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Comment by hvs | Hacker News Reader

In case you were looking for the necessary plea "for the children!" it was here:

"God forbid if the day came that a child is abducted from that mall," he says. "We would have that tool available to us, to look at that data and see if we can't find a possible suspect vehicle."

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It's hilarious, because kids don't actually ever get kidnapped in the U.S. (by strangers).

Thank you Anderson Cooper (http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/anderson.cooper.360/blog/200...).

> Despite these huge numbers, very few children are victims of the kinds of crimes that so-often lead local and national news reports. According to NCMEC, just 115 children are the victims of what most people think of as "stereotypical" kidnapping, which the center characterizes thusly: "These crimes involve someone the child does not know or someone of slight acquaintance, who holds the child overnight, transports the child 50 miles or more, kills the child, demands ransom, or intends to keep the child permanently."

My mom is absolutely freaked out about our wife and I living in the city, because someone might kidnap our daughter. Because a crowded apartment building where hundreds of people can hear a child cry for help is so much less safe than an out-of-the-way suburban house when it comes to a crime that never happens.

I think what follows immediately deserves to be noted here as well. 115 is a very small number by itself but then over half of them return.

>Of these 115 incidents, 57 percent ended with the return of the child. The other 43 percent had a less happy outcome.

You seem to be assuming the return is voluntary and not the result of police activity. 115 incidents is not that many in the context of the whole population, but that's not going to be much comfort to you if it's one of your family members that goes missing, is it?

We should mandate subdermal GPS tags for everyone.

Think of the children.

If the harm that a person suffers from their child being kidnapped and murdered is negative infinity, then even the smallest probability of it happening makes their expected harm from kidnapping negative infinity.

I don't think negative infinity is a reasonable number for this. If it were, then I would expect you to gladly pay someone all your income for the next 20 years to stand guard over your children night and day to ensure that none of them are kidnapped and killed. Anything less would be negligent parenting.

That's effectively what people are doing when they don't let them wander more than 12 inches from themselves in a shopping mall.

I don't think you are taking the word "infinity" seriously. If parents believed that, why are they recklessly endangering their children's lives by taking them to a public place where they could be shot and killed, instead of hiring a personal shopper? Why did they put them in a car when auto accidents are the number one cause if child deaths? Why are they living in America when child mortality is lower in several other countries?

The answer, of course, is that while losing a child is unspeakably awful, children are not infinitely valuable to us - at least if you go by what we do rather than what we say. And public policy needs to reflect that.

You say that kids don't actually ever get kidnapped (which is "hilarious"), then refer to some 115 children a year being kidnapped (where it must meet a list of conditions, and excludes the 50,000+ yearly who are temporarily abducted, often by sexual predators) as proof of your absolute statement.

You have some very confused notions of numbers.

And personally I find 115 children being abducted (in the more-than-a-day-taken-60-miles sense) about 115 too many (and it's simply incredible that the other poster observes that half "return", as if anything less than death is child's play).

Did you know that only three to five children are killed by lightning each year? Yet preventative efforts to avoid children being hit by lightning are extremely widespread. We all know to fear lightning.

It could be that there are only three to five children killed by lightning each year because preventative efforts are extremely widespread.

Lightning is also trivial to defend against. The only hard part is education and awareness. A person who knows how to avoid lightning and wants to avoid it will easily reduce their chances of being struck by a huge amount. Reducing kidnapping is much harder.

Indeed. We all have it pounded into our heads that lightning is dangerous. Sports have standard guidelines, strictly followed, about cancellations in weather. There are significant efforts made to avoid lightning deaths.

Yet I was replying to someone who said that children "don't ever actually get kidnapped" because 115 a year apparently don't count as "ever" (half of whom get murdered, the other half harmed in various other ways, and that's ignoring the 50,000+ who are molested in bathrooms and the like, yearly). All to refute a simple statement that logging might prove useful in such a circumstance.

> All to refute a simple statement that logging might prove useful in such a circumstance.

I don't think that was goal. I think he was questioning whether invading the privacy of a huge amount of individuals is worth it for that cause. How critical is it to have 2 year's worth of car-location data at your fingertips for any investigation? The question is not whether kids ever get kidnapped, but whether such a gigantic dataset aids investigation in any way. A compromise would be to delete the data after a few days, similar to what happens in Minesota, according to the article.

Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_interests_(rhetoric...

edit: I mistakenly assumed that hvs and rayiner were the same person. There might be something to be said for your interpretation, but I would assume the best possible one.

When talking about preventing children from being raped I'd prefer to concentrate on the vast numbers of children who are raped by a family member; then by someone they know (at a school or a club), than on the much fewer numbers of children raped by strangers.

"Stranger danger" created an atmosphere of fear, but did little to prevent sexual abuse of children.

Not that I think you need to worry about kidnapping, but in the city people are acclimated to ignoring their neighbors, whereas in small towns and exurbs there are a lot of nosey busybodies up in your business.

Yep, this is why "Stranger Danger" fear-mongering is counterproductive. The kidnappers are usually familiar, and Strangers are really one's greatest chance of help.

"We would have that tool available to us, to look at that data and see if we can't find a possible suspect vehicle."

The concept of collecting and storing all sorts of data and information on everyone just in case someone bad does something is a flawed one.

The government is collecting all phone call information, numbers, location, duration, along with SMS, email, and who knows what else on everybody in order to have that data "just in case" a terrorist attack happens, so they can (possibly) track down the perpetrators.

Now we have police collecting license plate data, along with GPS coordinates, video and still cameras mounted all over cities that can easily allow for facial recognition, combined with the tracking of your phone as mentioned above. It's not a stretch to assume that if the government (NSA/CIA/FBI) wants to know where you are at any given moment, they know.

All this "just in case" one of the infinitesimally unlikely events such as a terrorist attack or kidnapping occurs. For the children. And because terrorism.

The potential for abuse is huge and the cost/benefit is not even close to worth it—unless the stated purpose for collecting the data is not the real one.

85% of what people do is habit. So when they have a large set like this "habit" starts excluding people very quickly as they are just driving to common places. So if you are tracking somebody you dont know fleeing, they stick out in the numbers quickly... If you are tracking somebody you do know you can guess where they might be. Kidnappers and bank robbers aren't that smart when looking for hiding places, and you probably already have them tracked going there.

To a certain extent, all it really does is SUGGEST you belong or don't belong in any given location. There might be a murder in an alley, but data shows you go to a comic book store blocks away every week so you probably aren't involved. Generally the data is going to clear more people than it makes guilty.

Of course I'm a huge fan of Numb3rs and Criminal Minds that show this kind of stuff being used properly by honest people... Emphasis on HONEST people.

Of course. And fast forward 100 years from now when public is smart enough to call this BS and after spending trillions of tax payers dollars on programs like this one, the last resort would be something like this:

"God forbids all those reports of people being abducted by aliens were real, we would have a tool to analyze the data from an alien abduction and like 44th President said once hundred years ago: if it saves one life, then it was worth it!"

The public will likely never be smart enough.

Ah, the good old "people are stupid" saying.

http://dreamcafe.com/2013/06/18/people-are-stupid/

Well your example was stupid. There are always exceptions, but "the public" as a whole is stupid. Why do you think election campaigns run on negative advertising instead of talking policy?

http://boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2012

"Lincoln" was #13.

Here, let me rub your face in the stupidity: apparently almost half the United States population believes in ghosts and does not believe in evolution: http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-994766.html

I'm in no way coming from a position of intellectual superiority, rather from observational despair.

They always pick fringe cases that know the public would like, even if it's used for completely different things 99.9% of the time.

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