Parents have more options for keeping tabs on their kids than ever before. Web browsers can limit surfing, Sprint Family Locator can track locations, and Ford offers parental controls on one of their cars. Now Hammacher Schlemmer, that 160-year-old bastion of oddball gadgets you never thought you needed, has unveiled the Driving Activity Reporter. It’s a $229 covert device that attaches to your car and assembles a detailed report of places, routes, and speeds traveled.
The Driving Activity Reporter has a neodymium magnet for mounting in a glove box, under the seat, or against any metal surface. Inside, there’s a 16-channel GPS receiver that collects transmissions from 24 Department of Defense satellites to track movement, as well as on-board flash memory that can store 100 hours of information. To read the reports, the user takes the device, plugs it into a free USB port on a PC, and downloads the data.
In other words, it’s a magnetic USB drive with a GPS radio. It also includes a sleep mode to conserve battery power—in typical use, owners get about three weeks of operation from a set of AAA batteries—and the data can be read via its on-board mapping software or even fed into Google Earth.
