News for the Week of August 27, 2006
Monitoring, not filtering, is increasingly in the news as the parental tool of choice for the social Web. Why? Because as the Web gets more accessible in more places on more types of devices, it's getting harder for parents to rely on filters to block specific sites at all access points.
With the advent of social networking and tools designed for this new use of the Web, we now have three kinds of monitoring (so far, mostly for MySpace users):
- Human monitoring that uses technology (e.g., SafeSpacers.com, which emails parents reports of activity on MySpace)
- Tech monitoring (e.g., BeNetSafe and myspaceWatch) using search technology that makes monitoring teens easier and more convenient than going to their pages oneself, and...
- Hard-core key-logger-style monitoring that logs every keystroke of the person using a particular computer.
The third option has been around since the early days of the Web. Many Web-savvy parents feel this is a last-resort choice because it captures everything a child does online and thus affords zero privacy, a privilege (rather than a right) that children should have a chance to earn. I include it as an option because sometimes kids who are uncommunicative and put themselves at risk need to be monitored for their protection. See what Oregon dad Jeff Cooper wrote about this to ABC News (posted in our forum, BlogSafety.com here).
The first two options are really more convenience tools. Parents can monitor their children's pages themselves if the kids provide the pages' Web addresses or URLs (this is good, it means actually talking over online activities!). But sometimes busy parents prefer a daily or weekly email from a service, reporting key information, such as an address or phone number publicly shared. If the child's page has privacy features turned on, making them inaccessible to everyone but people on a friends list, some parents require that they be on that friends list so they can check in on the page every now and then. These new monitoring services can also help parents find the profiles of kids in "stealth mode," but again - once they're found - it's usually better to be up front about monitoring than to confront a child after something untoward is found. Overreaction and confrontation often send kids underground on a Web where there are dozens of free social-networking services. Many kids have more than one profile on either a single service or multiple sites, in some cases profiles Mom or Dad can see and others not meant for grownup eyes.
BeNetSafe is mentioned in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Red Herring.
In other news...
- Of cheats & other game news. How to explain to a gamer that cheating is bad, when in the world of videogames it's so good? Family discussions are definitely getting more nuanced these days! Some people say going to game sites and finding cheats is just a way to get more out of a game. Other gamers make it a little more questionable-sounding, as it was in pre-videogame history - that, as with lying, everybody knows it's bad but there are certain conditions under which it's ok. Even in videogame life the definition of cheating has changed, the Washington Post reports : "To cheat way back when was to figure out how to keep your character alive and finish the game. To cheat now is to unlock doors and expand the breadth of your game." As kids make fewer distinctions between online and offline, between this world and virtual worlds, teaching ethics is getting more interesting.
- La. game law nixed. A federal judge struck down a new Louisiana law that banned sales of violent videogames to minors, saying the state "the state had no right to bar distribution of materials simply because they show violent behavior," the Associated Press reports . The law's language was less than clear. Games that would be banned "if an 'average person' would conclude that they appeal to a 'morbid interest in violence' . [or] if the 'average person' would conclude they depict violence that is 'patently offensive' to standards in the adult community, and the games are deemed to lack artistic, political or scientific value," the AP adds. Similar laws have been struck down in other states, including Minnesota, Illinois, California and Michigan. In Minnesota, the Pioneer Press reports that the state would appeal a federal court's decision against its ban on sales of violent and sexually explicit videogames to people under 17.
- Parents 'exposed.' There's a high-traffic blog whose mission it is to expose what high-profile parents' kids have done on the Web, the Washington Post reports , but you don't have to be famous to be embarrassed by bloggers and social networkers at your house. The Post offers examples of children of state and federal lawmakers and media personalities acting out online, but also of a corporate executive defending his company's customer service before regulators while his son is blogging about customer-bashing policies in one of the company's retail outlets - one in which the dad got his son a job. There are so many roles in communities where teens' comfort level with the "age of public disclosure" and parents' discomfort with said could have an impact on family dynamics, not to mention professions.
- Teens' favorite 'channel'? YouTube.com definitely seems to be the MTV of our kids' generation. "More and more viewers want to cook as well as dine [the site's tagline is "Broadcast Yourself"], which makes the TV story of the year the story of a website: YouTube," the Associated Press reports . The AP adds that - though YouTube.com is less than a year old - it plays more than 100 million videos a day, and 65,000 new ones get uploaded it each day (I've also read that its costs are $1 million/month to provide this service). Some of this "channel's" fare is funny, some sleazy, some completely inane, some just mundane, some favorite broadcast TV clips recycled by fans, but that range of possibilities and no-rules environment is part of the appeal (and soon the news media will pick up on the child-safety story in all this).
