Use Your iPhone to Dodge Sex Offenders

App uses GPS to find sex offenders in your area

Apple's iPhone can help you find restaurants, movie theaters, bathrooms -- and now sex offenders.

"Offender Locator," currently one of the top 10 apps for the iPhone, help you search for sex offenders in your area, reports the Chicago Tribune. Users type in their location and the software uses data from the 50 states sex offender registry to create a searchable database.

"The more information you have the better decisions you make," Howard Wakefield, president of ThinAir Wiresless, the company that made the application, told the Tribune.

 "If I was going to take my child to the park and I see that the area is infested with child predators and I look up one that isn't, I'm going to take them to the one that isn't," he said.

But Offender Locator, dubbed a "peace of mind" app by Wakefield, isn't being lauded by everyone. Deborah Donovan Rice, executive director of Stop It Now!, a group that fights child sex abuse, said registered offenders are only a small percentage of people who actually harm children.

"What happened if there was an app that was about preventing sexual abuse, about how to look for the warning signs. How many people would download that?" she told the Tribune. "Or do they just want to look at this thing that is not going to do anything to help a child?"

The app, which also has a version available for the BlackBerry, retails for 99 cents on iTunes.

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