I’ve been highly critical of child tracking applications in the past. While they sound a great idea at first, you soon realise that most don’t do what they claim - ie keep kids safe.

The applications can’t track abducted kids as most people know that the phone can be tracked and the kidnapper just dumps the phone.

And in terms of making sure that spotty Tommy Teen is where he should be, his phone might be, but he’ll be off partying - possibly with a spare phone, kept for that purpose.

That doesn’t stop companies trying to sell these applications to increasingly paranoid parents, however.

Mobile SOS have sent me some details of their product, which actually neatly side-steps these issues, up to a point anyway. Moreover, they’ve clearly looked at how kids use phones and just made this process more efficient.

There’s three main elements to the service.

1. Panic Alarm

You hit a speed dial button and a pre-recorded voice message goes to up to five other phones, which are pre-determined. Along with the message, the automated call also tells the recipient where the phone is at that moment.

This can obviously be done pretty discretely and doesn’t require the Panicker to speak or anything.

This still doesn’t solve the extreme scenario of an abduction (that’s fortunately pretty rare though), as it still only says where you are when you’re abducted, but does alert people that you’re in trouble.

Let’s just hope you haven’t got a panicky kid though….

2. I’m OK

This is another speed dial button and simply says you’re OK and where you are. So if Tommy Teen is going round to a friend’s house, he discretely hits the button on arrival and his folks are notified. Tommy likes it because he doesn’t loose coolio points by having to phone Mum. Mum has peace of mind.

3. Timer

This sends out a panic alarm unless the alarm is deactivated in a certain time frame. So if Tina Teen is going to a party, she has to deactivate the alarm to indicate that she’s not in trouble.

Of course, if Tina is madly snogging Tommy and looses all track of time, it sends out a false alarm and all hell breaks loose. But better to be safe than sorry, I guess, and Tina (or Tommy) isn’t going to repeat the scenario of Dad busting down the door and beating Tommy to a pulp again.

Seriously, the way round this might be to have the service phone Tina back and ask for a PIN or code. Failure to answer or the wrong code then activates the alarm. It might be a better way to ensure use of this feature.

The service is pretty cheaply priced, starting at £2 ($3.64) a month, with alerts being charged at 50p (91 cents).

Nice work guys