a) you can give an “allowance” of minutes to a phone even though it shares all the minutes in your plan. So you can give the kid’s phone a monthly max of 100 minutes out of the 300 you buy, for example. This is true also for text messages.

b) you can make the phone unusable during specific times of the day on days of the week. You might, for example, make the phone inoperable from 9:30pm to 7am if you want to keep the teens from spending all night texting and and talking. You could also make the phone stop working during school hours. When disabled, the phone call still call 911, and specifically “white listed” phone numbers.

c) you can black list or white list allowed phone numbers for that phone.

d) they offer a “chaperon” service that uses GPS to let you know where the teen (or at least the phone) is. You can be notified if they goes outside a given area or is shut off.

e) you can see, almost in real time, exactly the numbers dialed, or text message addresses for sms sent and received along with the time and duration.

f) you can limit content accessed (music, browsing) based on a rating system.

Given that they’ve moved to do all of these as parental controls, how long before they also offer to copy the main account holder on all text messages (or at least make them available on-line to view)?