How Safe Are Child GPS Trackers?

Per­haps you know a par­ent that uses Child GPS track­ing with inten­tions of keep­ing their chil­dren safe. While it may seem like a safe idea to keep track of where your chil­dren are when you are not around, new advances in tech­nol­o­gy claim that there are dan­gers involved with child GPS track­ers. Below is some impor­tant infor­ma­tion about child GPS track­ers that you might want to share with your friends and family.

Don Bai­ley, a senior secu­ri­ty con­sul­tant at iSEC Part­ners has recent­ly dis­cov­ered a major flaw in the Zoom­bak Child GPS Track­er. He claims that the serv­er that con­trols the GPS track­ers con­nects over a GSM net­work, allow­ing for the net­work to eas­i­ly be hacked. This can be dan­ger­ous for a num­ber of reasons.

What makes this find­ing so alarm­ing is that hack­ing can make it eas­i­er for dan­ger­ous peo­ple to locate where your chil­dren are when you’re not around. If you have sole cus­tody of your chil­dren and you do not want your ex-part­ner to find out where your chil­dren are, GPS track­ing can poten­tial­ly pro­vide them with this infor­ma­tion. GPS hack­ing can also allow bur­glars to have an idea of whether or not you’re home. If bur­glars can hack the sys­tem and find out that you are not home, this can give them infor­ma­tion that you do not want them to have access to.

Don claims “Embed­ded devices are low-cost, easy to use, and easy to debug. And the secu­ri­ty land­scape is very small. There is very lit­tle capa­bil­i­ty for inte­grat­ing secure com­mu­ni­ca­tions on the devices and ensur­ing that it’s your code exe­cut­ing on there.” In many cas­es low cost means low qual­i­ty, result­ing in a poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tion for your child.

After read­ing this arti­cle you’re prob­a­bly won­der­ing how you can help pro­tect your chil­dren with­out run­ning the risk of poten­tial GPS dan­gers. One way to ensure that your child GPS track­er is safe is to ful­ly research it before you buy it. Ask the com­pa­ny which kind of net­work they run their servers off of and if they are secured, along with any oth­er secu­ri­ty ques­tions you can think of. You can also look into oth­er types of GPS track­ing such as cell phone track­ing, car track­ing, etc.

No track­ing device is 100% guar­an­teed to be hack­er free, so keep that in mind when you are brows­ing for such devices. Remem­ber to always do your home­work before you pro­vide your chil­dren with a poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous device in order to help achieve your over­all goal of keep­ing them safe.