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Tag Archives: monitoring

TMI for parents in social media – for now, anyway

15-May-13

A lot of unusually thoughtful points about parenting in our collective, global social media environment are made in this recent New York Times article: “Cyberparenting and the Risk of T.M.I.” Pamela Paul writes that, for this generation of teens, it’s not Big Brother so much as Big Mother and/or Big Father. “Yes, we know contemporary [...]

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The trust factor in parenting online kids

03-Dec-12

A 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 [...]

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Instagram: Teens’ alternative to texting, FB?

20-Aug-12

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 [...]

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Peering thoughtfully through this window into our kids’ lives

15-Aug-12

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 [...]

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Top EU policymaker on trusting our online kids

31-May-11

It’s amazing to hear a policymaker say this: “We cannot, and should not, put our children and youngsters in a digital glass cage, hoping they will never encounter any harmful or illegal content online. This will simply not work.” That was Neelie Kroes, European Commission vice president and the EU’s top legislator for digital issues, [...]

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Hawk drama (& human drama) in the digital age

16-May-11

The subhead might be: “Birth and growth under the digital microscope” or “The ‘observer effect’ with digital media.” And a red-tailed hawk family in New York City is the metaphor. In this case, mom and dad hawks built a nest outside the window of the 12th-floor office of New York University’s president, and “furnished it [...]

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3 new products for monitoring online kids

07-Mar-11

Monitoring revisited with some new products that illustrate how this “parental controls” category is segmenting.

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Parents, you’re not just focusing on FB, right?

13-Oct-10

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.

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AOL’s two new, easy-to-use safety tools

30-Aug-10

Safety Toolbar and SafeSocial are great because they promote parent-child communication.

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Monitoring apps for kids’ cellphones

13-Aug-10

There’s a growing number and variety of apps for parents who want to monitor their kids’ texting and media-sharing on their kids’ cellphones.

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