Safety or invasion of privacy.

So many students "missing" after a night out lately. We always used the Freshers Week to advise, don't go home alone, look out for each other. Also the Students Union ran a late night bus. I thought we could track using mobile phones without "chipping".

I believe tracking chips have been invented, as there were suggestions that they should be embedded in the shoe heals of senile dement people in care facilities here in Denmark, so they couldn't just wander off. However, the suggestion has been turned down as infringing the individual's right to privacy.

To me chips in humans is going a step too far, as if there is one thing the electronic revolution has taught us, it is that every technological invention can and will be hacked.

How would we safeguard women and children in hiding from abusive husbands or fathers? Keep people safe from those that have stalked them?

No way. It’s an intrusion of privacy. It’s bad enough being tracked on CCTV every move we make.

There are already devices to track elderly people with dementia who are in danger of wandering; for many carers it's a welcome alternative to drugging and virtual imprisonment. www.alzheimers.net/8-8-14-location-devices-dementia/
These devices work the same way as the GPS locator in your phone but are too large to be implantable.

people should never be chipped. awful idea. a newborn baby and that done would be abuse.
who knows if all this tech is safe even
and if people were chipped and abducted they would be harmed in the removal of the chip.

wherever she'd been drinking earlier in the evening, staff must have known how drunk she was.
Maybe not. Sometimes the drunkenness only really kicks in when the person goes outside.
Also, how do we know she was actually drunk? Maybe her drink was spiked.

I'm with those who say implanting chips would cause other problems.

I wonder if in the future a DNA swab might be taken from each newborn’s mouth and stored in a huge (millions) database. Then when a crime is committed and DNA is ascertained the computer can be set to run until it finds a match ....even if it takes months it would come up with a name.

There are already devices to track elderly people with dementia who are in danger of wandering; for many carers it's a welcome alternative to drugging and virtual imprisonment.

Not so welcome as it happens because places that trialed this decided not to implement it!

If someone needs 24 waking care a chip is no substitute for that and they need placement, a chip wont tell you if they hit their head or broke their hip beside their own bed!

I don't think a year goes by without a student in Durham ending up in the river. We have endless pubby places and it enrages me that they do not come down heavily on those clubs etc which offer cheap drinks to students after hours. There was a girl crushed under barriers in the rush to get in one and a young man who had been in a coma for years died recently. I don't know if that was drink or sport related.
I am amazed that they have the money - I know I sound old fogey ish but DH had a grant of £11 a year and I had a full grant as my father had just died and I had no spare cash for anything other than a frothy coffee in La Cabala in Bold Street - the height of sophistication.

I think there is some confusion between chips for identification and those for tracking purposes. Unless of course the functions cannot be separated, I really don't have the technical know how. I am in two minds about tagging dementia patients. I can understand people being concerned about the invasion of privacy etc but it must be so distressing for families and sufferers when they are missing. It's almost impossible to monitor someone 24/7. That means locked doors and other restrictions. As someone else said with all technology there is always somebody one step ahead often with criminal intent.

Its also worth noting that when dementia chips were trialed it didnt result in less locked doors: by the time you log in to the tracker the person could have stepped into traffic already so places found that the physical restrictions eg locked doors etc had to remain.

The whole thing was problematic because the inclusion criteria for the tracker = the criteria for 1:1 24hr care so it wasnt appropriate to not implement that

Tracking devices on mobile phones are very useful. Mr P and I switch ours on when travelling separately, we like to know the other is travelling safely. Our adult children use it with their family. They can know when one of them has picked up the children or arrived safely somewhere. Their teenage children switch on voluntary when they are out and about to keep them safe. Most youngsters carry a mobile phone and can choose to only switch on location data between friends if they don't want parents keeping an eye on them.
I think we do need to change the drinking culture, as others have said, going out with the intention of 'getting hammered' is not a good thing.
Parents need to educate children about being safe, drinking responsibly and taking responsibility. Where parents are inadequate then teachers, police, clergy, in fact citizens in general should step in. Education, education, education.

I agree with Peardrop.We as a family all use Location Finder on Google. (Apart from one of use who believes it runs his phone battery down (it doesn't )

Dont agree with a chip system, however you can get same kind of thing for mobile phones, my Grandsons parents have a device on their phones so that they can see where he is when he is out on his scooter, he travels in the country to friends and they can see where he is should his scooter breakdown,it has been very useful on numerous occasions.

Is it a step too far?
May be not for us in Europe but for other people who live under regimes ...

a few years ago in the space of two months two of our friends lost sons this way ,it was weeks before their bodies were recovered from the rivers they fell into.
Regardless of how they got there or how drunk they were its still a horrible loss for the families and even for us who had known these young men since they were babies .Their parents will never recover from the weeks of waitng for news or the day the body was pulled out of the water.Its not something I would wish on anyone .I hope theres a good outcome from these cases and if not I send my heartfelt sympathy to the families involved

Look what has been achieved since the introduction of DNA testing and if we have nothing to hide,I cannot see as some will no doubt claim, a chip tracing an'' area'' where someone might be is ' infringement' on human rights. It would save many hours of manpower in cases of missing persons especially children and not a wild goose chase and a 'hit and miss and previously seen in such and such an area'.
Whether the results of such searches be good/ not good news, the waiting and wondering must be equally hard.

Look what has been achieved since the introduction of DNA testing and if we have nothing to hide
That is the argument in favour of having everyone's DNA taken and put on the National Database.
I'm not sure that I agree with that either, although I am willing to be persuaded.

More needs to be done, perhaps an awareness campaign on TV, warning young people of the dangers of being drunk near water. A young man’s body was pulled out of the River Lem not long ago.

Same scenario.

Quite honestly Anja I would have thought that was self evident to anyone with a modicum of sense.

sodapop
People, women especially, have never been 'safe on the streets' at any time in history.
Yes, the women who used to carouse in inns and bars hundreds of years ago, were often found in alleys with their clothes torn and beaten or dead.
In all the countries in all the world, it's the same old story.
Do not drink to oblivion. Do not leave your drink. Do not accept lifts with strangers.
All common sense...at least you'd think so but it evidently bypasses those who want to keep necking vodka shots like there's no tomorrow.
We can't expect security staff in clubs to act like nannies or parents.
Yes, they'll have a list of reliable taxi firms but your actions from then on are your responsibility. Why drink so much that you can't remember the good time you were supposed to have? Half of it ends up in the gutter anyway.

I hammered it into my children not to bother ringing me if they got drunk and in trouble.
Thankfully, it only happened once and when I got a phone call to tell me about it I told the caller I wasn't interested as they knew the score before they went out.

Peardrop50
Did you each manage to travel safely before the advent of tracking apps on mobile phones?

FarNorth
Yes, there is that possibility but then, if your drink is spiked it's usually (but not always) done by someone who wants to make a move on the 'victim'.
That was not the case in this instance.
Few instances of spiked drinks are for no reason, besides, there have been numerous ads and messages on tv, social media etc, urging you to keep your drink covered and with you at all times.
People who choose to ignore drink aware posters, ads and their own sense, have only themselves to blame.
I feel sympathy for the parents and family but no-one else.

I don't go along with the idea a massive DNA database is fine 'if you have nothing to hide'. The bigger it is and the more people that have access, the more it will be abused. What about it being used to track down abused wives, use by paedophiles (the police force is not immune to these), use by the press to track anyone they want to run a story on, be they bereaved parents or celebrities. And of course in the hands of certain regimes......