Stories about cyberbullying, Internet predators, and other online threats continue to generate a great deal of concern among parents about what their teenagers are up to online. A growing number of services are springing up to respond to that concern, offering to report back to parents on their children's online activities.
Some, like GoGoStat Parental Guidance, cover a specific area of online activity—in GoGoStat's case, for example, that area is Facebook. But a number of companies are now aiming to offer much more inclusive surveillance of a child's online activity, tracking their profiles across multiple social media and commerce sites—for a monthly fee.
One of these services is called MyChild, a service of ReputationDefender. According to the company, MyChild uses "deep web" searching to look for any reference to children in "every corner of the Internet, including over 40 of the biggest social networks". The service generates a monthly report on your teenager's "online reputation".
The service costs $14.95 a month—and if it discovers content about your kid that's slanderous, offensive or wrong, you can pay ReputationDefender another $30 to try to "destroy" that content. That generally means contacting a service provider on your behalf to report a violation of terms of service, or something along those lines—it's not guaranteed to work.
The New York Times' Brad Stone recently took a look at two other online child-monitoring services: SafetyWeb and SocialShield:
Both start by asking for a few pieces of information about a child, including his or her e-mail address and the family's physical address. Then they look through various social networks, checking to see where the child has accounts and, where possible, monitoring what the child writes and what others write about the child. Long lists of a child's online activities emerge, some marked as safe, some as potentially dangerous. Other items are explicitly red-flagged, like a Facebook friend who is considerably older, or a posting with a keyword like "kill" or "suicide".
But are these services really worth the $100 or more a year that they charge? They're limited in what they can find—and in many cases, you can find the same information on your own if your child has "friended" you on Facebook and has been honest with you about their online accounts. It may be harder to track what's going on with your child on your own, but it's easy enough for a child to evade these services by signing up for social networking sites with an e-mail address they haven't told you about.
In the end, the only effective way to track what your kids are up to online is to have an open line of communication with them.As Parry Aftab, a lawyer specializing in online privacy and founder of WiredSafety.org, says in her "Guide to Keeping Your Kids Safe Online", the key is to ask your kids to let you see their profile pages, ask them questions about what's going on in their online lives, and check up on them to make sure they're telling the truth. " If they don't listen or follow your rules," Aftab says, "unplug the computer…the walk to the library will do them good. "