Summary: New smartphone apps make it easy for parents to track their kids' whereabouts. But should safety come before privacy? iTunes: cs.co/tnp - Listen to past episodes, subscribe or write a review. TRANSCRIPT for "Tracking Kids with Smartphone Apps" written by Jason Deign: If you're a parent, it's hard not to stress about what might be happening to your kids when they're out of sight. Missing children cases are often seen in the media. So every time a youngster steps out into the world, unaccompanied, it can drive a mom or dad crazy. Thankfully, the digital age has a handy solution to this dilemma: turn their mobile phone into a personal tracking device. It's relatively cheap and easy to do this using opt-in services. And it gives kids a degree of autonomy while allowing concerned parents to track their whereabouts. Companies such as Life360, Securafone and SMS Tracker offer free apps that can be downloaded onto a smartphone. With kids now toting smartphones at increasingly young ages, it's a seemingly perfect way for parents to check where they are, at all times. It's no wonder that the market for so-called "family locator services" is booming. Recent research by Berg Insight, a Swedish telecommunications analysis firm, indicates the market will see a compound annual growth rate of 34 percent in the next four years, taking the number of North American and European users from 16 million in 2011 to 70 million in 2016. Berg Insight also notes that this trend is in parallel to other personal locator services. Some organizations have employees that may be at risk. Take social workers, for example. Mobile devices with tracking services -- and some with push-button alarms -- are increasingly being handed out to protect employees. People who are elderly or weak can also benefit from having a personal locator service so they can be tracked by relatives or care providers. In these situations, the person being tracked rarely questions the value of the service. But the same can't always be said of family locator services, especially when children are concerned -- children who are old enough to expect a certain amount of privacy and independence. André Malm is a senior analyst at Berg Insight. He says tech-savvy teenagers will not have much of a problem quitting or uninstalling the app. Quote: "All parties should understand what is possible, and the drawbacks and benefits." End quote. It's also important for parents to know the limitations of personal locator services, which depends on the type of technology used. Cell ID services, which are available worldwide, can only pin handsets down to a radius of around 200 meters in urban areas and perhaps not even a kilometer in remote locations. In the United States, about 50 percent of mobile users are on Code Division Multiple Access networks. And they can benefit from GPS tracking. GPS is more accurate than cell ID, but sometimes it does't work well if you're inside a building. So it's not of much use if your kid is inside a shopping mall, for example. With smartphones, the accuracy of these services has been slowly improving. But since apps are handset rather than network based, they may be more susceptible to failure. After the limitations are taken into account, it's up to each family to decide whether to trust their children on the streets with a personal locator. And here it turns out, there is a big difference between the United States and other western countries. Based on his conversations with app developers and device manufacturers, Malm says, quote: "In the United States, privacy does not seem to be so much of an issue and the fact that parents can track children and control their habits seems to be OK. You can have deep control of texts and voice calls and it is considered alright to do that without the consent of the child." In Europe, on the other hand, Malm says, quote: "That level of control is not even available, and you definitely need the cons
