Just when the British were wondering if their Orwellian society was complete, a company, called Blade Runner, has devised a jacket to monitor every single step your child takes.

But it’s the technology that is likely to appeal to the people who are buying it, because at £250 – or an extra £80 if you want it with a Kevlar lining – and a monthly £10 satellite tracking charge, it is not cheap. It is simple, though. It runs off a web-based system, so there’s no software to load or minimum PC requirements; you just get your own user login and you’re up and running.

Great.  So for about $800 you can put your child’s life into the hands of whatever freak hacks the system and uses it for nefarious purposes all the while neglecting your duties as a parent.  You can then blame the technology instead of your own irresponsibility.  After all, there aren’t any dangers to such a system.

Also, if your child takes the jacket off or loses it, well, not only are you out a buttload of cash, your system is now worthless is tracking your children.  I can see little Johnny giving Billy his coat while he skips school.  Then again, parents today seem to enjoy the appearance of safety so they’ll probably just believe Johnny was a good boy today.

It sounds ideal for a certain type of over-protective, borderline paranoiac parent with too much time on their hands, and Adrian Davis, Blade Runner managing partner, admits that is part of the target market. “There are parents who are very concerned about their child’s safety,” he says diplomatically, “and this will give them peace of mind.”  But he is also keen to point out there are wider applications. “If your kids are doing adventure sports, like snowboarding, you can always know where they are. And if they get into difficulties, they can set off an alarm that tells you their location.”

So, they are marketing to crazy, paranoid parents.  Wider applications or not, this is Big Brother attached to your jacket.

The small rechargeable device – it has a 15-hour battery – fits neatly into a pouch inside the jacket. You switch it on when you leave the house and what you get is nothing less than the ability to know where someone is – within four square metres – anywhere in the world. You can watch them move, check where they’ve been and get updates every 10 seconds. You don’t even need to be permanently logged on to your computer, as you can have email alerts sent to your Blackberry or text messages to your mobile.

Aw, isn’t that sweet.  We can spy on our kids 24/7 instead of raising responsible children.

Yet despite these Big Brother overtones, Martin Taylor, sales director of AMS, suggests the benefits can cut both ways. “Kids want their independence,” he says, “and parents might be more willing to allow them to go out more on their own if they could check up on where they were from time to time and know they would be immediately informed if there was any trouble.” Yet despite these Big Brother overtones, Martin Taylor, sales director of AMS, suggests the benefits can cut both ways. “Kids want their independence,” he says, “and parents might be more willing to allow them to go out more on their own if they could check up on where they were from time to time and know they would be immediately informed if there was any trouble.”

Okay, I’m going to sound really old right now, but, back in the 1980s, we had this things called telephones that we’d notify our parents on when we got into trouble or to come and get us before trouble got out of hand.  Our parents let us *gasp* go outside and play all day long.  They knew where we were, who our friends were, and what we were up to.  They practiced a little thing called parenting in which a jacket that spied on you was unnecessary.

All this jacket does is continue to place parenting into the hands of technology and wussify our children.  This jacket will be added to the myriad other types of tagging being done to our children.  Personal companion, Personal Locators, Toddler Tags, Loc8tor plus, and various under the skin RFID tags are all conditioning our future generations to a world filled with constant tracking.  Shoving a leash up their asses at birth will be the next step.  And all they had to do was tart up the jacket so kids thought it looked cool.

Blade Runner says that such a jacket will give children more independence, but how can that be true when it updates every ten seconds?  Do you really feel free and independent in those nine seconds before you’re tracked again?  Parents have indeed sold their children’s souls for a momentary peace and their children looking cooler than the neighbor kid.