Modern families 摩登家庭.docxVIP

Modern families 摩登家庭【导读】：现代科技使追踪变得更加廉价、便利。Modern families摩登家庭Chips off the old block机器人也能像监护人一样照顾孩子Tracking children has never been easier.Nice for parents, not for privacyPAUL WALLICH usually walks his small son to the bus stop a stone’s throw from their Vermont home. But he can use a robot too: a football-sized drone, hovering several metres off the ground, follows a beacon stashed in the little boy’s school bag.A smartphone strapped to the device beams back video.Few parents areas handy as that, but even Luddites like the idea of keeping an electronic eye on the young. An early offering, in 2003, was Wherify, a tracking device which locks to a child’s wrist. Devices invented since then protect autistic children, who easily get lost, or into danger.Youngsters on Canadian farms wear radio tags on bracelets to signal their proximity to adults operating heavy machinery.Longer battery life and miniaturisation are making tracking cheaper and more practical. The easiest way is to use smartphones. Many mobile operators offer child-tracking at extra cost, but the number of free tracking applications is growing fast. Life360 rocketed from 1m registered users in 2010 to nearly 26m now. Berg Insight, a research firm, reckons that 70m Americans and Europeans will be tracking family members by 2016.These services and devices can provide children’s location, or send alerts about their behaviour: when they return home, or stray beyond an agreed boundary, or go out late. Speed detection reveals when somebody is in a vehicle—and whether it is breaking the speed limit.No devices, so far, have full chaperone functions—such as revealing furtive movements in a stationary vehicle. But some providers do have ingenious extra features. The pocket-sized tracking beacons of Amber Alert GPS, a company based in Utah, carry a microphone to let parents eavesdrop. SecuraTrac, a Californian firm, has a product that disables a phone’s e-mail and text functions when it is moving: that stops boy-rac