Always losing just about everything except your mind? Now it is time to put a stop to your chronic forgetfulness or the fleeting nature of your items, even the living ones. A new tracker may soon be on the market in competition with traditional “find it” apps.
Existing Tracking Services
For years, Apple iPhone, Google Android, and Microsoft My Windows Phone have provided popular features to help you track down your missing personal device. When enabled, these phone tools can find your lost phone and in some cases even wipe the data on them (should they have fallen into unknown hands). However, there are quite a few limitations with the above tools such as reliance on Bluetooth technology that offers poor range. Thus enters “Find My Everything” to the game.
A Newly Proposed Solution
After a frustrating experience using a service called “Find My Phone," Taylor Baloney decided to found "Find My Everything Inc.," a GPS device with a corresponding app that would more universally help individuals track and find items that have gone missing. Find My Everything’s mission is "to protect what’s closest to your heart."
Instead of using the built-in phone-finding app that came with your device or that you installed from a third party app vendor, clip the “Gotcha” GPS device hardware to your backpack, purse, suitcase, person or pet. Yes, you can even attach the Gotcha tracker to your loved ones.
Using the same technology we rely on for navigational directions and our fitness tracking, Find My Everything Inc. proposes on their campaign website that they will eliminate the worry surrounded by the minimal recovery capability of existing app and Bluetooth technology. You won’t ever have to worry again about losing something valuable to you.
How It Will Work
If this product makes it’s desired release date of December of 2018, you would first download the Find My Everything app (not yet in app stores). Then, you would attach the device to (or hide it inside) an object you wish to track. The Gotcha hardware attaches via adhesive or a keychain-type feature. Then you would have the choice to sync the Gotcha to one or more devices that you have installed the app on.
For example, do you have a dog who moonlights as an escape artist? Attach the Gotcha GPS tracker to Fido’s collar. Sync to the Find My Everything app on your phone or tablet and stop worrying. Want to watch your child’s progress getting home from school? Stash the device in the student’s backpack and watch their odyssey home.
Advantages
There are several advantages to choosing Gotcha/Find My Everything if released. As opposed to other trackers that work only from inside a 100-foot or Bluetooth range, with Find My Everything, as long as you are in reach of cellular towers in the USA, you should be able to track your lost item with Gotcha.
The GPS technology will work through US cell towers (any with 2G service) to allow you to track the item anywhere in the USA. Attaching the tracker to a loved one such as your child or a pet can serve as a piece of mind as well. The tracking app works to allow you to visualize in real time where your loved one is with GPS precision.
Disadvantages
If you’re looking for protection of data and the ability to wipe a beloved device that has gone missing, you will be out of luck with the Gotcha Find My Everything. It is a piece of GPS hardware that merely syncs to an app on another device you own (and hopefully do not misplace).
That right there is the second disadvantage: if you lose, forget the login, or otherwise brick the device on which you’ve installed the Find My Everything app, you might find yourself out of luck following the item or person you placed the device on to track.
The Find, My Everything campaign website, does not tell us in technical detail how the app will function. For example, would there will be a login with a forgot password feature so that if you lose the auxiliary device you were to track on, you could recover the credentials and resume tracking on another device?
Privacy
These days we can’t help it that privacy concerns come to mind. Baloney doesn’t disclose the size of the Gotcha tracker on the campaign website. What rules exist in terms of dropping a tracking device in a person’s purse or briefcase unannounced to them? Brickhouse Security says that you should be aware of local, state, and federal laws before using GPS devices on things that you don’t own.
Brickhouse says that in general terms if you own it, you can track it. Or, if your child is under 18 and the subject to be tracked, you can go for it. But if you want to track a vehicle, you don’t own, that is illegal. Or if you are trying to use the tracker to catch your significant other up to no good and they’re in a vehicle that they own, tracking them is illegal.
Other Features
The Gotcha device would also come with an SOS feature that allows whoever possesses it to hit a button and alert phone numbers pre-programmed in it. Another feature Find My Everything will have is the ability to set perimeters and let you have notifications when the guardian of the Gotcha penetrates them. That can be useful in monitoring a child or pet. Finally, the Gotcha device itself proposes also to have the ability to find the lost phone or monitoring device it is synced to which is an interesting concept especially for those who are always losing their everything.
