Where's Your Kid? Check the GPS

The handy AnyTrack device keeps tabs on whereabouts of family, cars, packages—as long as you're ready to pay, and don't require precision

by Rachael King

Editor's Rating:

The Good: Easy to use, small, and lightweight; works indoors, outdoors, or when hidden

The Bad: Tracks a maximum of once every five minutes; often shows imprecise locations; usage can get costly

The Bottom Line: Good, but limited, tracking device for family, pets, packages, and vehicles

Reader Reviews

Though I try to keep close tabs on my family, it's sometimes hard to know exactly where they are when. For example, when my daughter is on a play date or school trip, or my husband is traveling for work. For those who find moments like these unsettling, there are a growing number of services and devices that use satellite GPS signals and wireless networks to track the exact locations of your loved ones more closely. Many of these products are being integrated with cell phones, while others are standalone tracking devices.

One of these new devices, the AnyTrack GPS-100, is a lightweight pager-like device that fits in the palm of your hand. AnyTrack says the $229 device is designed to track people, pets, packages, cars, boats, and other items. My family agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to let me track them over a recent weekend.

On Friday afternoon, my daughter was invited to play at a friend's house and to then go to Lovejoy's Tea Room in San Francisco for hot chocolate, scones, and jelly sandwiches. The mother supervising the outing—someone I trust implicitly—said it was O.K. to track the play date. Getting started was incredibly simple. I just charged the AnyTrack GPS-100 by plugging it in, and it was ready to go after several hours. In addition to satellite signals, AnyTrack uses cellular signals to calculate locations so the device can be tracked indoors as well.

Not An Exact Science

When I logged onto www.anytrack.net, the site displayed the map I would use to track where the device was located—or presumably located, that is. After pressing the "locate now" button, the map showed the device to be located about a mile from my home in San Francisco. About half an hour later, the map finally placed the device on my block, but never pinpointed it to my exact address. In fact, during the entire time I tested the AnyTrack GPS-100, it never registered an exact address. Instead, it usually came within a house or two of the device's actual location, so be forewarned: If you're planning to use it to build your divorce case by catching a spouse in the wrong place, you might have to knock on a few doors before you get the right one.

The device, weighing 2.65 ounces, fit easily into my daughter's bookbag. After giving her a few stern warnings not to play with it, I dropped her off at her friend's house. I had turned on the automatic tracking feature, setting it to record automatically my daughter's location every 10 minutes for the next three hours. Frequency of tracking is important because each time you locate the device, it uses up one credit. AnyTrack's most expensive service plan, $19.95 per month, gives you 50 credits per month, and that may not be enough for even less-neurotic users. I ripped through 25 credits in just two days of rigorous testing. Heavy users can buy an extra bucket of 100 credits for $14.95.

I followed the progression of the play date from the friend's house to the tea room and back again, with the location registering within a quarter block of where they actually were. While my daughter was thrilled with the play date, she wasn't excited about the tracking device. "I felt like you were watching me from inside my bag," she said. My husband of 13 years gave a similar frown the next day when he agreed to be tracked en route to his Saturday morning cello lesson. "I should have known our marriage would come to this one day," he said.

A Cel Phone Disconnect

On Saturday afternoon we decided to join some friends at Tilden Regional Park in the hills north of Berkeley, where the kids fed the cows, pigs and goats. Again, I set the service to automatically track the outing. Since I wasn't in front of my computer during this outing, I could only review the device's movements when I got home by pressing the "Get History" button on the Web site. This means you can't use the device as a real-time tool if, for example, you get separated from a family member in a crowd. Still, the tracking history feature can be useful, say, if you want to make sure that your teen took the family car to the school dance—and not that concert 60 miles away—without spending the night in front of your computer.

Wondering what might happen if I lost my dog in the park and I wasn't near a computer, I tried to connect with AnyTrack's Web site using the browser on my iPhone during a walk. However I couldn't gain access to the site because my iPhone, like most mobile devices, doesn't have Flash Player 9, which is required to view AnyTrack's maps.

Too Pricey to Be Approximate

Another potential limitation with AnyTrack is spotty cellular coverage. The device, which transmits its coordinates over Sprint's (S) mobile network, tracked us accurately as we drove across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, but it lost us in the park where there was no wireless signal. It picked up our coordinates again later while we were eating at Zachary's Pizza in Berkeley.

Overall, I liked that AnyTrack was easy to use and fit so easily in a purse, backpack, or glove compartment. Even though I couldn't track the device with pinpoint accuracy, it came close enough most of the time. But the limitations may frustrate some users, especially at these prices. And yet my main reservation about AnyTrack and similar products is actually more ethical than technical: I'm simply not ready to treat my family like a bunch of FedEx packages to be tracked at a moment's notice.

King is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in San Francisco .