Can Cell-Phone Tracking Keep Our Kids Safe?
by Aner Ravon

Cell phones have long become a shaping factor as far as Parent-Child relationship is concerned. The “first cell phone age” is constantly dropping (My 5 year old niece is “not speaking” to her mother for a week now because she refused her cellphone birthday wish). In most cases the parents pay the bill and enjoy the ability to always be within reach, a requirement in today’s over-scheduled, over-anonymous, sometimes evil environment.

Kids owning cell phones is also a source of many ongoing debates as we all know - the biggest one being about the phone bill size. Other issues usually involve child safety - from mobile bullying to call / surfing monitoring. Now there’s another option - actual mobile phone tracking.

Call me old fashioned, but I think parents and kids need to communicate and enact discipline in other ways. I am a big advocate of safety measures, of course, but does anyone really believe a trackable cell-phone would stop a 12 year old from growing up? Kids are smarter then their parents when it comes to making use of technology. They will very rapidly learn how to “accidentally forget” the phone at the school locker and hit a nearby party. They will also very quickly learn that turning off the phone and blaming the battery is a viable excuse. Etc. Etc.

Barry Levine of Newsfactor writes about the new phenomenon - tracking enabled cell phones. GPS (Global Positioning Service Enablement) at cell phones is old news. GPS chips are already built into all CDMA carriers in N. America - Verizon, Sprint, Alltel, US Cellular among others. The commercialization of 3rd party tracking services, however, is still in it’s infancy. Verizon and Cingular already offer some limitted parental controls - mostly dealing with the phone bill and 911 services.

Disney Mobile has announced plans to roll out a parent minded service during CTIA in April. Disney is operating on top of Sprint’s GPS enabled network. Apparently the service is now actually rolling out. In Barry’s words “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.”

Marguerite Reardon of Silicon.com offers an interesting analysis on Disney’s business opportunities. With 69% penetration among adults and 24% penetration among kids, plus on-going neglection of parental control have made this one a natural value proposition for MVNOs like Disney. Or in Marguerite’s words, “The Disney service was designed specifically for parents who want their kids to have mobile phones for safety and convenience reasons but are either afraid of what their kids might do with the phones or are concerned about getting surprised at the end of the month with a huge mobile phone bill.”

As a parent I am often terrified with the dangers today’s environment poses. I do know that kids lack the proper judgment and are easy targets for abuse. But I don’t believe in the effectiveness of automatic tracking. As a matter of fact, my fear is that some parents will lean on this service instead of on proper communication. then again, when it comes to parenting there are no clear distinctions between right and wrong. Who knows.

Aner Ravon
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