NetFamilyNews.orgA new study indicates that a lot of parents who monitor their kids online and on phones do so without their children knowing it. The study – “The Online Generation Gap,” just released by the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) – found that 70% of parents check the text messages on their teens’ phones, while [...]
Reflecting on a cellphone app developer’s claim, I’m thinking that tracking our kids’ movements, moment by moment, isn’t the best way to enhance “family awareness.” Those are the words of Chris Hull, CEO of the company that developed the Life360 tracking app, in an interview for Time. Is that “awareness” as in “surveillance”? Oddly, Time [...]
Shades of social media researcher danah boyd’s finding on teens’ “social steganography” (hiding in plain sight): The Daily reports (about halfway into a 2-min. video) that, because so many parents are now monitoring their kids on Facebook and checking their texts, “an enormous amount of teenagers” are using Instagram to take random photos just so [...]
Back in 2005, a friend in Massachusetts referred to his daughters’ constant instant messaging (remember that?!) as “a window into their lives that I wouldn’t have otherwise. [My daughter] leaves her computer on a table beside my desk, and I get to watch a bunch of this stuff happening. Sort of like me working while [...]
Facebook’s only one site youth use. This article looks at other sites, virtual worlds and categories of interest to kids – and a new tool for monitoring kids’ use of some of them.
Safety Toolbar and SafeSocial are great because they promote parent-child communication.
Free PC security help for the first 1,000 families who sign up, but there are more long-term solutions too.
Though some of the news coverage called the results of Symantec’s survey of kids’ Web searches “shocking,” I don’t think they’d surprise too many parents (or anyone who was once a kid). The results suggest that kids really like watching videos on YouTube, want to sell stuff and make a little money, are curious about [...]
Glympse is a new geolocation tool that’s very different from the “social mapping” services I’ve seen so far. You download it to a cellphone the way you do Loopt and Google’s Latitude, but the key difference is the tracking times out. You track the phone only for a session set by the phone’s owner. That’s [...]
I see no point in parents secretly monitoring kids’ online activities – except if a parent feels a child is in danger and the child is unwilling to communicate or make a change in those activities and is being secretive him or herself. If those exceptional criteria are met and a child is at risk, [...]
Sponsor:
Profanity Filter
by Inversoft
