I’m a huge fan of the IPhone. I’ve unofficially, officially declared it the phone of the ifevolution.com blog.  The phone has about 15,000 downloadable applications to date.

There’s a new one though, that I thought would be worth downloading just because it’s so relevant to the safety of children. 

Offender Locator

According to the Washington Post:

The app allows you to see a list of offenders based on your current location (using the iPhone’s location services), any contact’s address, or it allows you to manually enter an address. The app then scours the database and lists the sexual offenders based on their proximity to the location you gave.  

For the sake of research, I downloaded this application. There are two versions: Free and Paid ($.99). 

Differences between the free version and the paid version:

• The main difference that I could see was that the free version only provides 3 local offenders. (As if 3 isn’t enough). The paid version gave me  41 (Yikes) that reside within 10 miles from my home.
• The free version allows you only once search per day

Click on any offender’s name and you are provided with:

• Name
• Alias
• Date of Birth
• Race/Gender
• Height/Weight
• Hair Color/Eye Color
• Address
• Crime committed
• Photo of the offender

I’ve read that this application may not be legal in all states. California being one of them.  The information may also not be up to date or completely accurate.

You don’t need the Iphone, or any phone for that matter to find this information out.  There are websites where you can enter your address and find out the same information. FamilyWatchdog.comis one of them. And when I tried using it, it provided me with the same information as the Iphone application.

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