I think BEING  GREEN is using technologies to save any of us pain. Perhaps kids staying out of trouble by having parents track their every move will save a parent from something horrible happening.  Would you care if your company you work for could see where you are at any one moment?

I was surprised how little people know about Sprint’s introduced their new service called Family Locator that lets parents track their kids’ whereabouts, using the GPS capabilities in each child’s cellphone. For $9.99 a month, you can get a fix on your little ones’ locations as long as they are on your Sprint account and carry one of the 30 Sprint or Nextel phones that allow this monitoring. I know one colleague that hates it because his management is tracking him all the time. You know life has changed when you’re worried about stopping anywhere for too long because you’re being followed.

I logged in to a page on Sprint’s Web site ( http://www.sprint.com/familylocator ) with a phone number and password provided for the occasion, and a moment later, a green icon on a map reported the location of another colleague.

The accuracy, as indicated by a wide blue circle around that green dot, was not so great — only “within 644 yards,” according to the page’s suspiciously precise estimate — so I clicked a “Locate” button.

Within a minute, the system had pinned down my target’s location to within a 98-yard radius, close enough to call in the airstrike.

The most precise estimates rely on the GPS receivers built into these phones. When that satellite signal isn’t available, such as when the phone is indoors, the system computes an estimate from the phone’s distance to the nearest cell tower.

Sprint’s Web interface offered a few other options: I could click a button to send a text message to the object of my surveillance or click another button to see her recent locations plotted on the map as numbered “breadcrumbs.”

Sprint says it has tried to build in measures to stop parents from being too aggressive in their snooping: Kids must authorize tracking by entering a password on their own phones, and the phone will also buzz or beep every time its location is checked.

So at least the trackees can know exactly how they are being followed and can react accordingly — say, by leaving your cel phone under a park bench while off at a movie for some hanky panky for 2 hours.

So what do you think? Why hasn’t this become a bigger hit? You’d think parents would be all over this.