Trusting your children to be safe online

The internet is a big, dark, dangerous place filled with perverts, oddballs and fruitcakes. Sometimes. More often, though, it’s an empowering and enriching place to play. And children these days are playing there more and more frequently. So how do you protect them from those paedophiles and the like?

It looks like there are 3 ways out there at the moment:

• You can stop your children from communicating online
• You build some prevention measure into the software
• You build some prevention measures into the software and focus on the parent-child bond

Deleting Online Teens
Well, the first approach is being debated in the States at the moment - the Deleting Online Predators Act. Essentially, it tries to protect minors by stopping them from getting their hands on the technology. The Act aims at prohibiting schools and libraries from providing minors with access to social networking sites (like MySpace etc.) and Instant Messaging Services. A couple of months ago it was passed in Congress by 410 to 15 and has now moved to the Senate.

As Larry Magid said over at BlogSafety

While it’s easy to understand why Congress would approve a bill like this, it is ill-conceived because, rather than “deleting” online predators, it deletes the ability of schools and libraries to determine whether kids can constructively take advantage of social networking and other interactive services that are extremely popular among teens. Maybe the law should be called DOTA (the Deleting Online Teenagers Act)?

Exactly. But it also seems to ignore one little thing … the mobile phone. Last year, the Telegraph reported that

“a million youngsters between the ages of five and nine now own a phone - double the number two years ago. Another half a million are expected to have a mobile by the end of the year.”

That was last year, and that was between 5 years old and 9 years old. The problem is that more and more of these phones are coming with Instant Messaging built in. So if you’re a kid, what are you going to do: chat with your mates in the library? Or IM them from behind the bike-shed?

If you just take away their phones, what then? You might be able to do that for children of a certain age, but surely teenagers will find ways to route round you?

Building protection into the software
The second approach is to build some protection in to the software. In August, Microsoft UK partnered with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) Centre to introduce a special feature: a one-click button to flag about a potential sexual predator.

“Behind the report abuse button will sit police and intelligence officers who have been specially trained to tackle child sex abuse. We will tell you how to capture information and how to seize online discussions and then proactively do all we can to track down the perpetrator, says Jim Gamble, chief executive of CEOP.”

[Hat tip to 21talks]

It’s great news. But it’s still leaving parents out of the loop, and I’m not convinced that’s a good thing.

Building protection into the software in a trusting way
The third approach, championed by IMSafer looks like a much better solution. As Brandon says in their manifesto,

“After spending considerable time on the topic, we have concluded that the entire debate about protecting children online was focused on the wrong solutions. Not only are the press and politicians thinking about the wrong problems, the technology that exists, ostensibly to help parents, doesn’t work. In reality, they create nothing but headaches for parents, not to mention an air of distrust they create with their kids because they are perceived as spying tools.”

It sounds incredibly sane somehow.

So what is IMSafer?

Basically, it’s an unobtrusive IM monitoring tool for parents. It uses the same sort of textual analysis that the police use to monitor conversation, and if it finds any telltale ‘predator’ signs, it alerts you, the adult, so you can intervene before anything terrible happens. (For example, the phrase “you’re a good girl” is believed to be common language for building a dominance/submission based relationship. IMSafer sees that and let’s you know.)

TechCrunch has some more details.

“When an offending statement is made, an email alert is sent to the parent in real time. The IMSafer dashboard displays conversation excerpts that the system believes are unsafe. The parent can then vote on whether they believe the conversation to be inappropriate and those votes go into a common pool tied to IM screen names. Other parents will be notified if their child enters into conversation with someone who has had conversation filtered and voted as inappropriate by any other IMSafer participating parent.

IMSafer is a Windows desktop application and it couldn’t be easier to begin using. It currently detects and tracks IM conversations going through Microsoft clients, AIM and Yahoo! Support for MySpace, GTalk, Skype and Mac is forthcoming, the company says. The MySpace filtering tool is ready but hasn’t been pushed to the IMSafer client yet and MySpace IM use is relatively limited.”

As Alec Saunders said,

“What I, as a parent, found most appealing was that IMSafer respects the privacy of kids at the same time. The IM logs are not available to the parent — only suspect exchanges.”

Spot on.

• MySpace and Sex Offenders
• Online help for stressed-out mums
• Why do parents join online communities?
• Free Software for Kids
• What children get up to online

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