A 'Glympse' of your kid's whereabouts

Glympse is a new geolocation tool that's very different from the "social mapping" services I've seen so far. You download it to a cellphone the way you do Loopt and Google's Latitude, but the key difference is the tracking times out. You track the phone only for a session set by the phone's owner. That's why it's called "Glympse." I like this concept because it requires parent-child communication. Here's what I mean: A kid's going to a game in the next town. The parent wants to be sure she gets there ok. The parent asks the child to send him a Glympse, and he can track her for the time they've decided it should take her to get there. He can track her progress on a Web page, courtesy of Google Maps, and even tell how fast she's driving. Once the session's over - say 45 minutes later - she's no longer being tracked. Dad can always call her up again in a few hours and request a Glympse that tracks her home. I'm not saying parents should use this service, and certainly not constantly, but I like that it 1) affords a young person some measure of privacy if her safety's somehow of concern (maybe it's used as a repercussion rather than all the time!) and 2) promotes conversation (rather than mere control, I hope). As TechCrunch blogger Jason Kincaid puts it, it's tracking without the social network (TechCrunch has photo). Here's an audio interview my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid did with Glympse CEO Bryan Trussel at CNET. [Glympse, loopt, and Google are supporters of ConnectSafely.org, which I co-direct.]

What kids search for

Interestingly, even at school, "games" is the No. 1 search term young people type into the search box. "Animals" did very well too, with "dogs" No. 2, "animals" next, and "sharks" and "frogs" in the Top 15. "George Washington," "Holocaust," and "Abraham Lincoln" ranked 5-7. NetTrekker, a search engine used in 20,000 schools throughout the US, has just started publishing a quarterly index of the Top 15 search terms students use. "The total number of unique search terms for the spring quarter was 1,844,677." Here's parent Thinkronize's press research.

People-tracking phones

If you'd like to know more about global-positioning-enabled phones, SafeKids.com's Larry Magid surveyed the scene for the New York Times. He looks at the various child-tracking phones and services from Verizon Wireless, Sprint, Disney, and Wherify, as well as social-mapping services by Helio and Loopt that are very cool but not really for kids because they actually map users' physical location (with the users' permission). But on the flipside of this tech marvel is a story out of Australia illustrating the privacy concerns involved in countries where consumer privacy isn't a top priority. Australia's national security agency and "law enforcement agencies will be able to track the movement of people through their mobile phones secretly, without obtaining a court warrant, under new laws, legal and civil liberty groups are warning," Australian IT reports. Meanwhile, in the US, on the Web, and as privacy concerns grow, search engine companies are tightening their privacy policies, the Washington Post reports.