Seattle – Because of technology, children will no longer be able to claim they are at a friend’s house or at school when they really aren’t.
On Thursday, Sprint Nextel rolled out a cellphone service that lets parents pinpoint where their children are by tracking their cellphones. The parents can flip open their phone or log onto the Internet and find their child’s location marked on a map.
The technology, using a global-positioning system, or GPS, has been available for some time, but it has mostly been geared toward businesses that want to track workers. Now the technology is available in consumer applications.
The child tracker is aimed at families with multiple phones on one service plan. In addition to the Sprint service, Disney Mobile last week announced details of its new wireless phone service geared for families. Among other things, Disney Mobile, unveiled at a wireless convention in Las Vegas, allows parents to monitor where their children are and is to launch in June.
The Sprint service, using technology from Emeryville, Calif.- based WaveMarket, is called Family Locator. Once a family signs up, an application is loaded onto the parent phone.
The service, which can also be viewed online on a computer, has numerous protections, including passwords, so only people who have given permission can be tracked.
The password is used during registration by both the parent and the child. It can also be given to others, such as a grandparent or babysitter.
The parent phone has four simple options: locate, messaging, manage or exit. After locate is chosen, a map appears with the child’s location. The service uses GPS, but if it’s not available, it will locate the phone based on the nearest cellphone tower. The service will not work if the phone being tracked is turned off or is not receiving a signal.
Once the child is located, a message goes automatically to the phone.
The location can also be found from a website. Parents can manage other features at the site, including setting up a daily text message or e-mail that goes to the parent when the child arrives at school, day care or a specific address.
Family Locator is available on both the Sprint and Nextel networks. For $9.99, there are unlimited location requests for up to four phones. If both parents want the service on separate phones, they will have to pay for the application twice.
“There are times if your kid doesn’t show up at home when you expect them, and if you can see they are still at school or somewhere you know they are safe, that’s useful,” said Gerry Langeler, who has sons 15 and 19 years old. “You could call them, but they may have the ringer turned off, or they are in noisy place and they don’t hear it.”
Langeler, a venture capitalist, said he is looking at investing in location-based services. He said the first consumer services are just coming out, particularly applications focusing on turn-by- turn driving directions and child trackers.
Langeler said that when his son enters high school in the fall, he will get his first cellphone.
“I think it’s something we would consider adding as a service,” he said. “It’s not the kind of thing you’d use very often, but it is a very interesting thing to have, even if you use it once a year.”
The Disney Mobile service is similar to Sprint’s, but the parent would need a Disney Mobile phone to track the child. Disney Mobile has announced two phones – one from Pantech, the other from LG.
The service will run on Sprint’s infrastructure and will offer many more family features, including restricting the number of minutes a particular member of the family can use, or limiting downloads. The company has not said how much the service will cost.
For now, Sprint’s opportunity to target children and teens is fairly large. Although Sprint wouldn’t say how many subscribers are already equipped to use the service, the wireless-research company M:Metrics estimates that Sprint and Nextel have 2.4 million subscribers ages 13 to 17.
