It looks like Verizon Wireless will take the high road and not market Chaperone to paranoid parents as protection for children and instead focus more on monitoring and communication. Indeed, much of the child-location service focuses on even more high-minded purposes, such as increasing a comfort level so that kids get more exercise. However, while services like Chaperone have the edge over pioneers such as Whereify in reaching the mass market and the phone is clearly a device that is starting to become more popular among the "tween" set, Whereify service offers more protection, such as automatically sounding an alarm when its watch-like device's band is broken.
Ideally, it would be great to see something as small as the shoe receiver used in the Nike+iPod system be tied to a locator, but then again the last thing we want to encourage in those who prey upon kids is strip searches.