Assignment 4 - Question 2

Prepaid cellphone can have legitimate uses, and that all really depends on your lifestyle. If a person doesn’t use a phone very much, it would make way more sense for them to use a prepaid plan because they are paying a lot less money than they would if they had a contract. Contracts can be very expensive, and if you aren’t going to make a lot of calls, send a lot of texts, or use a lot of data, it makes no sense to have a contract. Also, if you have poor credit, and don’t want to have another bill to pay, it may make sense to pay for a prepaid cell phone in cash, so you know how much exactly it is going to cost you and you don’t have to worry about it every month when your credit card bill comes in. I think that it would be unfair to this type of cell phone user to get rid of prepaid cell phones because they are using them legally. Maybe something can be done so that even though you aren’t paying for a contract, your name is still tied to that phone number. But if that were to occur, criminals would go back to using phone booths to keep their anonymity. If a criminal knows that the way they are going to be communicating will cause them to be caught by the authorities, they will seek other ways of communicating. It doesn’t seem worth it to get rid of a legitimate phone service to have criminals stop using them. It is unfair to phone service providers who have customers who aren’t willing to get a contract to lose business because the government wants to be able to find people. That doesn’t seem fair to the phone companies and the people who have legitimate reasons to have a prepaid service plan. 

Assignment 4 - 1st Question

I think that there are clear pros and cons to the idea of implementing GPS tracking into children, teenagers and the elderly. The pros for putting them into children, is that if they get lost, it would be much easier to find them. For example, in a busy department store, if they run off, a GPS would be able to find them, so that would be much easier for parents to keep track of their kids. And if a young child was to be kidnapped, the GPS would make them easier to find, and there would be less missing kids in the country. However, I believe that at some point, a parent has to be willing to trust their kids to make their own decisions and their own mistakes. If a parent is insistent on having GPS chips in their teenagers, a kid will feel like they are always under constant watch. They can’t go anywhere without their parents knowing, and at some point that becomes over bearing and ridiculous. If they go missing, then yes it would be helpful for the teenager to have a GPS chip in them, but for everyday, it would be unfair for a teenager not to be able to go places without being suspicious of being watched by their parents. For the elderly, especially people with dementia  or alzheimer’s disease, a GPS chip would also help the people caring for them. That would be the trickiest situation of the three though, because these are grown people, who would go from complete freedom, to being under constant supervision. Yes, if they get lost and don’t know where to go, it would be helpful for finding them, but they are adults and shouldn’t have to feel like they are being treated like babies. I think the idea of GPS shoes would be a great choice, because a young child or mentally diseased adult wouldn’t know that they were wearing shoes with GPS and wouldn’t have to worry about it. But a teenager would probably be tech savvy enough to know that and would have the option of taking the shoes off, and wouldn’t be constantly watched by their parents. 

CS408.01 - Justin Bleier - First Post

Test Post for Assignment 3