A New Way of Identifying Lost Children

An article from Daily Cup of Tech "DCot Helps Find Lost Child" highlighted a family that place information about their kids, the parents' phone numbers and pass phrase into thumbdrives (a.k.a. USB drives). This way, when the kid is lost and hopefully, a good samaritan finds the kid, he/she could take the drive off the kid's neck, stick it to a nearby computer and read the information. After that, the kid's parents can be contacted and as an extra form of security, the parents will need to produce their own thumbdrive with the pass phrase to match with the kid's before bringing the kid home. Here is an excerpt of the story:

Our three year old did just what we thought he would do - Disappeared. Within 13 minutes of being ‘lost’ though, my cellphone rang. My three year old whom we thought didn’t understand what we told him about the funny thing around his neck actually did what we told him. The account from our boys ‘finder’ was humorous and panned out like this: My little redheaded boy was SCREAMING for his mom. The ‘finder’ came to help him, the boy showed the ‘finder’ the labelled USB drive, the ‘finder’ then brought him to security, security plugged the USB drive in to his computer, saw the message and called me on my cellphone. When we went to retrieve our boy the security guard asked for our USB drive with the secret phrase on it. The USB drives performed just as set up to. It had my cellphone number, my boys’ first name (first name only!) to calm him down and his favorite treat.

To say the least, D-land security was very impressed and the ‘finder’ equally impressed and my redhead boy was wearing M&M’s on his lips and chin.

There it is. Not only can you retrieve lost USB drives with this you can also find lost kids. Thank you!