, mom, I'm sorry. I guess I wasn't getting a very good signal when you tried to call me before. You know how it is. But we were in Billy's backyard. Honest!"

Really, parents. Get real. Your kids are going to do what they are predisposed to do. It's your job to give them a compas, not to perform every minor course correction.