Posted on 04/13/2006 10:44:13 AM PDT by george wythe
Up until now, parents had to deal with a separate company or buy special equipment to track their children through their cell phones. Sprint Nextel Corp. becomes the first U.S. wireless provider to sell its own product when the Family Locator Service rolls out Thursday.
Using the Global Positioning System, the service allows parents to track up to four cell phones over the Internet or on their own wireless device. Parents can periodically ask the service to find the child's phone, displaying the location on a road map.
Parents can also set alerts, automatically warning the parent if the child isn't at a certain place, such as school or soccer practice, at a specific time.
[snip]
He added that the service could let adults keep track of elderly parents.
(Excerpt) Read more at belleville.com ...
Children tracking parents.
Spouses can also track each other.
When my kids become teenagers, you bet I'm going to track them.
My folks tracked us with GPS.."Get Poppas Stick"
The telecom industry has been frothing at the prospect of offering "location based" services. Assume you want to find the closest Chinese restaurant. The service takes your GPS coordinate, then looks up all the Chinese restaurants nearby and gives you that list on your phone...sorted in distance order with phone number and address.
In 2002, I build a door to door routing service that acquired your GPS location from the phone, then used a voice recognition driven application to determine your destination. I used those two pieces of information to create a door to door route that was downloaded to the phone. I didn't deploy the application because the phone companies didn't have an adequate capacity in the GPS lookup sysetm, nor was the hardware fully deployed to do the job.
"No, I was not there. My cell phone says I was somewhere else."
LOL. The libs are getting their way. They're turning our country into an Orwellian nightmare. None of this crazy stuff would be necessary if pedophiles, murderers, etc. were hanged promptly after their first offense.
If you don't trust your kids (or if your kids are trying to sneak around without telling you where they're actually going), the easiest way to check up on them is buy them a camera phone.
When they tell you they're at Starbucks, say "Fine...could you send me a picture right now of the place."
"Sorry, George; you got the short straw. Here's our phones. We'll meet you at the library in 3 hours. If any of them ring, DON'T answer it! We'll just say it had to be turned off in the library."
I can hardly wait until this is available on Verizon. Sprint doesn't have good service in my area.
***BRING***BRING***
Oh, Joe, it's you!
Where's Bobby. Isn't he at the mall with you?
Why do you have his phone?
Gawd, I love ThinkGeek. That's pretty cool stuff!
LOL. You think parents are using GPS as means of protecting their children from pedophiles and murderers? Somehow I think in many cases it may be that they want to rest assured that Joanie is not at Johnnie's when she should be at Janie's.
It's especially funny that you feel the need to politicize this. I think a lot of pubbie parents are using this tool.
Remember the 50's when child murderers were promptly hanged? Those were the days. Never saw any kids on a leash back then. And we walked five miles to and from school, too, alone, in minus 10 degree weather!
Good point about Joanie sneaking over to Johnnie's. That's always been a big problem and I'm sure lots of GPS trackin' parents are doing it for that reason, too.
Using the Global Positioning System, the service allows parents to track up to four cell phones over the Internet or on their own wireless device. Parents can periodically ask the service to find the child's phone, displaying the location on a road map.
I go balistic when I see that.....
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