Given that our special needs daughter has a history of leaving school ground unannounced, we decided to give Verizon’s Chaperone service a try.
In theory, it allows you to track a “child” phone so long as that phone is powered on and has the Chaperone Child software installed. The Parent software is installed on other phones and they can then “locate” the child phone ether on the parent phones themselves, or from a web page. Both options give a map view that shows location.
On the online page you can set up what are called “Child Zones” which are basically locations on a map that you can use as “trigger” points to have the system send you an alert via SMS. You can set it up so that you can receive an alert to let you know when your child has left a zone (ie: wandered off campus), or entered a zone (returning home from school), and you can set the range of the boundary (distance from zone center) at 1 mile, 1/2 mile, and 1/4 mile.
In theory, this sounds great, but there are certainly some possible problems -
1. How “real-time” is the locating? When I hit the “locate” button the the webpage or my phone, it says it can take up to two minutes. Geez, in that time she could be in and out of a small trigger zone. On average, I found it took about 30 seconds though after a number of online samples.
2. How reliable is the locating? I ran a test on the second day as my daughter was driven to school on the bus. Granted, she’s inside a metal vehicle, but out of about 10 location requests, it failed to locate her twice in a fairly dense residential area. Not too bad considering the spotty nature of cell phone coverage.
3. The phone must be ON and charged and WITH her. This seems straight forward enough, but remember that this is a phone for my mentally disabled daughter. Taking out her cell, properly inserting the charging plug, and then remembering to unplug and take that phone with her each day as part of her basic routine is going to take some work. But it does bring up another problem, and that is, what happens on the service side when you turn off the phone? Do I get an alert that says as much? The answer is no. The representative that I talked to at Verizon mentioned that you could set up an alert when the phone was turned off, but I find nothing of the sort on the actual site. But I don’t see how they could do this, since there is little or no way to distinguish between a phone being turned off, and one that simply passes through a tunnel and looses connection with the cell towers. Just in the short local bus trip to school, she obviously went in and out of coverage multiple times. I certainly don’t want a text message every time that happens. However, it would be helpful to know if the system can not make contact with her phone for an extended period of time that I could set, for example, one hour. It might just be that she’s having lunch in a cellular shadow zone, or that her battery is dead, but either way, after an hour or two, I would want to know about it.
The other side of this is that she also has to carry the phone with her. We keep the phone in her backpack for emergency use only. But it’s not like she’s going to be wearing her backpack all day. The second day of service her class went on a field trip up the coast. Backpacks were left back in the classroom. Most schools don’t allow students to have a cell phone on them during school hours. Policy varies, but usually they must be kept “off” in a purse or backpack. I chose to push the rules given the special-ed nature of our situation.
Ethical Considerations
Personally, I have always been a fairly fierce advocate for privacy rights, and generally, I feel it is NOT right to track people as they live their lives day to day. Given that, it’s almost impossible not to have some level of tracking going on whether we want it or not. For example, how many times a day do you swipe your credit or debit card through a machine for a purchase? Think that data just disappears? I can assure you that there are many many people very interested in your local spending habits and how far from your home you shop.
But as far as the Chaperone service is concerned, you should seriously consider why you might want such a service before jumping in. In the case of our daughter, we have some specific security concerns. Not only has she left the school grounds on her own, but there is a real possibility that certain estranged family members might try to abduct her. Verizon is obviously pushing the service as more than just a tracking collar. They include functions to send a message to all children for example, or one to locate a child and give you directions to that child via their Navigator service. The validity of these abilities is debatable, but I think that if you are looking to the service simply to prove that your teenage daughter is going to the mall and not the library after school, then perhaps you would benefit more from genuine face-to-face communication. Either you trust your children or you don’t. If you don’t, then no amount of digital trickery is going to turn them around. Simply put, they are going to be far and away more attuned to new technology than you are. How long do you think it will take them to figure out that they only need to turn off the phone to hide their tracks? Sure, some would rather be caught dead than turn off their phone, but they will find a way, and you will only foster a sense of mistrust. One note: I saw one comment regarding the service that I have not yet tested, and that is that the locating function will not work if you are currently using the phone for a call. That could be a problem if your chatty teen figures this out and just spends the two hours at the mall talking to her boyfriend.
If you talk to them about it beforehand, and they don’t care if you can track them, then I suppose you have nothing to lose. But don’t assume. Give them time to think about it. Maybe they would be fine with it if they could track you as well? If you think about it, it might be even better in that direction, so that a child in trouble could see where you are and get to you as fast as possible.
Suggestions for Verizon
Here are some things that I feel Verizon Wireless should consider in future updates to this service.
Website:
- It would be nice if the system could tell me when a child is “in” a zone. Perhaps changing the color of the dot or turning the dot to a square or something. It might even be enough to show the child zones on the map presented when you make a “locate” request.
- Alert time range. For example, I would very much like to specify the range in which an alert can take place. I only care about her leaving the area around her school campus on weekdays between 8AM and 3PM.
- Better log-in. The log-in page is a non-intuitive mess that looks like they didn’t have the time and simply incorporated it with the marketing “info” page. Skip the moronic java-based popup login forms. They are just confusing.
- The ability to send an alert to something other than a Parent phone – say an email address, or voice mail.
- A better FAQ page that honestly discusses some of the issues mentioned in this post. Word of advice: Don’t let marketing get their grubby hands on it… ever. The last thing you want is a FAQ that looks like they removed or obfuscated beyond understanding anything that might appear as a possible negative… Which is what you have now. Better to sell the service on it’s merits. See point “18″ in your current FAQ as an example of what NOT to do.
- It might be difficult on a technical level, but an alert that lets me know when a child phone is moving after having been stationary for a given time, regardless of whether or not they are in a child zone would be useful. Or perhaps if they move at a rate that is faster than a walking pace?
- Auto-locating log. It might be helpful to have an online log that automatically records a child phone’s location at set increments during the day, say every hour, instead of sending an alert. The service could be restricted to perhaps a twelve-hour block and would be viewed on the website. I understand that this might overwhelm the network if the service was to really take off, but twelve hits a day doesn’t seem like a lot when you think about it.
Phone Applications:
Note – The user pays for the “child” service in general ($9.95/mo as of this writing) for each tracked phone in the family plan, and the Parent and Child phone applications are free (just download airtime, no monthly fee). You can have as many “Parent” phones as you like. All SMS alerts are included in the service.
- SMS alerts should have some sort of audible sound option. If I don’t actually take my phone out and look at it for most of a day, I won’t see the alert that shows my child leaving campus.
- Make it easier to log-off and quit the application. Two confirmation screens? Come on…
- Make the apps available on the Blackberry line. Simply put, you are grossly limiting yourself with one of your most popular phones. Perhaps there’s a workaround using the web functions of the Blackberry itself, but your site says nothing about it except that it wont work so we can only assume the worst.
General comments:
All in all, the service has great potential. Given that Google has a similar service out there now (as well as serveral others) I think personal geographical locators are going to slowly become commonplace no matter how we do or do not like them. Verizon’s Chaperone service is a first step in the right direction. It’s simple enough for an average family, and can address some genuine concerns that parents face in this day and age. As with any technology, first-run introductions can be tough, but I think Verizon has done a resonable job. I highly praise their decision to incorporate all SMS fees into a single monthly service fee. There was an earlier version that charged extra for the ability to do alerts and they were smart to drop it. Unless there is a real and difinable cost for a special function, they should be striving to give customers more, not less. Nickle-and-dime’ing us to squeeze a little more blood out of our wallets might look good on paper, but it only breeds resentment and a desire to switch to a “friendlier” network.
Updates:
3/27/09 – I did another test today as my daughter came home from school and found that there was about a 5-10 minute delay from the time my daughter left school on the bus (found via repeated “locate” requests online) to when I received the SMS notification via the Parent application. There was also a 3 minute delay when she arrived “home” (another “child zone”) and when I received that SMS alert. Given that I was reading comments online about 1-2 hour delays, 5 minutes doesn’t sound so bad, but compared to a standard txt message, it royally bites.
That kind of delay makes using the service for ANY kind of time-based tracking completely useless. In a car driving around town, you could easily be three full miles from the reported “location” by the time you get the alert message and significantly more on the freeway. The service also failed to locate my daughter on over 70% of the tries as her bus made it’s way home. Not good for an area that I know has reasonable coverage.
The real deal-breaker for me though, is the alert system itself. You receive alerts via the Parent phone application. Your phone will suddenly bring up a silent screen that (at least on my phone – an LG enV) locks out all other functions and can not be canceled with the “CLR” button. Only opening the phone took me past the screen and to the application, which required me to log on simply to get the message. This is whacked. If the phone at least beeped or audibly alerted you in some way, this might be tolerable, but as it is, it’s just a major pain in the rear. Getting messages should NOT require you to log in. Just the tiniest bit of user interface work could really make this product shine, but unless they make some fairly major changes to the system, I doubt I would hold on to it for long.
3/30/09 – Today’s test was also mostly disappointing. Going to school I received an alert that she had “left home” (one of my child zones) about 20 minutes after the fact, but never one that she had arrived at school, even though I later “located” her and found her there. Checking the Parent phone application I found the missing alert, but was surprised that I had not seen the silent screen. This surprise was repeated when she took the bus home, only this time I saw neither the alert for leaving school itself, or the one that should have appeared when she arrived home. I was watching for them this time, and neither showed up for at least 10 minutes after she was seated in my living room. I checked the application later that night and “found” the messages, but it’s pretty pointless as an “alert”.
They really need to get this worked out. The whole alert mechanism will sink this product without a doubt.
3/31/09 – Child off to school. No noticed alerts at the time. Two alerts (one for leaving Home and another for arriving at School) when I logged into the Parent phone application. This is crazy. What’s the point of an “alert” if you have to go check it to see if it’s there?
4/1/09 – Morning test today was weird. No visual notifications (can’t call them alerts anymore), but when I checked the application it showed tht my daughter left home and arrived at school at the same exact time. This leads me to believe that the SMS messages are being queued up at Verizon some how, perhaps until there are enough of them to make the sending action worth it to them. Sucks for the consumer.