It's 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are? That call to parental oversight, made famous by TV stations and copied or parodied the world over, has a new twist in the early 21st Century. With the upcoming U.S. release of phones that can help track children and teens, the dutiful parent's answer now can be: "Yes, to the exact coordinates."
Parents who want to know with absolute certainty where their child is will soon be able tap into the Global Positioning System (GPS) and locate the child via a cell phone enabled with the technology. If a child doesn't call home, or answer the phone, or tell the truth about where he or she is, no worries. Parents can still find the kid, as long as the phone hasn't been ditched or turned off.
Not everyone is happy with this solution, however. Privacy advocates have raised concerns that GPS-enabled phones are susceptible to hackers who could easily locate the devices and subsequently track a child with no one else knowing.
"The problem with tracking devices is that it's a ripe target for any number of sinister purposes," says Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, a watchdog group based in London. Target or not, plans to market these phones to U.S. families have been put on speed-dial.
Not Like 20 Years Ago
Starting this month, Disney Mobile will roll out a family plan of cell phones that will offer a suite of features fashioned for the 11- to 15-year-old set, coupled with a generous helping of parental controls. The most controversial of these controls is what Disney Mobile calls Family Locator -- a tool that pinpoints the phone's position using GPS.
Originally designed for military use, GPS has since become an indispensable part of all navigational systems, from passenger jets to family minivans. By evaluating signals from at least three satellites, a small GPS device can immediately tell you its position anywhere in the world.
Disney Mobile allows a parent to get the location of his or her child's handset by entering a self-selected PIN into a Web site or a phone. "Kids are over-scheduled these days, running around to activities, not running around the neighborhood like 20 years ago," says George Globar, senior vice president and general manager of Disney Mobile. "Kids and parents want to connect more during the day."
As attention-grabbing as a GPS locator can be, some see other features in the Disney package as being more enticing to the average customer  , such as a function that sets monthly allowances for voice minutes, text/picture messages, and downloadable content such as ringtones. (continued...)
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