Getting Mom and Dad on the same calendar page
Moms often end up feeling like their brain plays the role of the family "hard drive," especially when it comes to scheduling. Someone has to know exactly what, where and when each family member needs to be. Moms get frustrated when they have to do it all, and Dads feel left out of the process when they might like to be involved.
I've looked for a tool to manage this family scheduling and communication, which can often add up to a job as complex as managing a business team. But the products I've found have been more akin to a "Mom's Calendar" series of paper planners that don't provide the depth and flexibility needed to keep up on this dynamic task.
I have been waiting for an online tool to arrive that could easily coordinate our schedules in one central location. Cozi Central looks like it could be the killer app. This free service creates a central master calendar that tracks each family member's schedule. It also provides a messaging center, and online shopping lists that you can access from your mobile phone. I love that, since most of my paper shopping lists never manage to make it to the store.
Getting everyone onto the same calendar page could revolutionize parenting. We're going to try out Cozi Central our house and I'll check back in a few weeks to let you know whether we are sticking with it.
Amy Tiemann, Ph.D., is the author of Mojo Mom: Nurturing Your Self While Raising a Family and creator of MojoMom.com. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. 
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You don't own your data. Anything you put into the database (including your kids' schedules) can get transferred to someone else. Do you really want someone else knowing where your kids are?
Missing from the privacy policy is how they will protect the data from insiders at Cozi. Knowing schedules can be really valuable -- when can I break into your house, where can I snatch your kids, etc.
There's no way to "opt out" of the 3rd-party advertising. Yes, that's how the service is paid for, but I can at least fast-forward through commercials on TV.
This service could be useful, but it doesn't pass my security review. Use paper and some discipline...
Practically speaking, our privacy policy states that we will never share your personal information with a third party. We know how important this operating procedure is and we take it very seriously. So much so that even within Cozi, we regularly audit how we treat private information. No single person at Cozi has the authority (or privilege) to examine your personal information and in the event that you ask us to resolve an issue that requires that we examine that information, there are strict guidelines around how that access is carried out.
The simple fact is at Cozi we have worked very hard with our attorneys to accurately reflect our "standard operating procedure" in our privacy policy. Unfortunately, it appears we may still have some work to do.
As the law goes, if we are going to store your information on our servers and serve it back to you in a more useful format we need to have rights to it; the easiest way for us to have those rights (besides a complicated licensing process) is for us to take ownership of your data that we store. In the event that Cozi is ever sold for whatever reason, we need to transfer those rights to the party that will take over managing the service and your information in the same respectful way. Without these rights, we couldn't serve you your data, we couldn't make it available in our PC or web service for you, nor could we pass it along to you on your mobile phone.
I have 3 children; they are 9, 6, and 3. I relate to the concerns raised in the prior post. Cozi has dedicated our entire existence to helping families manage family life and we treat your family data with the utmost caution and security. Ultimately, our users need to evaluate the quality of our company, our product, and our vision, then decide whether you are willing to entrust us with ensuring that all your private data remains secure and private. We take this responsibility very seriously and have built our platform to support our privacy commitment to all the Cozi Families.
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Thanks.
Robbie Cape
Cozi CEO and Co-Founder