1 view of kids' top Web searches

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 sex and certain body parts, like social-network sites a lot, want the latest on certain celebrities like Miley Cyrus and the Twilight stars, and are looking for the latest video from Fred, the uber-popular kid character on YouTube with the really high voice. Though we all remember a developmentally appropriate interest in sex when we were kids, one reason why "sex" and "porn" were in the Top 10 (spots 4 and 6, respectively) could well be kids testing the system: the study was of young people with a monitoring product called OnlineFamily.Norton installed on their computers. Symantec, which makes the product, isn't releasing the number of kids in the study (though it said the results are based on 3.5 million queries by those 8-to-13-year-olds). The software, which parents configure for kids' maturity levels, alerts the account holder when a child tries to access inappropriate sites (involving violence, sex, drugs, etc.), but what I like about it is that it's designed as a source of talking points for family discussion about the online part of kids' lives. Ideally, that's the best use of monitoring software (and it can be a good deterrent when kids know it's installed).

One little surprising thing about the survey noted in a great analysis at ReadWriteWeb was that kids were searching for easy-to-remember URLs like Facebook, MySpace, and Yahoo. "Some may say that this points to children not entirely grasping the way internet addresses work, but it's more likely an example of the trend where search has replaced typing in URLs for navigating the net." Here's coverage at the BBC and Reuters.

A 'Glympse' of your kid's whereabouts

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 why it's called "Glympse." I like this concept because it requires parent-child communication. Here's what I mean: A kid's going to a game in the next town. The parent wants to be sure she gets there ok. The parent asks the child to send him a Glympse, and he can track her for the time they've decided it should take her to get there. He can track her progress on a Web page, courtesy of Google Maps, and even tell how fast she's driving. Once the session's over - say 45 minutes later - she's no longer being tracked. Dad can always call her up again in a few hours and request a Glympse that tracks her home. I'm not saying parents should use this service, and certainly not constantly, but I like that it 1) affords a young person some measure of privacy if her safety's somehow of concern (maybe it's used as a repercussion rather than all the time!) and 2) promotes conversation (rather than mere control, I hope). As TechCrunch blogger Jason Kincaid puts it, it's tracking without the social network (TechCrunch has photo). Here's an audio interview my ConnectSafely co-director Larry Magid did with Glympse CEO Bryan Trussel at CNET. [Glympse, loopt, and Google are supporters of ConnectSafely.org, which I co-direct.]

Being up front about monitoring online kids

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, surreptitious use of monitor software is very probably necessary. Otherwise, the only kind of monitoring I'd recommend - for the average kid who's not at risk offline and is lucky enough to have engaged parents (the vast majority of online kids) - is open monitoring involving lots of communication and maybe technology. Which is why I like the whole concept of Norton OnlineFamily: It's not just about technology. I'm not aware of any other online-safety or parental-control product or service designed from the ground up around in-person parent-child communication. "OnlineFamily is meant to be completely transparent between parent and child," writes USATODAY's Ed Baig in his review of the product. Also good: It's free till next January. "Symantec isn't committing to a price after that but says a one-year subscription is valued at $60," Baig adds. For video on the product, see Good Morning America.

New Net Nanny

Net Nanny, parental-control software for family computers, has released its latest version (not long after issuing Net Nanny for Macs), and PC Magazine gave the product 4.5 stars and its Editor's Choice Award. "Net Nanny does everything a parental-control utility should do. It also offers unique features like secure Web-traffic filtering and ESRB-based game control. Balancing privacy and security, it can record IM conversations only if they seem dangerous." The product, Net Nanny 6.0, sends email alerts to parents at work and allows them to configure or change preferences from work. SafeEyes 5.0, CyberPatrol Parent Controls 7.7, and Net Nanny 5.6 were next on PC Magazine's list, each having been awarded four stars. NetNanny and CyberPatrol run about $40, SafeEyes about $50.

Stealth surfing further enabled

Parents who rely on browser history to keep an eye on kids' Web-surfing habits might want to know that stealth browsing is getting easier - at least for Windows PC families. Internet Explorer 8, now available in beta, "lets users surf without having a list of sites they visit get stored on their computers," CNN reports. "The program also covers other footprints, including temporary Internet files and cookies, the small data files that Web sites put on visitors' computers to track their activities." USATODAY says "anonymous Web browsing ... may be the most attention-grabbing feature in the new Beta 2 release" of Explorer 8. The good news for parents using the light, browser-history form of monitoring is that, when Windows Vista "parental controls are activated, InPrivate Browsing is disabled," Microsoft says on its corporate page about this new browser feature.

On monitoring online kids

Some parents continue to wonder how privacy they should allow their children, where online activity is concerned. Of course, there is no simple answer even in a single household. Even in a family we may have rules and values that apply to all, but in so many cases different ages require different rules, and each child is individual where rule compliance, maturity, and trust levels are concerned. Having said all that, though, I will add that no parent should hesitate to use monitoring software if s/he's concerned about a child's safety. If you feel your child's communicating a little obsessively online with someone you don't know and the child's otherwise acting a little strange (for example, spending too much time online or being secretive about his or her online "friends"), her privacy is simply not an issue; you're keeping her safe. But a commentator in the New York Times suggests there are other reasons to use monitoring software that make it perfectly justifiable, and he makes a compelling argument, but - again - I think it depends on the child. "Will your teenagers find other ways of communicating to their friends when they realize you may be watching? Yes. But text messages and cellphones don’t offer the anonymity and danger of the Internet. They are usually one-on-one with someone you know. It is far easier for a predator to troll chat rooms and MySpace and Facebook." I agree about the trolling that happens on the Web, but he's missing the fact that 1) young people can share phone numbers via chat, IM, and social-networking sites which can be used later to call them on their cellphones (see "Grooming by phone too"), and 2) 90% of child sexual-exploitation victims know the offender (see "Sex offenders on MySpace: Some context"). But, speaking of MySpace and Facebook, this other perspective on teen social networking might be helpful too: "Dispelling 2 social Web myths."

Innovative child-protection tech

Its creator, Adam Hildreth, 22, calls it the Anti-Grooming Engine, The Guardian reports. "He claims the product is 99.9% effective in identifying adults online with a sexual motivation," and it's not keyword filtering. "The software is designed to look out for conversation patterns, typing speed, use of grammar and punctuation, and any aggressive or bullying language. Using extracts of online conversations between young people as examples of 'good' data, it is fed into the computer and compared with conversation gathered from that of suspected groomers." And the computer, he says, "learns" to tell the difference. CyberSentinel in the US has made some similar claims in the past, indicating that others have thought of this approach (see this in 2001). The proof is in the pudding, though, The Guardian cites one child-safety advocate as saying, and the pudding's not done yet - check out the article to get the full picture. Here's info in our forum site, ConnectSafely.org, about "How to recognize grooming."

Monitoring kid phone use

Fifteen-year-old Joshua has a fairly pricey Blackberry Pearl. Why? Because it runs Radar kid-monitoring software, CNET reports. “Initially, the Radar software, which costs about $10 a month on top of a wireless plan, has worked only with BlackBerry devices and other smart phones, a factor that has limited growth.” But its makers have struck deals with Verizon Wireless and Motorola that will make it available on more phones. As for Josh, anytime he “gets a call from someone not on a call list approved by his parents, they receive a real-time text alert on their cell phone or online,” according to CNET. Now if the software can just monitor kids’ photo- and video-sharing activities. (See the reference to “happy slapping” attacks in the BBC, whereby “assaults on children and adults are recorded on mobile phones and sent via video messaging” and examples in “We’re all on candid camera,” which ran in the Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, and BBC.)

Online parenting tools: Long list + context

Marking National Internet Safety Month**, Adam Thierer - parent, author, and online-safety public policy specialist – commented in his blog: “This remains one of the great mysteries of the parental controls debate: Why is it that so many parents say they want more and better controls, but when they are made available many of them choose not to use them?”

Adams says some people think it’s because the parental controls aren’t easy enough to use and others because they’re too basic. I hope it’s because parents instinctively know tech tools are no blanket solution. Different tools (Web filters, phone filters, IM monitoring, Net curfew software, etc.) can be useful at different times, but nothing ever replaces parenting, even though we’re figuring it out as we go along!

Adam just released a book - Parental Controls & Online Child Protection: a Survey of Tools & Methods - that provides a very comprehensive survey of what’s out there for us, but saying in his introduction something very similar to what I just said: “If there is one point I try to get across in my book, it is that regardless of how robust they might be today, parental control tools and rating systems are no substitute for education - of both children and parents.”

Related links

Controls in the OS. Wall Street Journal tech writer Walt Mossberg recently reviewed parental controls at the operating system level in both PCs and Macs. For PCs, he looks at the fairly comprehensive controls in Microsoft’s new OS, Vista. For more on Vista controls, see this item in my 1/12/07 issue .

PointSmartClickSafe: The cable industry has partnered with a number of national nonprofit organizations to offer PointSmartClickSafe.org, an online-safety-ed resource for parents and kids. Here’s the press release. Here’s Adam Thierer’s commentary on the project. The cable industry’s trade association, which spearheaded the project, is the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.

**The statistics in the Senate's resolution on National Internet Safety Month, which haven't been widely corroborated in the online-safety research community, shouldn't be the focus of this document. For data, check out the research at the Digital Media & Learning Project, Pew Internet & American Life Project,and the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire - or search for "research" or "study" in the 10-year-old NetFamilyNews archive (search box at the top of each page).

Phone monitoring on steroids

It's a little chilling, but maybe some parents feel they need to go to these lengths to protect their cellphone-using chilling. I can see parents using a product like this openly as a tool for solving a cyberbullying problem that might include calls and text message to a child’s cellphone. It’s called Flexispy, and it’s downloadable monitoring software for cellphones. The Thailand-based company's tagline is "Protect Your Children. Catch Cheating Spouses." According to its press release, the software “has already been used successfully worldwide to bring to light to extramarital affairs, disloyal employee activities, and to protect children from predators and SMS [phone text] bullying. It "runs invisibly in the background and can only be accessed using a secret code." Flexispy Light "automatically records all incoming & outgoing SMS messages, calls, emails and tracks the device location" and uploads all this to a Web site the "spy" can access. The "pro" version does all that and offers "the ability to secretly switch the phone’s microphone on from any other phone; thereby listening into the target’s surroundings."