Verizon Smart Family review

US carrier Verizon Wireless offers customers a unique mobile phone locating service smart family (formerly known as family locator, subscribers of which have all been switched to the new service). Verizon Smart Family, is essentialy a piece, or two pieces of parenting apps that offers children monitoring services and location tracking services to their parents, which many parents applaud and most elder kids hate.

There are currently two plans, basic at about $5 a month which comes with basic access, such as monitoring, and viewing what your monitoring settings result. In addition to monitoring, if you want to know the whereabouts of your children in real-time, you have to pay an extra $5 a month for the premium plan.

Since this blog is all about cell phone tracking, I will detail its location realted features brefiefly below.

Locate your kids. Verizon Wireless provides with you the detailed location and address of your children on a map, so you will find where your kid is and where he/she is supposed to be, like at school or on the way home.  There are two ways to locate your kids, network based, or app based. The later requires you to install Smart Family Companion app on your kids’ handset and pair with it. The differences are that network location is less accurate while app provide more precise position and more features such as content filter, stop internet access and pick me up etc.

Receive arrival & departure updates. Verizon Wireless also can send updates to multiple members when your children arrive or leave certain places predefined by you such as school or hotel. If you do not receive the updates when your children should reach school, you need to check their whereabouts.

Set scheduled updates. Verizon Wireless sends to multiple members scheduled updates verifying your family members’ locations; you just have to set scheduling entries. This is useful when you need to know the whereabouts of your kids at certain times, such as recurring events or one-time events.

Hmmm, souds very uninteresting, right? $5 for something you can get for free elsewhere, the only thing comes to my mind is that since you already have a basic plan, upgrade to a premium plan might add some value.

In order to make Smart Family work, you need to download and install the parent app as the control end, meanwhile download and install the companion app on your kid’s device. Moreover, you have to enable the VPN connection, without which your restriction settings would not apply. However keep in mind that your kid could disable that VPN connection and most of the restrictions you set at any time although you will get alerted about that.

I personally do not think this is an good idea. I know out there in some countries carriers offer those smart kids SIM card that tied to their parents’ account, parent can manage their kid’s mobile phone without installing anything, for example, disable mobile data, block unhealthy and harmful websites, track the rough locations etc. After all, with a mass number of cell towers, carriers are able to pinpoint any of its customers roughly without striking a blow.

I have found a review on Apple store saying that the location given is not that accurate. Well this could definitely happen. Although the location data are obtained from the handset with or without GPS turned on will make a huge difference.

The location services that you pay extra for is not accurate. Compared to the “Find Friends” app, which shows my child’s EXACT location, this Verizon app shows their location a few hundred feet or a mile away for their actual location (differs daily). I have yet to see it place their location accurately in the past month or so since upgrading to this service.
-Helloreader2468