Verizon Introduces a New Way to Spy on Your Family
Have a wayward husband or maybe you want to see where little Angela goes when she’s not at home, well Verizon has introduced a service for you. Its called “Family Locator” and it will allow you to track the location of your loved ones. Of course Verizon already has a service like this called Chaperone, but now they are replacing it with Family Locator. (no word on why)
But if Family Locator is anything like Chaperone, a smart 7-year-old can disable it in about 10 seconds flat. Let me explain: Yes I have had just such a wayward child and thought, “Hey lets put that Verizon Chaperone thing on”. So I actually went to the Verizon store and had them activate it and install it on the phone. Of course what they didn’t tell us was that every time you “track” a loved one, by law, the phone has to notify the trackee of the attempt. Which means the phone flashes a nice giant message that says something like “HEY STUPID YOU ARE BEING TRACKED BY YOUR UNTRUSTING PARENTS!!!”. Well as you can imagine, this went over like a lead balloon and our daughter not only disabled it, but was actually able to remove the app from the phone before we had our first successful tracking complete.
Of course we could have insisted on her allowing the tracking, but even if she left it on the device, she could still override each tracking attempt with the press of a button.
At $9.99 per phone there is honestly only one scenario where I could see this as helpful and/or justified that is if your child was, God forbid, abducted. Then the $9.99 could literally be a lifesaver. The older, before mentioned daughter has left the nest, more like pushed out, (joking) but I still have another young one and she just got her first cell phone and I’m considering this service for her phone.
Would love to hear your opinions on this, so please comment on this article with your thoughts.
*** 09-17-09 Update *** Ok, I put this on my daughters phone last night and this morning one minute after she left on the bus I got both a text message and an email come to my phone. My wife and I both looked at each other and said, “hey, I like that”. Then about 7 minutes later we got confirmation that she had arrived at school. Parents out there, in my opinion, this is a must have!
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Hi Daniel,
Wayward husbands and 7 year old children are interesting extremes, but I thought there are some other scenarios which might be useful that are more main stream. Verizon Wireless is the only carrier which provides arrival and departure notification. This is what moves it beyond the examples you outline.
- To tell my girlfriend when i leave work or vice versa, so we know its time to leave our work as well (it happens so much by route that it is useful as is a facebook poke)
- To tell my friends and clients when i arrive in their town automatically upon my arrival or my passing through.
- To feel safe that my latch key child has arrived home, as they forget to call often, and my child likes me to know they are well we have a loving relationship
- To mark the ends of my commute which frequently takes me to NYC, Chicago and LA, which I do weekly, so the notifications are nice to my family for each airport arrival and depature
I am interested that you missed the announcement for your readers: for the first time Verizon makes Chaperone available for the BlackBerry so you can do your locations from your super phone. Perhaps for the following scenarios:
- My dear father has dementia and sometimes he requires my help getting home at night, now I know which bar he is at, he often doesn’t
- We are at Wally’s World and I wish to know where my kids are at so i can round them up for lunch, and they have no clue where they are, they are having too much fun
A very well thought out rebuke Lex and your points are very well taken. I stand corrected, there is indeed more than one valid scenario as you so aptly pointed out.
But I do feel the price is a bit steep. I would instead like to see this around the $4.95 range or maybe a discount for people such as myself who have multiple phones on their account.