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Be your own Big Brother: With the help of Apple, Facebook ... oh, HANG ON

(Don't fret, there are other options to keep tabs on kids)

Rolling your own

The LocOf app for Android makes tracking easy – and an API means you can roll your own solution, too (click to enlarge).

If you don't particularly trust a big company with your information, there are plenty of other solutions. One such is Locof, a project run from the Netherlands by Jasper Goes, which can provide live tracking via a client on an Android phone. It allows tracking to be turned on and off via a web page – so you could turn it on only when the kids are late home from school, for example. It's also possible to choose which other users of the service are able to see your location. The basic service is free, too.

More interesting to Reg readers, however, is the API, which is available to those who pay for an enhanced licence, which starts at just €17.50 a year. That allows you make calls to retrieve a device's location. You could then, for example, choose to create alerts based on certain places, much like the Geofencing offered by Trax. Send an "OK" when someone's at a friend's house, or "Danger Will Robinson" when the kids are playing on the railway line. The limit to this is, really, your ingenuity.

My own status tracker, for instance, grabs updates from the Locof API, and I have a database where I store specific locations, together with a radius. The web dashboard checks to see if I'm within 800 metres of any, before displaying a status like "at home", "at John Lewis" or "near Waterloo Station". If there's no saved location found, a reverse geocode gets a neighbourhood. Yes, you could do that with a map, but sometimes a quick text description is a more useful thing.

Motorola to the rescue

It is, of course, the season for giving gifts, and if a smartphone is likely to be one of those, then some of the latest Motorola phones come with their Alert app, which can either send an emergency distress signal, or report position at intervals. You can set it, for example, to send you an SMS when your wife leaves the office to head home, so you know it's time to put dinner in the oven. It's a neat idea, and is available on the budget Moto E and G models but not, so far, on this year's Moto X.

With the E available for £89.99, frankly for a lot of tracking needs, it's probably much better value than most of the dedicated devices mentioned so far – as long as the battery life isn't too much of an issue. It's unlikely to be so with teens, but if you use one as an alarm for an elderly relative, you may have to nudge them into the habit of charging.

Next page: Track and trace

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