back to article Sprint helps fuel parental panic

Sprint has launched FamilyWatchdog Mobile, a latest family-friendly offering, allows US parents to check out maps showing where registered sex offenders live and work, and download photographs and conviction details. Concerned parents can even receive text alerts when an offender moves into the neighbourhood. Mobile access to …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The whole world becomes a Pac-Man game

    So is there an epidemy of serious mass raping and pedophiling going on in the US? Will the service track page-ing Congressmen, lusty GOP operatives and unholy priests?

    I can see the possibilities, now. We need gay tracking ("powered by Reverend Phelbs"), NRA tracking ("know when your wal-mart and kindergarten are unsafe") and neocon-tracking ("know what they are up to know").

    I can't wait.

  2. Dillon Pyron

    The children

    But think of the children!!

    If you get busted for public urination, you can wind up being required to register as a sex offender if the DA chooses to elevate the charge to indecent exposure (google "Williamson County Texas prosecuter" for the chances of that happening). Any largish city has plenty of guys (and a few girls) who find themselves needing to take a leak while making the 2 mile walk from the bar to their car.

    And what will you do if you find that your kid is walking by a sex offender's house? Call the cops? This is just another paranoia inducing "service". I'd rather have credit watch from my credit card company (which I don't have) or road side service from my mobile carrier (which I don't have). Free? As if anything were "free".

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Welcome, to paedogeddon...

    I don't have the words...

    How is this information available to anyone? If someone is living out of prison, they surely have fulfilled their debt to society, maybe an eye needs to be kept on them, but surely by the rozzers/social services, not a telco! Also, like the previous poster says, you can get on the SOR for almost anything.

    That is all...

  4. AngrySup

    Can I use Family Locater?

    It sounds like this is an add-on to the 10$ a month Family Locater service. If someone is paranoid enough to track their kids, I'm sure they want this information also. BTW, can I use Family Locater for my 150 employees that are carrying Sprint phones? I wonder what they're doing after-hours.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If someone is living out of prison, they surely have fulfilled their debt to society

    Parents think differently and aren't up for giving kiddy fiddlers second chances.

  6. Tawakalna

    what a stupid argument (above)

    well now Mr or Mrs or Miss Anonymous poster, I'm a parent of two yet I don't go into a panic about "sex-offenders" under every hedge or round every corner, nor do I assume that everyone on the sex-offenders register is a "kiddy-fiddler" - and it just so happens that I think this sort of alarmist action is dangerous and counter-productive. As a matter of fact I think that the Sex Offenders Register in both the US and the UK is a disaster, but at least in the UK access is limited to the Authorities and not available to every self-appointed gun-totin' pointy-hat wearing vigilante redneck.

    Having this sort of information available to a public that's legally entitled to buy guns and ammo over the counter is just asking for trouble. Imagine being shot by some good ol' boy who's fileld himself with dutch courage down at his local C&W club because a copper caught you having a pee in the open and beat a confession out of you that you're really a perve.

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