Do you worry about where your children and family members are when they are out of the house? During the past decade, the security situation around the world has considerably deteriorated. As a result, people feel a strong need to know the whereabouts of their loved ones just to be sure that they are safe. With the advent of smartphones and connectivity through social media, it has become much easier to stay connected and to locate someone.
‘Where are you going?’ is one of the difficult questions to answer for your teen. Just put yourself in their shoes, and you’ll see a million things that you wouldn’t want to share with your parent. However, since they are not as concerned about their security as you are, you need a way to keep tabs on them. This can be done without pestering them with phone calls or text messages.
Tracking someone’s location seems sneaky but not when you use some of the apps we will talk about here. The person being tracked by these apps actually has to agree for this. So, there is no sneaking involved here.
Glympse
This may seem to beat the purpose, but Glympse puts the power in the hands of the person being tracked. It allows the user to share their location in real-time with the people they choose. Glympse was one of the first location based tracking apps. It gives the option of choosing the person to be tracked and for how long they can be tracked. You can share real-time locations, travel speed and estimated arrival times through email, text or social networks.
Most of us have friends, who are always late when a plan is made. You can get a MUCH better expected arrival time using Glympse. So, when you plan your next party, send out Glympse invitations along with party invitations to your guests.
Price: Free!
Life360 Family Locator
As life is getting busier with every passing day, it is becoming increasingly important to find efficient ways to keep in touch with your family members. Life360 Family Locator is an app designed for this specific purpose. It allows you to setup geo fences around selected locations such as the home, which means whenever a family member enters or leaves that area, the others will know. The free version allows you to select two such spots. The app also has a ‘panic’ option that sends an alert with the user’s GPS coordinates to the designated phones and emails.
While the free version has many useful features, you can get more useful features with a premium version. The additional features include unlimited check-in places, the ability to locate non-smartphones, roadside assistance and protection against stolen phones
Price: Free Basic version
FollowMee GPS Tracker
This app converts any mobile device into a GPS Tracker. One of the great things about Followmee is that similar to Life360, it also records locations not only through GPS, but also uses WiFi and cellular triangulation. This ability greatly improves battery usage. There are several useful features in this app including real-time location, multiple device tracking, vehicle tracking ability, geo-fencing, low battery consumption, downloadable reports and it is always on (running in the background).
Price: $3.99
These apps are great but what if the other person turns off their phone? Well, we can always go back to basics and do it the old fashioned way, until they make an app to fix this problem!
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