Throwing Madonna getting all up in your grille

Okay, I owe you some context:

Neurobiologist William Calvin wonders if women were among the prehistoric technologists. He does some inspired detective work to find out. He begins with mothers and babies.

...

Maybe that's why most of us are right-handed. A mother survived with a child on her left arm if she could protect herself with the right. Calvin gives us the term, "The Throwing Madonna." That's the mother who can throw a stone at a jackal while she holds her child.

Now what has this to do with technology? Calvin points out that for right-handedness to have much Darwinian value, prehistoric mothers had to be deeply involved in the manual skills of survival. They had to be hunters, tool-makers, and tool users...

And now, they're gettin all MI-6 on junior's Razrphone.

Washingtonpost.com

Watch Out, Kids: With GPS Phones, Big Mother Is Watching

Ever since the first telecom engineer figured out how to cram a Global Positioning System receiver into a cellphone, people have worried about how "They" might exploit those features.

Either the feds would follow our footsteps or we'd see phones spammed with ads for every business within a mile. Or both things would happen at the same time.

But instead of Big Brother, we may be dealing with Big Mother.

Last week, Sprint Nextel Corp. introduced a new service called Family Locator that lets parents track their kids' whereabouts, using the GPS capabilities in each child's cellphone. For $9.99 a month, you can get a fix on your little ones' locations as long as they are on your Sprint account and carry one of the 30 Sprint or Nextel phones that allow this monitoring.

As demonstrated by a Sprint publicist yesterday, the service was deceptively easy to use . . . considering that the whole idea would have been science-fiction fodder a decade ago.

I logged in to a page on Sprint's Web site ( http://www.sprint.com/familylocator ) with a phone number and password provided for the occasion, and a moment later, a green icon on a map of Sprint's Overland Park, Kan., corporate campus reported the location of another Sprint employee.

The accuracy, as indicated by a wide blue circle around that green dot, was not so great -- only "within 644 yards," according to the page's suspiciously precise estimate -- so I clicked a "Locate" button.

Within a minute, the system had pinned down my target's location to within a 98-yard radius, close enough to call in the airstrike -- I mean, identify what street she was on. (Sorry, got distracted for a second.)...

Especially creepy is this feature on my Moto V-cast™. They use a cross-hairs as the icon for Settings feature #9, "Location."