How safe is the service?

The safety of children and peace of mind of parents has driven every consideration in the development of the Find Your Child service – developed and maintained in the UK by Creativity Software, a British company.

Find Your Child Complies With an Official Code of Practice

A Code of Practice governs the operation of any service – such as Find Your Child – that uses Location Data from the network operators (Vodafone, O2 etc). This Code was developed by the Mobile Industry following extensive consultation with children’s charities, the Home Office and the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).

Assistant Chief Constable Stuart Hyde, representing ACPO, commented: “The Code of practice provides a framework within which location based services can be delivered safely and securely. We support the use of technology, particularly where it is generated within the UK. Our primary concern is child protection and so we have agreed a number of measures to prevent abuse by potential offenders. We applaud the partnership that has evolved between the network operators, children’s charities and application providers.”

As a general point, we stress that the service has been developed to provide information that assists in the care of children – on the basis that the more information we have, the safer our children can be. The technology supports – but does not replace – sensible parenting.

As a result of the work that we have done with the leading UK children’s charity and ACPO, we have decided that we will not provide pinpoint accuracy, but will restrict accuracy of locations to 150 metres. We have concluded that this level of accuracy provides sufficient information to parents who know where their children should be, and is therefore of value to them. However, without this prior knowledge of where a child is, accuracy of 150 metres is not sufficient information by itself to be of use to anyone who has no legitimate interest in a child’s whereabouts. If we served pinpoint accuracy we would not be able to make this assertion.

Servers housed in military installation with full-time security staff

We have full time security consultants that update our systems constantly to ensure that we have the highest levels of security protection against hackers and viruses. Our computer servers are located in an underground, secure data centre – formerly a Military installation - with no external walls or windows and high security access. This means that access to the application and to the information is robustly secured at all times.

Consent Based

Find Your Child requires the permission of the person you wish to locate – which is done by sending and receiving a PIN to their handset. Once that permission is obtained, unlimited location searches can be made. The person is sent occasional SMS reminders for their peace of mind and is instructed how to terminate the service at any time. If the permission is not received, the service is not provided.