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Five apps that can help you keep tabs on your loved ones — for better or for worse
Connect
This app for iPhone or iPad can follow
your husband, wife, children and even your friends on sites like
Facebook FB, Twitter , Instagram, Google Contacts and LinkedIn. Most
social contacts are jumbled and split up across multiple devices,
platforms and apps, but this app collects them in one place, says Ryan
Allis, Chairman and Co-founder of the app. “Your Connect map has
hundreds of your friends on it the first time you use the app,” Allis
says. Unlike similar apps like Foursquare, it doesn’t use virtual
check-ins, which can prompt users to activate their location settings
(many people don’t realise that when they turn on location settings on
their phone, location information can be embedded in shared photographs
and status updates too). What’s more, the other person doesn’t need to
have Connect installed or to accept an invitation from the app.
Find My Friends
Find My Friends for iPhone and Android
allows you to keep up to speed on when your spouse leaves work, your
child leaves school or even when a visiting friend arrives at the
airport. “Friends who share their locations with you appear on a map so
you can quickly see where they are and what they’re up to,” according to
the app’s official site. The app syncs with phone contacts and maps on
the iPhone. Users can also select what other Find My Friends users they
want to interact with on their network. Not to be confused with Find My
iPhone (free on iOS), which will give the location of a lost or stolen
phone via Apple Maps on a map and also works for iPod, iPad Touch.
Trick or Tracker 3.0
Many parents want to keep track of their
kids — and not just on Halloween. Wayne Irving, a father of four and
the president and CEO of Laguna Niguel, Calif.-based technology company,
Iconosys, has a novel solution. Trick or Tracker, available on Android
or iPhone, can be used by up to seven family members at one time. The
app must be downloaded on both parties’ smartphones — with their
permission, of course. It can send text alerts when a child has
travelled out of a previously agreed area, and it has a latchkey-kid
feature that can ping a parent when a child arrives home. It tracks the
phone using the geo-location data contained in text messages and sends
the person’s location every 15 minutes. Irving says it could also be
used to track a child in the unlikely event of an abduction, although
some online reviewers have complained about its accuracy.
Phone Tracker
Phone Tracker is marketed to families
with busy schedules and employers who want to track employees during
work hours. It combines mapping and GPS technology to let you track your
phone plus one other for free on Android and iPhone (follow 10 users
with a 99-cent upgrade). The app doesn’t have to be open to work, and it
can locate another person’s movement within the previous 24 hours and
within 30 feet (10 meters). It can be programmed to log locations every
two to 60 minutes. To follow another person, they must use the app too. A
similar app — Glympse — free on Android and iOS — shares estimated
arrival times and even the speed your spouse is traveling at. While the
app is free, it has also received mixed reviews on the iTunes store.
AccuTracking
Pitched for GPS vehicle tracking for
companies and a way for parents to keep a tag on their children,
AccuTracking has been around for over a decade even before the advent of
Google Maps. “Our vision is to provide low-cost and simple to use
applications that enable the tracking of any number of targets wherever
and whenever the user chooses,” the company states. It adds, “Knowing
where your vehicles, employees and physical assets are in real-time on
your desktop computer is a valuable management and cost-control tool.”
The app is downloadable through the phone’s web browsers. Caution should
be applied when downloading software onto your phone that is not
approved; Apple’s App Store does not support AccuTracking.
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