GPS chips in cellphones track kids and help navigate, too

Cellphone carriers are mandated by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to provide location information for emergency use, and some employ technology that triangulates a cellphone signal among cellphone towers. As more phones come equipped with a small and relatively inexpensive GPS microchip, the technology is being used for all sorts of location-based services that telecommunications companies can offer to their customers. For example, the Family Locator service on a Walt Disney-branded mobile phone on the Sprint network uses GPS to track a child's whereabouts. Parents buy special "kid" and "parent" phones. The child's phone is programmed to beam its location to the parent phone, which has the ability to display and map the approximate street address where the child phone is at any moment. Sprint offers its own Family Locator service that provides parents with the child's location and alerts them when the child arrives at a specified location. The Sprint service can also be used to track adult family members, but the adult controls who can track the phone and gets a text message each time someone uses the service. Verizon's child locator, called Chaperone, goes a different route. It adds a "geofencing" service that allows parents to define an area — a school or babysitter's house, for example — where the child is permitted. Parents receive an alert on their handset when the cellphone of the child enters or leaves the zone. But GPS phones aren't just kids' stuff. A company called Wherify Wireless offers a line of GPS- enabled phones to track employees of elderly relatives.