Wendy Tuohy: Parents microchipping kids is tantamount to child abuse
FINDING your child via ‘Find my phone’ is one thing but putting tracking implants under their skin is borderline child abuse, writes Wendy Tuohy.
Wendy Tuohy
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IN the same week Facebook users are discovering how much personal information has been released in a massive data breach, parents are considering putting tech tracking devices in their children.
Not on them, under their skin. It seems too mad to be true
The fact a survey of 1000 Australian parents found 40 per cent believe it is their “parental right” to track children using apps, and some would consider microchipping them with “medically approved tech implants” is terrifying on many levels.
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The most obvious implication of inserting technology into your child is that young people will lose any sense of privacy, at a time when it seems they already have too little.
If they are technologically chained to hovering parents, they will be robbed of life skills by the very people supposed to help equip them with life skills: the smarts, confidence and common sense to navigate their own lives.
Added to that is the potential for them to be located and exploited via Facebook-style data leaks or hacking, this makes implanting children with technology a disaster waiting to happen.
Making your kid put Find my Phone on their device is one thing, but chipping them like a dog is a violation of their bodily integrity.
You could argue it is borderline child abuse. What’s next? Ear implants to which we can broadcast instructions? Visual implants so we can see what our child is experiencing in real time?
Sydney-based microchip company Chip My Life has reportedly been “flooded” with calls from “concerned parents” wanting to get tracker implants for children. Parents are reported to be worried about kidnap or ransom.
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No doubt these people are well-meaning, but they are putting their kids at risk of developing life-limiting anxiety. Kids of now are swimming in enough parental neurosis without adding in-body access to them for their over-involved mother or father.
If you have an authentic fear your child is a target, go to police, of course. But technologically tethering them is a choice a parent doesn’t have the right to make on behalf of a young person.
Loving parents do all we can to make our children’s world safer, but there is a point at which we must stop and trust the young person to have the sense to make good choices.
They will fail along the way, like we did, and those stumbles will offer priceless learning experiences.
Putting such invasive tech into young bodies may well be the way of the future, but if so, let’s stave that horrible moment off for as long as we possibly can.
Twitter: @wtuohy
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