Control Zones, our geofencing feature, now available for laptops

Releasing Control Zones some time ago was a big deal for us and our users. Finally, a geofencing feature for Prey was seeing the light: it was now possible for our users to create zones in the map in their Prey account and get notified each time a device left or entered an area. All fine and dandy, for iOS and Android..

We’ve got some bigger news today! .

Control Zones is finally available for laptops, running smoothly on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

From now on you’ll be able to set areas on a map and get notifications whenever a device enters and/or leaves them, so you can make sure that all your school’s computers are at the precint, or that your employees aren’t taking company laptops home to watch Netflix (may or may not be chilling in the process). Now, instead of wasting time keeping tabs on your phones and laptops, Prey will do the job for you. You get more with less.

Effortly keeping tabs on your devices has never been easier.

Imagine the possibilities. Whether you own a few laptops at home and just want to be safe in case of theft or you’re a busy IT manager who needs to keep tabs on your organization’s laptops (and you’ve told Andy from accounting a thousand times to please not move laptops from the meeting room to the cafeteria), Control Zones will come in handy..

The process is pretty straightforward: zones are circular areas that can be placed over the map with a pin, or type a referential address to place the marker. Free users get to create 1 zone while our Pro users have no number limit..

Zones are customizable in terms of name, size and color..

Pro users can add as many devices as they want to an individual zone. To add a device, select it from the bar on the left side of the screen. If you’re a heavy user with a large amount of devices, use the search tool at the top. If you have a free account, you can add all your 3 devices to the zone you created..

Selected devices will appear at the top of the list with their name and their connection status to the Prey servers right below. As it’s always the case with Prey services, devices must be connected to the Internet to be tracked..

Last but not least, notifications can also be customized. You can select whether you want to get an email every time a device enter or leaves a zone, or both. If you select to get no email notifications on both cases, though, geofencing won’t do much good, since there’s no other way for Prey to warn you that your device is on the move..

Share with us on Twitter how you’re using or planning to use Control Zones with your devices..

To learn more about geofencing, check out our article on geofencing basics!.