New App Shall Collectively Save us All From Tyranny of Dog Walkers

Well, the app is part and parcel of Swifto dog walkers, a company that lets you monitor your pooch’s daily jaunts via your phone. It’s official — we now trust computers more to watch our dogs than the people we employ to watch our dogs.

Not only do they use GPS tracking to let you see your pups every turn, it can also calculate the dog’s average speed down to fractions of a mile per hour. That way, you can get pissed if your Border Collie gets a stroll instead of a sprint (trust me — Border Collies need that sprint). Further, they send you photos of your dog on the walks and according to Dogster, will text you a “poop alert,” along with a text message that says, “Your dog has just pooped” when your dog drops a deuce.

The service charges reasonable rates — $20 per half-hour walk, which is industry standard in NYC where they are currently operating — and have plans to expand to Boston by the end of the year as well as Chicago and San Francisco in 2014.

I’m of two minds. As the owner of two dogs, I love knowing my dogs are getting the walk they need so they don’t eat my couch/shoes/tampons, but I also hate feeling watched and know I’d be super annoyed if I was accountable to some damn machine. Uh, maybe that’s why it’s better that I live the solitary life of a writer, holed up in my dank corner of the internet, not having to move for years on end. But seriously — would you be bummed if you were a dog walker and your company introduced something like this? Even if you’re as honest as Abe Lincoln, you might be bummed to find yourself strapped to Skynet.