Who's watching the kids? Verizon's Chaperone. But who's watching Chaperone?

A location-based service that knows where your children are at all times and can help you track them down may sound reassuring, but there's also something a little bit creepy about offerings such as Verizon Wireless' new Chaperone offering that launched this week.

Like Sprint's Family Locator, Chaperone allows parents to issue a special cell phone to children, use GPS technology to track their location and alert you when they're not where they should be (to see how Chaperone works, view the demo at the Web link above).

Parents can configure the child's phone (which can't be changed by the user), then can track that phone through a Web site and receive text message alerts when the child is not in an area, or "zone" they have defined, such as your local middle school. In essence, you become both parent and Big Brother.

But that's not the main selling point. Chaperone plays on parents' worst fears, fanned by sensational media stories, that trumpet the fact that some children go missing every day - and how yours might be next.

Could Chaperone help you track down an abducted child? Maybe. Like the Sprint offering, Verizon's technology is proprietary and only works on its own cell towers. For example, if your child has a Chaperone phone and is abducted in Concord, NH, no problem. But if the perpetrator drives fifty miles away to Keene, NH, where Verizon rides on U.S. Cellular's towers, you're out of luck. The child's cell phone will still operate in Keene, but Chaperone won't. The service also won't work if the phone is turned off or if it is in use when you're trying to locate the child.

Parents should also think about the fact that the location information isn't just shared between you and your child -- it's available on Verizon servers, where it could become accessible through the Web to anyone who has access to your cell phone number and can guess or gain access to your password. Verizon's Chaperone news release states that you "activate the service through a secure, password protected Web site." To access that public Web site, all a hacker needs to do is enter your account name (your 10-digit cell phone number, which is not so hard to discover) and your password. He gets five failed login attempts before the account is "temporarily locked for 20 minutes."

Access to something more precious to you than your credit cards is protected on the Web by an easily surmised user ID and user-defined password, with no other authentication mechanisms in place.

Then there is the question of who has access to that tracking data, which could provide an audit trail of where your child has been over time. Phone companies have recently shown a willingness to capitulate to vague government requests for telephone records in the name of homeland security (although Verizon denies that it was one of them). Other agencies also may want to see those digital footprints, from your state Division of Youth Services to the state or local police department that's tracking a vandalism complaint. Will they get it? Privacy controls and legal protections in this area aren't very well defined.

Given those risks, Verizon's tag line "Wherever your child goes, Chaperone knows" could take on a chilling new meaning.

Services such as Chaperone play to parents' worst fears, which are arguably overblown by sensationalized media stories such as a Detroit teenager's surreptitious trip to the Middle East last week to visit a man she met on MySpace.com.

Then again, if your 16-year-old is willing to run off to the Middle East to visit someone she met on MySpace.com you have bigger issues to deal with than whether or not to issue her a Chaperone phone. Chaperone wouldn't help because the teenager, who didn't want to be found, could have simply turned her phone off.

Tracking technology deals with behavior after the fact. It's all about recovery, not prevention. A better solution is for parents to get involved in what their kids are doing on the Internet and to train them about safe behaviors. Chaperone is, at best, an adjunct to that.

Nonetheless, Chaperone offers parents peace of mind -- if somewhat illusory - in a scary world. By using technology to let parents keep children on a virtual string, Chaperone is the ultimate pacifier for parental worries. Which is another way of saying that Chaperone and similar services will probably be a huge success. By this time next year, half of the kids in your child's school may be carrying around these devices. Chaperone offers immediate gratification. Worries about security and privacy issues will have to come later.