新款應用程序可助父母找到失蹤小孩

中國日報網 2012-05-09 08:39

An app called Family Tracker can help parents track location of their loved ones.

It's a parent's worst nightmare. Their child doesn't come home one evening and is missing for several days.

When a 14-year-old boy from Atlanta, Georgia disappeared earlier this year, his mother turned to her smartphone for clues using an app called Family Tracker that helped track his location.

It is one of several apps that allow parents to track the whereabouts of their children.

"You can see where your loved ones are without having to call or bother them," said Roberto Franceschetti of LogSat, the creators of the Family Tracker, which has more than 100,000 users and is available worldwide.

Parents can track the location of their child on a map, send messages, and even activate an alarm on the phone remotely.

"We have an option for the sender to make a very nasty, noisy sound. It's a loud siren and we repeat that sound every two minutes until the person picks up," he said.

Parents don't need to own a smartphone to track their children. The service is also accessible via the web, as long as the phone that is being tracked is running the app, which runs on an iPhone or Android devices.

Family Tracker has an additional service that keeps a log of all data generated by the app for a two-week period, which the company calls GPS breadcrumbs.

The service was used to find the missing boy in Atlanta.

"With a subscription, we keep all the locations where people have been on our servers. You can see where your kid has been for the past two weeks. You can find out where someone was at a certain time, or when that person was at a specific place," Franceschetti explained.

"When somebody gets abducted, usually whoever does this throws the phone away or takes the battery out. We were hoping that our app would at least provide information on where the person was abducted or where they had been in the past, that way the police would have a history or some clues as to who they may have been seeing."

But are these types of apps an invasion of privacy?

"The advantages are huge compared to the disadvantages. Let's not forget that the person always has to give initial permission -- no one can be tracked unless they allow someone to do it," said Franceschetti.

(Read by Emily Cheng. Emily Cheng is a journalist at the China Daily Website.)

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(Agencies)

如果有一天晚上，自己的孩子沒有回家，然后接下去幾天都蹤跡全無。這對父母來說，是最可怕的噩夢。

一個來自美國佐治亞州亞特蘭大市的14歲男孩今年早些時候失蹤了，他的母親用自己智能手機上的一款名為“家庭追蹤系統”的程序來幫助找出他所在的方位。

這是讓父母能追蹤孩子所在地的幾款應用程序之一。

這種“家庭追蹤系統”是由LogSat公司創建的。該公司的羅伯托?弗郎西舍提說：“你無需打電話或打擾孩子就能知道你心愛的寶貝在哪里。”這一系統有超過10萬用戶，可在全球范圍內使用。

父母們可以追蹤到孩子在地圖上的位置，可以發信息，甚至能遠程激活電話上的警報器。

他說：“我們提供讓發送者啟動非常刺耳、吵鬧的聲音的選項。這是一種很響亮的警報聲，我們每兩分鐘就會重復一次這種響聲，直到接收者接電話為止。”

父母們沒有智能手機也能追蹤自己的小孩。這項服務也可以從網上獲得，只要被追蹤的手機運行這一程序即可。該程序在iPhone或Android系統的手機上都可以運行。

“家庭追蹤系統”還有一項服務，能保存該應用程序在兩周內產生的所有數據記錄，公司將其稱為“GPS面包屑”功能。

該服務被用于尋找亞特蘭大的失蹤男孩。