GPS Helps Parents Track Kids: Is it 'Big Mother'?

April 23, 2006 — -- Now, the same technology that's used to guide missiles and track criminals can be used to track your teenagers.

Sprint Nextel has unveiled a new GPS service it calls the "Family Locator." For $10 a month, parents can know where their children are at all times simply by sending a signal from one cell phone to the other.

The phone company stays away from words like tracking and monitoring, but critics say that's exactly what it amounts to.

For nervous parents, though, it can be $10 a month for piece of mind.

Jacqui Fahrnow, a single mother in Shawnee, Kan., bought one of Sprint's new "Family Locator" phones last week. It allows her to pinpoint her two sons' whereabouts within yards.

Over the past decade, the global positioning system, or GPS, has become a powerful navigation tool for hikers, drivers and pilots. Fahrnow demonstrated for ABC News how the tool helps find her kids.

"When you click on locate, I go right to Jordan and it finds him for me," she says. "And there he is right in the city park right where he's supposed to be."

Her sons, playing basketball in the park, hear the locator device on their phone beep. Jordan, 14, exclaims to his 13-year-old younger brother, "Josh! She got us: She knew where we were!"

Fahrnow can even go online to get a map of her kids' movements throughout the day.

"When we were using the phones before without this," she says, "he didn't always hear the phone and he didn't answer it. And it kind of made me a little nervous sometimes."