New Child Locator Service From Sprint

Mike Temporale

http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.j.../technologyNews

"Sprint Nextel Corp., the No. 3 U.S. mobile service, on Thursday introduced a wireless service to help parents find their children, as it makes a bid to expand its presence in the family market. The service lets parents look at maps on their cellphones or computers to locate their children who also carry mobile phones. Parents can also program the service to automatically send them text messages at specific times each day to confirm that their children have arrived at home or in school. The so-called Family Locator service aims to bring in revenue from a location technology Sprint and its rivals are required by law to put into cellphones so that safety workers can pinpoint the location of 911 emergency service callers. Sprint's service shows data such as street addresses to which a child is close and the estimated accuracy of the reading, which could range from a radius of 2 yards around the child to a radius of hundreds of yards."

This sounds like a pretty cool application. It will also notify the child, via a text message, that you have checked up on their location. We just need more GPS's built into devices so we can really start to take advantage of this technology. If there was a Windows Mobile version, you could run this across carriers. So everyone doesn't have to be in the same country. Wink

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"I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious" - Albert Einstein

Rocco Augusto · Posted: Mon Apr 17, 2006 10:40 am Post subject:

i wonder how long it will take until we start hearing stories of this new service being abused

egads · Smartphone Pupil Joined: 15 Jun 2005 Posts: 23

To me this would be an invasion of the kid's privacy. Would you have liked this when you were a kid?

I'm a 42 year old with a 12 and 15 year old and I KNOW where my kids are. I don't need a frig'n cell phone to tell me where they are. This is just another tool for lazy parents to shirk one more responsibility. This service should be priced high enough that the only time you would use it would be an emergency.

Also, I would hate to have a pervert or wacko ex boy/girl friend being able to track them down with this service.

jacklf · Posted: Mon Apr 17, 2006 3:17 pm Post subject:

Enabling parents to be safety-minded as well as responsible for their kids seems fine by me.. At least now someone other than law enforcement can make use of it. Just about any tech out there can be a double edged sword. This tech/service already exists out there with dedicated devices -- this is nice since if the parent has already given them a cell phone, they don't need another piece of hardware to make them remember to carry. Cool idea to leverage something they have to have in their anyway.

Rocco Augusto · Posted: Mon Apr 17, 2006 3:25 pm Post subject:

Mike Temporale · Posted: Mon Apr 17, 2006 4:38 pm Post subject:

It's a little early to say, but I would think it would be locked to family members, pre-defined numbers, or phones on the same account. Surely they have thought about stalkers.
_________________
"I have no special talents, I am only passionately curious" - Albert Einstein

AdamaDBrown · Smartphone Intellectual Joined: 17 Aug 2005 Posts: 119

I agree that this just screams out for abuse. It would be a useful service sometimes--for instance, if someone's not answering their phone--but mostly it's just going to be used as a substitute for actually knowing where kids are: like those automotive black boxes that privledged suburbanites buy in lieu of teaching their kids to drive responsibly.