Verizon Wireless Chaperone Service for teenagers

This post is off topic, and relates to my earlier post about teenager issues causing me lots of stress in my life. I’m only posting this to help someone else avoid wasting a bunch of time trying to set up the Verizon Wireless Chaperone Service, only to find out that it’s totally useless for a teenager. If this post helps you out, email me…misery loves company.

The short story is that an alert pops up on the child’s phone whenever the parent tries to locate the child’s phone. There’s no way to get rid of that alert. And, once a teenager knows about it, they can easily remove the chaperone application from their phone.

Here’s the long story:

I confiscated my daughter’s cell phone for the day. I drove to a Verizon Wireless store and walked in. The salesman saw the LG Chocolate phone in my hand and asked “Phone not working?”. I replied, “My teenager is not working.” The guy was too young to understand the sarcasm. I explained my issues, and said I wanted the Chaperone Service on the phone. He said to call Customer service and they can help me better than he could. Grrrr. I asked him if it was possible to set it up so that my teenage daughter would not know about it. He said “Yes”. I asked twice to be sure, and he answered “Yes” both times.

So, I go home and call Verizon Wireless and ask them to help me set up the Verizon Wireless Chaperone Service. The gentleman on the phone was very helpful and patient and walked me through downloading the service onto my daughter’s phone via “Get It Now” and getting the settings configured so the phone allows itself to be located, etc. ,etc. He also activated the service on his end, which costs $9.99 per month. Well worth it to keep tabs on my teenager.

Next, I logged into the Chaperone website and tested it out. It worked great and showed a map indicating that the phone was located somewhere on my street within a range of about 1000 feet. I was excited at the thought of having some peace of mind.

I noticed that the “child phone” displayed an alert message saying “Chaperone is locating the phone – do you want to allow this – Yes or No“? That’s no good…there must be a way to get rid of that alert. I went to the Profile settings on the website and set it to “Always Allow” Chaperone to locate the phone. That changed the alert question on the “child phone” to an alert message on the phone: “Chaperone is locating phone, you may Press Cancel“.

Hmmm….let’s say you are a teenager staying out way past your curfew, and you see this message pop up on your phone. What would you do? And, once you realize your parents have this service, aren’t you going to Google “How to deactivate Verizon Wireless Chaperone on Chocolate Phone” and easily figure out how to uninstall it.

So, I call Verizon Wireless back and ask them how I can get rid of that message so my daughter doesn’t know her phone has Chaperone on it. Again, the person was extremely helpful and patient. I have to say that I have always been pleased with Verizon’s telephone Customer Service. But, unfortunately, the answer is that you can’t get rid of that alert message. So, I canceled the service. Apparently, the developers of Chaperone care more about a child’s privacy than their safety.

This Verizon Wireless Chaperone service is only useful for a child under the age of 10, who doesn’t mind having their parents keeping tabs on them. And a child that age shouldn’t be out and about without adult supervision in the first place, so what would be the point then?

A big chunk of my day down the tube. And no time for a workout now. Oh, hey, there’s the tie in for this post to my triathlon blog.