Cell Phone Tracking

Depending on the service, it's pretty reliable. The tracking service I had with AT&T was not bad, but the "find my phone" tracking on the iPhones is awesome. You can locate the exact spot.

I love(d) being able to track my kids. Now that they are "grown," I mostly don't need to. But I've been known to do it a time or two since, if they are on a road trip out of state and I'm worried about them, for example.

I don't consider it "spying," and I think parents have every right to locate their teens. I did not hide the fact that I could locate them -- I made it mandatory. I see no reason why I should have to sit around and worry myself sick about my teens just so they can feel like their "privacy" isn't being invaded. That's just ridiculous, in my book.

I have the GPS that comes on the iPhone as does my husband. We use it to tell us the weather where we are, we use it to navigate where we are going if we aren't sure, we use it with Yelp to find something in the area we are at, it works with Find my iPhone in case we need to use it (we've used it to find a phone misplaced in the house before), it tags our pictures so we know where it was took. The list keeps going, it's been extremely helpful.
We don't use it to track where each other are and we would never use it to track where our children were unless there were an emergency where it made since (cell phones have been used to track car accident victims) in remote areas). We don't have enough reasons to not trust our kids enough to not track their every movement.

This is probably a different application than one you'd use for teenagers, but I own a construction company and use a GPS app to track where my technicians are. It is extremely accurate (within 10 feet or something like that). The app is installed on their iPhones, and we use it mostly for dispatching purposes (so we know who is closest to any given job and can respond the fastest). For us, it's strictly a business/dispatching/payroll app, but I'm sure there's something similar that you could use to track your teens. The one thing I'll say is that if they log out of the app, obviously it stops tracking them (I know this because we specifically instruct them to log out when they get home for the night, or on weekends - I don't really want/need to know what they're doing on their time off!).

We use the GPS all the time when we are using out phones and heading out to a restaurant or some location. LOVE it.

We do not track our teen. We have established communication with her, certain rules to adhere by and no need to track and spy on her. She is almost 19, 1st year in college and in her own condo.

In my experience, it works well, but because it has to track you in real-time, it goes through data like crazy. So you need a data package with a really high limit if you do this.

My hubby and I both have the Google+ app on our android phones which includes a GPS map (you have to accept who can see your location). There's also an iphone "find my phone" app that works in a similar fashion. If your teen has a smart phone, you should be able to find a free app to download.

I've used the GPS on my cell phone to navigate to places and to find what restaurants are located in a specific area. It takes practice to be able to easily use it. I haven't used it to track someone else on their phone. I don't know if it's available on my phone or my granddaughter's phone. I can see where it would be helpful.

I have it and never use it.