It used to be that teenagers had to worry about their little brother or sister snitching on them. Now, big brother is watching, too.

A new class of monitoring devices is hitting the market that lets parents keep close tabs on how their kids are behaving behind the wheel -- whether they're driving recklessly, whether they're wearing seat belts, whether they are really just going to the library like they promised. Based on technology long used by trucking companies to track driver behavior, the gadgets, which typically are installed under the dashboard, can track a vehicle's acceleration, braking and distance traveled.

Some of the new devices are interactive, capable of notifying parents if their child speeds or drives beyond a predefined boundary -- like to a boyfriend's house, or Tijuana. Depending on the product, the alerts come via e-mail, phone or logging onto a Web site.

Alltrack USA, an online retailer that offers a product it calls Real-Time Tracking, even sells a $40 add-on that lets parents immediately tell their kid to knock it off. From their computer, they can flash a light on the dashboard or blow the car's horn at the driver. It also allows parents to prevent a car from being restarted once it's parked somewhere.

Gadgets like these can range in price from $140 or so for a basic system without instant tracking, to more than $400 plus monthly fees for options that use global-positioning satellite technology. In about a month, for instance, Road Safety International Inc., maker of the RS-1000 Teen Driving System, plans to add an optional GPS receiver that will push up the total cost of that product to about $480 from about $280 now. Currently, its device records the car's speed and other data that parents can only retrieve later.

Like nannycams and other observational equipment, the teen trackers raise tough issues for parents. On the one hand, motor-vehicle crashes are the top cause of death among teens. On the other, of course, is the value of treating a young adult as someone worthy of trust.

When Jeff Auerbach put a tracking device in the car used by his 16-year-old son, Andrew, the two of them went shopping for it together. "What I didn't want it to be was sort of a 'gotcha' spy program," says Mr. Auerbach, a patent attorney in Rockville, Md. His hope was that since Andrew knew someone could be checking up on him, he'd be inclined to drive safely all the time.

Andrew says he was a little upset at first. "It's not the greatest feeling" knowing that someone might be watching, he says. But he also says it provided a helpful excuse once when a friend urged him to see how fast his car would go. "It was very, very easy to just say 'no, it's got a tracker system.' "

Similar technology is also being used by car-alarm makers to help prevent theft and recover stolen vehicles. For example, Directed Electronics Inc.'s Viper GPS Tracking System -- a device designed to add tracking capabilities to the company's car alarms, but which also has teen-tracking capabilities -- can, among other things, alert the car's owner if the alarm is activated.

Insurance companies are also starting to get interested in technology like this. Progressive Insurance, Mayfield Village, Ohio, is running a 5,000-car pilot program in Minnesota using a device that records speed and other data. Participants, in return for letting the insurer track their driving patterns, can qualify for insurance discounts of up to 25 percent.

The most basic devices (the ones without GPS or e-mail capabilities) simply plug into the computer that most cars these days have. It records a couple days' worth of data, such as when your teen (or anyone else who uses the vehicle, for that matter) started the car, how far it went and at what speeds. To see the data, a user must unplug the device from the car and hook it up to a PC.

More-powerful versions, which either offer instant e-mail or real-time access via a Web page, never have to be removed from the car. But since some of them use cellular-phone networks to transmit the data, they may require monthly fees of up to nearly $70 in some cases.

There are dozens of products available with an array of brand names, but many of the devices are actually very similar, and are in fact manufactured by just a handful of companies including AirIQ Inc., Advanced Tracking Technologies and Discrete Wireless in Atlanta. For example, CSI Wireless Inc., based in Alberta, Calgary, makes the hardware and provides the software to Directed Electronics, a vehicle-security and remote-start company based in Vista, Calif., for its five GPS tracking products. Each of those products is sold under four different brands: Viper, Clifford, Python, and Automate.

Inger Falco of Northport, N.Y., found that even a basic model solved her son's problem with reckless driving. After he got in "more than one" accident, she says, she put a SmartDriver recording device in his car without telling him, and quickly saw that he was speeding, and also traveling on highways he was told not to take.

"Of course, he said that's very sneaky of you," she recalls. "But he got over it very quickly. It was either have this in your car, or don't drive."

View Original Article at Wall Street Journal Online