Family Locator Service: Sprint Nextel to offer parental tracking capability to their service

Family Locator Service: Sprint Nextel to offer parental tracking capability to their service

Sprint Nextel Corp has now become the first US based mobile service provider to offer parents value added facility to track their children through their cell phones. Until now, parents had to take service from a third party to avail of a similar service.

Spring Nextel would roll out this new service called Family Locator Service today. This service would make use of the Global Positioning System and it would allow the parents to track up to four cell phones over the Internet or on their own wireless device.

They would be able to frequently ask the service to find the child’s phone, which would display the location of their kids on a map. Parents would also be able to set alarms if a child goes away from a certain place before a particular time period. This service can also send a text message to their kids informing them that they have been searched for and found.

Spring Nextel would provide this service through WaveMarket Inc. for $9.99 per month. It supports 17 existing phones and can search for owners of as many as 28 GPS-enabled models.

Dan Gilmartin, Sprint’s marketing manager for location-based services said in a statement on this new service initiative: “It’s not about tracking. It’s not about monitoring. It’s about giving parents and caregivers peace of mind that they’re able to find their children’s location.”