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File-sharing realities for families

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There’s no question about it: file-sharing comes with risks. Beyond the lawsuits (the RIAA this week announced its latest round of nearly 500, bringing the total to about 3,000 sued among the 100 million+ file-swappers worldwide, Reuters reports)…

Here are the risks the average family is more likely to encounter:

  • Porn. The P2P services allow for sharing photos and videos, as well as music and text docs. Some of those images are pornography, including illegal child pornography. A study done in the US a year ago found that porn is being widely shared on these networks – even more than music on one called Gnutella (see Slyck’s Guide to Gnutella), and kids can download porn by mistake because it’s often not labeled as such.

  • Viruses. Unless properly protected with a firewall, anti-virus measures, and the latest security patches, file-sharers’ PCs are vulnerable to the worms and viruses on other machines on the P2P networks.

  • Privacy. There are two very common risks in this category: 1) People are making a lot more than music available on their home PCs. The P2P services don’t do a good job of telling users that they have to be careful about what folders on their hard drive they open up to the file-sharing public. Emails, medical records, and family financial information have inadvertently been shared on P2P networks, so – if used – the software needs to be configured carefully. The P2P services are also known to have a lot of spyware on them.

    A family discussion about file-sharing could touch on: these risks, what P2P software people are using (here’s one list of 54 titles), a kid’s demo of how the software was configured, and what rules everybody should agree on. For more on family file-sharing (including the latest news and resources), see this week’s issue of SafeKids/NetFamilyNews), and for one dad’s views on kids’ file-sharing, see “A tech-literate dad on file-sharing.”

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