Starting in April, anyone purchasing a phone in Mexico will be fingerprinted and their call logs, text and voice messages will be archived for a year. These seem like strict measures, but hundreds of tourists are kidnapped in Mexico each year and the problem is getting worse. In fact, some believe these measures don't go far enough:

Billionaire Carlos Slim, who controls Mexico's No. 1 cell phone operator America Movil, said the law would be more useful if it tracked the movements of cell phone users. "What needs to be done is another type of more effective measures."

Either way, will these steps do much to prevent you from being nabbed while visiting on Spring break? I doubt it. Mexico's corrupt bureaucracy is legendary. At most it would amount to a minor obstacle that could be easily remedied with a little extra cash. [Yahoo Tech]

Police in Massachusetts were trying to track down a missing 9-year-old girl who had allegedly been kidnapped by her grandmother. They had managed to find the girl's cellphone coordinates and traced it to an intersection in Virginia.

Since they were nowhere near Virginia, the policemen turned to Google Street View to help them round up possible hiding-out locations. They identified a building that looked like a motel, confirmed it was one with a subsequent Google search and then called the Virginia State Police, who visited the motel and found the grandmother and the girl.

The moral of this story is: Police know how to Google now. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

The Johnson County District Attorney, Phill Kline is leaning towards the latter explanation:

There was a lack of understanding on their end of what they were incapable of doing. I was on the conference call with Verizon, and we had three technicians telling us different things and using different terms, and we can't guess their mind. We've got a girl that's missing. We have a girl that's missing, we have a likely abduction, we need to find her.

So far, Verizon has not offered up an official explanation. Whatever the reason, Verizon really dropped the ball on this one. Obviously, their actions in this situation lead to two or three extra days without closure for the family of the deceased. In case you were wondering, Target went out of their way to help on their end. So at least we know that they can be trusted should something terrible go down while you are perusing their electronics department for batteries.[Fox via Consumerist]

Yeah, so long as you're kidnapped while wearing your GPS transmitter fanny pack (and your attackers don't mind you keeping it), you'll be fine. I guess it might make sense if you're going to be alone in a seedy neighborhood late at night to go ahead and strap up, but still, at this price, it seems like Xega (who seem to be mysteriously without a website yes, here it is, thanks guys, it's Friday) is just capitalizing on people's fears with a bogus safety net. And successfully, too—the company claims they've sold the service to over 2,000 people. [Reuters, Image: Amal Graafstra's OG RFID implants]