Early iPad safety tips

It's something to think about – no filtering or other "parental control" tools for a wi-fi-enabled device that can go anywhere a kid can go. I'm referring to the iPad at the moment (because it's so new, there's no such software available for it), but the wi-fi-enabled mobility part is true of most phones that go with kids to school now (I hear a lot of parents didn't think much about parental-control software before they bought kids iPod Touches for last winter's holidays). Norton Internet Safety Advocate Marian Merritt is a mom who did think about her kids connecting to the Net with her new iPad – a lot (a lot in terms of how much they wanted to use it and a lot of thinking on her part about how to keep their use constructive). Basically, all there is for the iPad so far is the filtered search offered by the major search engines. Check out Marian's advice for that under her "Browsing" subhead, and don't miss what she says about video, apps, and security (YouTube's new parental controls don't work for the iPad yet). See also "Potential iPad glitch for families."

Supremely useful tool for parents: GetParentalControls.org

Parental-control technology – filtering, monitoring, screen-time controls, etc. – isn't for all families all the time, but it's a valuable part of the parenting toolbox, along with values, regular discussion, rules, rewards, repercussions, etc. There is no easy, one-size-fits-all solution in that mix and, since '97, when I started writing about youth tech, media, and safety, I've heard from a lot of parents who so wish there was – at least in the tech-tools area. It would be nice for parents, but not so nice for kids, who are all about change and individuality even in a single family. But, if not the ultimate parental-control product, how about the ultimate guide to such products? Check out GetParentalControls.org's 2010 Product Guide.

What you get is a tremendous service: at-a-glance comparison-shopping organized in a number of ways: e.g., by kids' ages (up to 7, 8-10, etc.); by type (filtering, monitoring, etc.); by location (at the operating-system, router, or ISP level); by activity (Web browsing, email, IM, search engines, video-sharing, virtual worlds, social networking, etc.); and by device (cellphone, game console, media player, etc.). All cleanly presented with a librarian's appreciation for "accurate, unbiased information." It's the brainchild of David Burt, a former librarian who in 1997 founded the nonprofit Filtering Facts (cited in a US Supreme Court decision in 2003) and now works for Microsoft. Get Parental Controls is the new face of FilteringFacts.org. In an email interview, Burt told me, "I’ve wanted to get back into online-safety activism, and I wanted to find something that would have an impact but wouldn’t be duplicating what others were doing. What set the direction for me was when in June of 2009 I read the PointSmartClickSafe Task Force Recommendations for best practices for child online safety, one of the recommendations really struck me: "The following is a sample of the limitations connected with the purchase, installation, and use of filters: No standardization or benchmark exists to differentiate an excellent from a merely good or mediocre product." [See also this review of NetNanny's monitoring software for cellphones in the Wall Street Journal blog, with insights into the challenge even a trusted brand has offering working controls for teen mobile phone use.]

Kids' top toy for 2010: iPad?!

Apple may not have thought of it that way, but Children's Technology Review editor (and former teacher) Warren Buckleitner thinks the iPad just may be Toy of the Year, he writes in Gadgetwise at the New York Times. Some of the reasons: Lots of available games and other software already; no controller or mouse ("the screen *is* the controller and it sits in their lap, which works for children (and their grandparents, too, by the way"); that big high-res screen and gorgeous color palette that brings imagery to life; road-trip activity center; and Warren adds "a fair price," but I think parents will be waiting for that $499 starting price to come down – which is not to say there won't be plenty of parent-hounding while they do that waiting. But before anybody succumbs, give it some thought. The iPad also makes the Web very attractive and portable. Basically, it's a very big iPod Touch, which led to lots of family discussions after the recent holidays, when parents realized all of the Web was now in their kids' pockets wherever they went, and they hadn't thought about parental controls before giftwrapping. The iPhone and iTouch's App Store – including all the games and some parental-control apps – will be available for the iPad too. Check out the possibilities before giving 2010's "Toy of the Year" to your child (because the iPad will function very similarly, see "How To Setup Parental Controls on iPhone & iPod Touch."

The cost of cellphone service choice?

If people at your house think the Nexus One phone is cool, they're right, but they still need to think twice about various costs. The new Google phone is a pricey option to begin with: $539, "not including service fees by T-Mobile, Google's first service partner" if untethered from a T-Mobile service fee, the Washington Post reports. But if the buyer changes his or her mind and wants to end service early, the penalties "could amount to $550 in early equipment return and contract cancellation fees," the Post adds (not mentioning that T-Mobile does have a month-to-month plan with no termination fee, but probably higher-cost up front). This when the FCC is reviewing early termination fees at Verizon Wireless. Part of the cost of choice and being an early adopter, but he or she will want to make the adoption long-term! Another possible disincentive for parents looking at phones for their kids is Nexus One's lack of parental controls right now (this will change as apps proliferate for the phone). Speaking of third-party apps, there's soon-to-roll-out software from Taser for "a variety of smart phones" that will allow parents to see just about everything incoming and outgoing from a child's phone, described by ConnectSafely.org's Larry Magid at CNET, asking if using it would be overparenting. Here, too, is a Common Sense Media video on how to set the parental controls Apple put on the iPhone and iPod Touch. [Meanwhile, ReadWriteWeb.com cites a Gartner projection that mobile app stores will make $7 billion this year, up from $4.2 billion last year (even with about 80% of apps offered for free. Apple's App Store represents about 99% of the app biz right now.]

New tool for keeping Web searches safe

A few simple household rules can help kids at your house avoid stumbling upon inappropriate Web content: 1. If you're not absolutely sure of a URL, don't just type it into the browser window. Use a search engine. 2. Use only our family's search-engine pick (one that offers filtered search). 3. Nobody changes the settings or preferences in the search engine. We've had these rules at our house for years, and they've worked great (we're fortunate to have a pretty rule-abiding crew). But now one search engine, Google, has made family rule compliance a lot easier: It has a new feature that lets parents lock the computers kids use into the strictest SafeSearch setting (as long as Google's the search-engine pick, of course). All parents need to do is log into their Google account on any computer the kids use, click on Settings, then Search Settings in the upper right-hand corner of the page. On the page that takes you to, scroll down to SafeSearch Filtering and click "Lock SafeSearch." The rest will be clear. But here's a little 95-sec. demo. The only thing to remember is that you need to do this with any browser used on that computer – Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc. This is a lighter touch with parental controls that might be a good place to start (and some parents may find it meets their household adult-content-blocking needs). We've found that tech tools are best used when layered on top of parent-child discussions about what is and isn't appropriate for our family and why. Here's Google's Help page on the locking tool.

Sweeping parental-control product for phones

Tell me if you can possibly think of a feature not covered in this new parental-control app for Windows, Symbian, and BlackBerry phones (but especially Windows ones, its creators say). It's actually a little chilling, if a parent were to try to use MyKidIsSafe surreptitiously (though kids would probably figure it out). Features include Text Message Monitoring (scans for approximately 1,500 "words," "slang," and "lingo" and copies parent); Safe List (people ok to call child); GPS Tracking for child's physical location; Geo-Fencing (monitors to see if child leaves set physical boundaries and sends alert – maybe he'd "forget" to take their phone with them?); Kid Arrival (parent notified via email or text when child comes within 500 feet of her destination); Speeding Notification (alerts parent when child is driving fast); Cyberbullying & Predator Monitor (notes an excessive umber of calls/texts from a single person, whom parents can add to block list, but I'm not sure how it distinguishes between gabby friend and strange adult); Time Restrictions for phone use; Restrict Calls and Texting While Driving (now, this is cool); and Sexting Alert (claims to scan images on Windows and Symbian phones for nudity). There's not much more detail on these and other features in the 5+ minute infomercial at YouTube.

In an email, I asked the company's CEO, Jay Lacny, if they include in their marketing the importance of talking with one's kids about all these features if used. He responded, "Yes, that is the most important thing. We really don’t like the term 'Parental Controls' but have yet to come up with a fresher word. This is engaging your kids and the need to know to be a caring parent. Kids will be exposed to alcohol, drugs, sex unless you live by yourself in the wilderness. We don't want to tell parents how to parent but need to give them the “data.... Parents can spend years instilling their belief systems into a child and have them broken by peer pressure. It’s difficult to have parents wake up to this." Do you agree? How many of this tool's features would you use, and which would you find most useful (or not)? Pls post a comment here or email me via anne[at]netfamilynews.org.

Posting pix: How cautious should we be?

The other day I was talking to a psychologist who described a time when he was driving into a busy 4-way intersection on a highway frontage road – one of the craziest intersections I've ever heard described. He came to a stop, he said, and suddenly found he just couldn't take his foot off the brake, paralyzed by a voice in his head saying, "Be careful. Don't move. Don't get in that driver's way. Careful!" He said it was then that he realized he'd heard those words countless times as a child, and that they'd become almost a mantra in his head, making him overly cautious as an adult. For him the solution, he realized, was simply to go forward, make that move. He has since been much more decisive, he said, and – as he related this experience – I was thinking about the similar messages kids and parents are getting from so many directions about young people's Internet use. Of course we want them to be safe, but we don't want to clip their wings altogether. This article at AnnArbor.com offers that perspective – it's one of the few I've seen in the news media questioning the message that posting pictures in parenting and family blogs is highly risky. For more on both sides of this, see "Violating our kids' privacy" and "Online privacy: Photos out of control."

Echometrix: Monitoring *and* selling kids' chat

With its Sentry Parental Control Software, Echometrix sells what kids say online in the name of protecting them. Once installed, Sentry – like other products in its category – monitors kids online activity and communications for risky speech and behavior and sends parents alerts upon detection. What isn't like most other such products is how the company packages the kid communications (in aggregate) into a product it sells to marketers, reports ConnectSafely.com's Larry Magid in CBSNEWS.com. Echometrix CEO Jeffrey Greene, told Larry that "the company doesn't collect or report the names or any identifying information about the children" but "says that it delivers the unsolicited raw conversations in real time. It gives marketers immediate, unique information about what teens are saying in their own words." Here's how Echometrix describes itself in its blog: "a leading developer of opinion mining and sentiment analysis applications for user-generated digital social media content with specialty industry focus. We have specialized in delivering brand metrics, real-time business intelligence and consumer market research for the teenage consumer segment." See a detailed commentary on this in Amy Jussel's Shaping Youth blog. And here's the story in Yahoo Tech news .

Snapshot of parental-control use

Parents seem to have a love-hate relationship with parental-control software. "Four out of five parents that use parental control software don't turn it on, despite being concerned about their children's online safety," NetworkWorld.com reports, citing a survey by McAfee computer security company. In other highlights, 52% of parents "admitted they never changed the security settings on their parental controls software"; nearly two-thirds haven't talked about "online security" with their kids; just under half say they monitor kids' online activities but 30% said they leave the kids alone in their rooms when using the Net, and 26% of all 5-to-7-year-olds have a computer in their rooms.

Heads up on Free Realms chat

Chat has always been a problematic piece of the Internet where child safety's concerned - some would say that's putting it mildly! So it's a bit surprising that Sony included chat in its new Free Realms virtual world for kids. Online game specialist and blogger Jaime Skelton registered her surprise about this in Examiner.com, saying that Sony's parental controls allowed parents to restrict what young users could say in chat but not what they could see. She later added a correction: "If you use parental controls to restrict chat to quick chat only, it goes both for what the child says and what the child sees, nor can children [registered as] under 13 see open chat at all." I would add that qualification in brackets because parents need to be involved in the registration process if they want the parental controls to work properly (they also need to know if a child's even using the Free Realms world, of course!). This is a great illustration of how parents need to be engaged if they want virtual worlds to be pure kid entertainment. Skelton gives an example of off-topic chat in a screenshot with her post and, in her correction at the bottom, links to an explanation of chat settings in the Free Realms forums (though that's where anyone can change the settings, including kids, unless parental controls override them). Here's my post about Free Realms when it launched.

A few Apple bytes for families

Some of Apple's just-announced news is good for families thinking about laptops for a new school year - now just one basic Macbook at $999 and a new Macbook Pro with much longer battery life for just $200 more, CNET reports. Apple also unveiled its new Snow Leopard operating system, to which Leopard users can upgrade for $29, the Washington Post reports, adding that "the company said it will use less disk space and run faster" than Leopard. Then there were the announcement about new iPhone hardware and software, including the new iPhone 3G S, which looks a like the current 3G but which Apple says performs "a variety of tasks 2-3 times as fast as the current model. It includes a new 3-megapixel camera that can record video in addition to still images, a voice-control feature that lets you place calls and control music playback by speaking commands to the phone, a digital compass and built-in support for Apple's Nike+ running-tracking system," according to the Post. The new 3.0 iPhone software Apple's releasing next week for the first time includes age-level parental controls for the phone's App Store, the New York Times reported recently. "All iPhone applications will be rated in one of four age categories: 4+, 9+, 12+, or 17+.... I assume," the Times's Saul Hansell writes, "the new system will allow Apple to accept more applications that it now rejects, on the theory that parents will be able to limit children from getting applications that can give them access to raunchy or violent material." So new controls spell added responsibilities for parents of iPhone users.

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.

'Child-proofing' for Firefox browser

This is an interesting development for families with elementary-school-age kids: Kidzui built right into the Firefox browser - built-in parental control in a new form. "Once installed and activated by a parent, [the Kidzui browser extension] locks the child (or anyone else for that matter) out of accessing non-Kidzui approved sites, or other areas of the computer, by taking up the entire screen," CNET's Webware blog reports. That last phrase means kids can't even get to other applications on the computer like Word or instant messaging without inputting "a password, which is chosen by the parent" - the only way out of KidZui. It's up to parents, of course, to decide if older kids can have the password. The add-on is free, like the basic version of Kidzui too, but also supports the $40/year edition with extras such as kid social-networking features (e.g., having a profile and "Zui" avatar) and extra parental-control tools. For more on Kidzui, see my October post on new sites and services for young people.

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.

Mobile parenting

I especially liked Nos. 4 and 6 in Marian Merritt's blog post about how parents can help their kids keep mobile phone use safe and affordable. If you use cellphone parental controls (she speaks to those, and I wrote about them last May here), "tell your child you are installing and using parental controls and show them the details on what you'll be limiting." She adds that this is not the time to be spying on your child." I agree, for the simple reason that, if you did monitor them surreptitiously and found something untoward, you'd have to talk with them anyway, and then it'd be really hard to keep anger and communication breakdown at bay. There is one exception, though: If your child is spending an unusual amount of time online and is being secretive and uncommunicative, monitoring software might be justified to ensure s/he's not at risk. For more on mobile parenting, see our "Cellphone Safety Tips" at ConnectSafely.org. A couple of other posts on the subject: "Teen uber-texters" and "Cellphone etiquette."

Register to vote on Xbox Live?!

Thanks to a partnership between Rock the Vote and Microsoft, registration in Xbox Live started this week, the BBC reports. Having also worked with MySpace to grow the number of youth voting, Rock the Vote aims to register 2 million voters via the Xbox gaming community by this fall. The BBC adds that Xbox Live had 12 million subscribers in 26 countries by last May (the latest figure available). Incidentally, someone in our ConnectSafely forum asked about parental controls for Xbox Live; here's the link I gave him to Microsoft's page on "Family Settings" for the gaming community.

What mobile carriers need to do for kids

US cellphone companies have made impressive headway with parental controls lately. That's great in terms of preventive measures, but this country's mobile industry has quite a ways to go, compared with those of some other countries, on support for kids and families after bad stuff happens.

I'll tell you what I mean in a moment, but first here is what's in place right now. According to the mobile industry's Wireless Foundation, all the major carriers - Alltel, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless - offer:

The ability to turn off Web access on children's phones (under a parent's account)

If Web access is allowed, basic filtering, as well as blocking of phone-based purchases at no extra cost

The ability to turn off text messaging on kids' phones, or "sub-accounts"

The ability to block text messages or phone calls from specific numbers on some of the phones each carrier offers

The ability to monitor kids' minutes and text messages (the bills they're running up) via the carriers' Web sites

The ability to limit the times of day children can use their phones (in some cases at additional charge).

So why is technology not enough? Because for the same reason tech controls on a single computer are no longer by themselves enough protection on the everywhere, anytime, user-driven, multimedia, multi-device fixed and mobile social Web, tech controls aren't enough on phones. Certainly technology can be a help on any platform - like bandaids in a family First Aid kit - but kids find workarounds both technical and non-technical, including using their friends' phones and accounts.

Even more key is that - for young people - devices are just means to an end. Socializing is the focus, not its enablers. Solution development increasingly has to be as holistic, cross-platform, and collaborative as the "problem." And what ultimately protects the vast majority of teens is the software between their ears, with parents providing backup.

No matter how much support and good sense they have, however, teens take risks - because risk assessment, child development experts say, is a primary task of adolescence, along with personal and social identity exploration. In the midst of all that, sometimes things come up, and those things most frequently fall in the huge gray area that is noncriminal and beyond the scope of law enforcement, as much as law enforcement needs to be in the mix.

One example of behavior in this gray area is peer harassment, often called cyberbullying (a term that's less than meaningful to teens - see this). It has been happening a lot on phones, longer in other countries. In the UK, "bullying" is the single biggest issue mobile companies get abuse reports about concerning kids, a colleague there told me. Britain's major carriers have worked on this a lot, and one of them, O2, has a team of more than 100 staff people specifically trained to deal with bullying and other children's phone abuse issues. Vodafone has done a lot of work in this area too.

In New Zealand, I recently spent an afternoon at NetSafe, the country's premier online-safety organization. NetSafe works with New Zealand's two major carriers, Vodafone NZ and NZ Telecom, which have customer-service staff trained to detect and send these gray-area issues on to NetSafe for quick dispatch to the expertise most appropriate for each case. This approach illustrates the "holistic, cross-platform, collaborative" approach I mention above: NetSafe works with young people, parents, educators, legal advisers, law enforcement, psychologists, and policymakers; these people know that solutions to cyberbullying, domestic violence, nude photo-sharing, teacher defamation, or any problem kids experience almost always requires more than one skill set to work through.

This is the kind of support - customizable, holistic, collaborative, and remedial as well as preemptive - that is most realistic for young people whose everyday lives are increasingly blended with technology. Social-networking services have already implemented, have *had* to implement, measures with those characteristics: preemptive ones such as consumer education, PSAs, and training videos for parents; reactive, back-office ones such as customer-service staff trained for child protection, dedicated helplines for educators and law enforcement, and dedicated customer service for parents; and collaborative ones such as lobbying for more effective legislation and developing technology for law enforcement. Now the mobile carriers need to too. Not that I'm singling them out: Online games, gaming communities, and virtual worlds are on the next frontier for kid-tech safety.

Related links

The Federal Trade Commission has been looking into what sorts of rules and regs there might need to be to protect kids on cellphones, Internet News reports - from whether there should even be ads (around premium services such as wallpapers and ringtones) aimed at youth to age challenges for people making transactions with their phones. On the latter, right now kids could just lie when a screen pops up requesting their age, so the wireless industry is looking into technology like that on the Web where a "cookie" installed on a site visitor's computer can stop a user who is denied entry from going back and entering a different age.

"Students cautioned to avoid cell phone, Web pitfalls" in the Minneapolis area's Pioneer Press

In the UK, "21 million UK mobile phone subscribers - of a total of almost 48 million - belong to a social-networking site. Out of this 21 million around 5 million" people use their phones to access their social-networking profiles at least once a month, The Guardian reports.

The Wall Street Journal looks at the range of parental-control features available from both carriers and third-party providers.

Check out the newest plague in the pipeline for mobile users - text spam on phones. The New York Times reports.

See how far we've come: I first wrote about parental controls on phones back in 2004.

New guide to videogame parental controls

The videogame ratings board and Parent Teacher Association have teamed up to help parents get a better handle on videogame safety. They've published a free parents' guide to both the ratings system and the parental controls on game consoles, including step-by-step instructions for the controls' settings on PLAYSTATION 3, the Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, and PSP, as well as the game controls in the Windows Vista operating system. You'll also find advice from "GamerDad" Andrew Bub about online gaming and a family discussion guide with talking points. "The booklets were distributed to all 26,000 PTAs, and are available in both English and Spanish on both the ESRB and PTA web sites," according to the organizations' press release (there's a link right to the guide from the presser).

Trend afoot: Cloud socializing

We all know that kids socialize and share media on computers, phones, Xbox Live, etc. They don't think much about the delivery device. Pretty soon neither will we. The New York Times reports on "pocketable" and "cloud" computing, pointing among other things to Adobe's new AIR software that will help "merge the Internet and the PC, as well as blur the distinctions between PCs and new computing devices like smartphones.... But," it adds, "most people may never know AIR is there. Applications [sub in "socializing"] will look and run the same whether the user is at his desk or his portable computer, and soon when using a mobile device or at an Internet kiosk." I'm subbing in "socializing" because that's how mobile everything teens do online will be. They already make nearly no distinction between devices or online and offline. We're all just going the way of the online teen. The mobile Internet has only begun. Now think about filtering or monitoring software in this context. It can be useful, but how much control does it reliably give parents when online socializing is wherever the Internet is, wherever kids are? I'm not trying to discourage, just offer a reality check. Increasingly, the only safeguard as mobile as online teens, is the software between their ears. But loving, engaged parenting can be very flexible and spontaneous too and (most important for teens - though they'd be reluctant to admit it), parenting is there running in the background when it's most needed.

Ukrainian parental controls got top spot

To mark the fifth-annual Safer Internet Day today, the European Union unveiled a three-year study it sponsored of parental controls software and services. In the study, the big-name brands in the US "were all beaten to the top spot by a small partnership that employs no more than 50 people, mostly designers and developers in Ukraine," the BBC reports. The partners who created Magic Desktop, a "walled garden" approach to online child protection, are a couple of fathers who developed it for their own kids. It's basically useful for children 10 and under because it's based on a "white list" of approved children's sites. The rest of the top 10 products are listed in a sidebar to the BBC piece. Here's the official Safer Internet Day site and more from the BBC on Safer Internet Day, in which 50 countries were expected participate this year. For its part, Ireland launched a national online-safety-education program for teachers, parents, and children, the Irish Times reports.

PC Magazine on parental controls

Parents might be interested in the latest reviews of filtering and monitoring software here at PC Magazine. The top-rated products are Net Nanny 5.6, Bsafe Online, Safe Eyes, and Webroot Child Safe. Note that these are "client" software products you install on the family computer. If you have the latest operating systems on Mac and Windows PCs, you can simply configure and use OS-level parental controls that are pretty feature-rich. But all these - OS or client - work only on the computers they run on. Kids' access on any other Net-connected computer or device (including those at friends' houses and, increasingly, cellphones) can be unfiltered, which means it's also good for kids and parents to work together on testing and using the filters between kids' ears: critical thinking and media literacy! Here, too, PC Magazine's parental-controls buyers' guide - a little old, but still offering good advice.

Parental controls improving

We - parents - are the winners in the "showdown of new parental controls in Apple's Leopard versus Microsoft's year-old Vista," CNET's Stefanie Olsen reports. The reason is, filtering, monitoring, and time-control features are increasingly built in right at the operating-system level on both PCs and Macs now. That means it's all easier for parents to use and tougher for kids to find workarounds (younger kids, anyway). The huge key thing parents need to keep in mind, though, is that the idea of "the family computer" is beginning to fade - at least in the world's wealthier, more connected countries. More and more households have multiple computers, which might require rules restricting kid use to particular computers. But even so, the Web is available on more and more devices, most of them highly portable. It's also available at friends' houses, or course. The friend's house (or public library, or local wireless hot spot, etc.) is probably the No. 1 "workaround" for which no parental-control software you buy or set up works. Even so, Olsen reports, "parents are clearly paying more attention to technology for managing their children's computer use, especially as more kids venture online at younger ages." She cites NPD research showing that "sales of parental control software were up 47.3% percent in the first nine months of 2007 over the same period last year," and some of the top-selling off-the-shelf parental-control products are Enteractive, Microforum, and ContentWatch.

Miss America's browser for kids

As Miss America, Lauren Nelson made online safety her cause because of a scary experience she and some friends had as young teens seven years ago when they were messing around in a Web chatroom during a sleepover. Someone in the chatroom as for one of the girls' personal information and "within a week, an online predator was emailing one of them lurid photos," the Associated Press reports. Now Lauren's the star of "The Miss America Kid-Safe Web Browser." The browser, which can be downloaded for free at MissAmericaKids.com, "permits access to 10,318 Web sites, all of which were prescreened and determined to be kid-friendly by the Miss America Organization and the Children's Educational Network, which developed the software for it. It has a feature enabling parents to lock the computer and prohibit Internet access with any other browser, and it lets parents add sites to the approved list." Other safe browsers can be found via GetNetWise.org's searchable parental-controls database (browser search results here). Here's The Telegraph's coverage of Miss America's browser from London.

Cellphone parental controls available

It was a gleam in some early adopter parents' eyes back in 2004 when I first wrote about phone controls; now a reality. Today AT&T launches a service that might make for a little more cellphone-related family harmony: "Smart Limits" for $4.99 a month. "Many parents want their children to have access to cellphones for safety reasons, but they don't want them making or receiving non-emergency calls during the school day, chatting away all the shared family-plan minutes or bloating the bill with text messaging charges," AT&T told the Associated Press. "The functions, ranging from call blocking and hour limits to text message and download allowances, will be set through a website. Calls to or from a parent's number can be made to override the restrictions, and calls to 911 can be made anytime." Smart Limits also includes filtering if Web access is within the AT&T phone network (it won't work on an iPhone or when any phone is using a wi-fi hot spot for Web browsing outside the company's network). Here's the Detroit Free Press's coverage, which says about 79% of US 15-to-17-year-olds have cellphones.

5 good tips for parents

…in a financial news site of all places - MarketWatch.com. It’s a good sign that intelligent tech parenting is going mainstream. I like these online-safety tips because they’re simple and smart, and they promote parent-child communication. Points worth highlighting: author and dad Adam Thierer’s “layered approach” to online parenting, layering tech tools (like Google’s SafeSearch and maybe filtering or monitoring software) with open communication; reaching out to other parents (tech parenting does “take a village”); and keeping up on kid-tech news (I’m showing my bias).

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).