Proud father and imaginative inventor, Corey Menscher has made the ultimate yummy mummy gadget, the Kickbee. This chunky belt of electronic wizardry detects every kick from junior fetus and informs the world via Twitter. Just what we need, another way for expectant mothers (and tech crazed fathers) to show off and annoy us. 

However, once you get past the inane tackiness of this gizmo it razes another, bigger, much more important question.

The digital freedom of our children is being stolen before they even know what that means: tiny, innocent fetus can tweet from the womb; newborn babies have their pictures plastered over Facebook; toddlers have their own Myspace pages; infant school children have email addresses and mobile phones. Childhood has being stolen by the microchip.

But it’s more than just children sitting in front of computer game consuls rather than playing outside. The pictures, the movies, the text, everything about these infants of the digital generation is spread over the internet before they have the chance to decide whether they want maintain their privacy, a commodity which should be so carefully guarded.

Who owns these tweets? These photos? These first words? The ownership, distribution and secondary or even tertiary uses of this data is vague. Once on the internet can anything actually be deleted? What will come back to haunt you in years to come?

Perhaps yummy mummy with a tech fetish wants everyone to know when baby kicks, but does she realize that the flood gates which she opens are very difficult to close?