GPS Helps Parents Track Kids: Is it 'Big Mother'?

April 23, 2006 — -- Now, the same technology that's used to guide missiles and track criminals can be used to track your teenagers.

Sprint Nextel has unveiled a new GPS service it calls the "Family Locator." For $10 a month, parents can know where their children are at all times simply by sending a signal from one cell phone to the other.

The phone company stays away from words like tracking and monitoring, but critics say that's exactly what it amounts to.

For nervous parents, though, it can be $10 a month for piece of mind.

'She Got Us'

Jacqui Fahrnow, a single mother in Shawnee, Kan., bought one of Sprint's new "Family Locator" phones last week. It allows her to pinpoint her two sons' whereabouts within yards.

Over the past decade, the global positioning system, or GPS, has become a powerful navigation tool for hikers, drivers and pilots. Fahrnow demonstrated for ABC News how the tool helps find her kids.

"When you click on locate, I go right to Jordan and it finds him for me," she says. "And there he is right in the city park right where he's supposed to be."

Her sons, playing basketball in the park, hear the locator device on their phone beep. Jordan, 14, exclaims to his 13-year-old younger brother, "Josh! She got us: She knew where we were!"

Fahrnow can even go online to get a map of her kids' movements throughout the day.

"When we were using the phones before without this," she says, "he didn't always hear the phone and he didn't answer it. And it kind of made me a little nervous sometimes."

For cell phone companies, marketing to nervous parents is a way to tap into a lucrative market -- phones for kids. Several providers are expected to follow Sprint's GPS lead.

Bad for Privacy?

But not everyone thinks it's a good idea.

"I would not have used this device for my kids," says Peter Stearns, provost of George Mason University and author of the book, "Anxious Parents: a History of Modern Childrearing in America." "One of my real worries is that this does not teach kids that privacy is something to be respected, and it does not teach them the kinds of values I think our society is supposed to cherish."

Sprint sees it differently.

"It's not about controlling a child wherever they are; it's about giving you the power to locate them when you need to and the ability to communicate with them when you need to," says Dan Gilmartin, Sprint's marketing manager for consumer location-based services.

Gilmartin points out children do get notified with an automatic text message every time their parents use the locator.

The phone isn't foolproof. The feature does not work if kids turn off their cell phones.

"I don't see this as, you know, the ankle bracelet for them," says Fahrnow, who has called her sons and asks them to bring home a can of tomato juice after discovering via the locator that her sons are near the grocery store.

"It just kind of goes back to making sure my kids are safe," she added, "because it isn't the same world as when I was growing up."