GPS Tracking ROI

(CBS) Mother and daughter, Denise and Romi Barta, are close.

“She’s a good kid,” says Denise.

But when it comes to the brand new Sprint “Family Locator” cell phones that allow parents to keep track of their children’s every move, there’s a generation gap, reports CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker.

“I think that’s a violation of my privacy, personally,” says Romi.

“If there was an emergency, if there was an earthquake, I would know where she was. I think that would make me feel better,” retorts Denise… (Full article here:)

I told you these things come in bunches *smile*. Here’s a CBS report on the Sprint “Family Locator” cell phones I mentioned in my last post.

Aside from the all too typical brain-dead media description …the phones do not send a signal “up to a satellite and back down to mom”; it’s not a bad report.

For those who might get a little impatient at my continual carping at these technological mistakes, here’s why I think it’s important to point them out.

First of all, all these reporters and correspondents have lot more formal education than I do. I would like to think that our colleges and universities could do a better job at teaching. They’re good at fundraising and football, but from what I can see with US news reporting, if you want your child to have an education, it would be much better to send him or her to a country like England where schools teach academics rather than sports.

Second, and most important, if you don’t understand the basics of the technology, reporting about it and reading about it is a useless waste of time. Suppose I wrote an article that said light bulbs in your house glow bright at night because they are reflecting the glow of the sun on the other side of the Earth? D’oh, even Homer knows they glow from the radioactive waste GE packages inside them, right?

There are tracking devices that send signals up to commercial data satellites and back to users and control centers. But they are not consumer-grade cell phones at ten bucks per month. The pint that is missed on all these cell phone articles is that in a large portion of the US, they don’t freakin work. If you live out in what our government officials like to refer to as “flyover” country like I do (Colorado), your kids will be out of range of these Sprint devices as much as they will be in range. Even if you live inside the Beltway, there are dead spots. Twenty years ago I worked on formal cellular radio coverage surveys for the US government and I can take you today to places (much more populated now) where the exact same dead spots exist today as they did in 1986.

These phones have a GPS receiver inside them that gathers navigational signals from GPS satellites, calculates the phone’s position and sends the positional data via the cellular network to the requestor. To intimate that they send their data back to “mom” via a satellite link is disingenuous … sloppy, sloppy reportage.

These tools can be great for those who need them, but be darn sure they work in your area and in the area you expect to be able to track your teens