I am always very interested in reading up on the latest technology to help us protect our children online. It is a good reminder as well, that cellphones and even media players like the ITouch (not used as a phone at all) can access Internet at any time. My husband has no problem ever, finding a connection on his ITouch, no matter where he is, it seems. So even though we are doing our best to protect our children at home, we have to be vigilant with what electronics we are letting our children possess outside of the house. My dream phone would be one designed especially for concerned parents like me, no picture capabilities, no Internet access, and only actual phone call use. Nothing else. Then it wouldn’t have to be an area that we parent heavily, other than looking at the atrocious cellphone bill when it comes in.
From The Globe and Mail:
Rowan Trollope was concerned about his son, Perry. Like many parents, he wondered what his teenager was up to online – and was looking for a way to keep track of he was doing. But unlike most parents, the solution Mr. Trollope came up with helped initiate a whole new approach to online security.
He wrote and quietly installed a program onto Perry’s computer, in order to monitor the teen’s behaviour and stream a feed of the activity to his own computer’s desktop.
“That allowed me to have a few conversations that I needed to have with him that otherwise would have never been had, never known and remained completely submerged,” said Mr. Trollope, senior vice-president of consumer products at security software maker Symantec Corp. of Cupertino, Calif.
“That was an experience that told me that there’s something wrong here – we’re not doing a good job of helping parents with their kids.’ ”
Mr. Trollope’s experience hinted at the uphill battle against an array of risks to children online, which demands a new approach to safety, experts say.
“ Why is it that existing parental control software doesn’t work? It isn’t just that they don’t support the new paradigms but it’s also that they have, fundamentally, the wrong approach. ”— Rowan Trollope, senior vice-president of consumer products at Symantec Corp.
Although technology has recently helped police to make high-profile arrests of predators in child sexual abuse and pornography rings, the impact is limited, said Paul Gillespie, president and chief executive of the non-profit Kids’ Internet Safety Alliance (KINSA) in Toronto.
“Law enforcement does make arrests but in the big picture, it’s relatively ineffective,” he said. “The degree of sophistication that police develop simply reveals there’s way more out there than anyone ever thought.”
Even so, he noted that better technology remains a key piece of the puzzle in law enforcement and at home. “I’m in favour of any product or tool that gives parents any flexibility to protect their children,” Mr. Gillespie said, but added that he believes the emphasis must be on prevention.
“We know from experience that educating children about risks from an early age works. We’ve seen it with antisocial behaviours like drugs, smoking, drinking and driving. … We need to educate parents and children.”
Education and opening a family dialogue is critical, Mr. Trollope believes. After realizing that tools to help families use the Internet safely were inadequate, he approached an engineering team working on child safety.
The Symantec software engineers had tried parental control software – but their children were getting around it. Part of the problem, they found, was that the conventional approach is rooted in a model that increasingly doesn’t exist: One family computer with a child’s account that parents check.
“Now, kids have their own computers,” Mr. Gillespie said. “The dynamics have changed.”
Symantec
Symantec’s OnlineFamily.Norton is a hybrid of a website and software installed on children’s computers that can be used to set rules, monitor activities live and deliver e-mail alerts of violations, including circumvention attempts.
When Symantec consulted child-development specialists, they found that – unsurprisingly – spying on children to control activities created an adversarial relationship, which hindered kids’ understanding of parents’ guidance efforts.
“It’s not about control, it’s about communication,” Mr. Trollope said. “Why is it that existing parental control software doesn’t work? It isn’t just that they don’t support the new paradigms but it’s also that they have, fundamentally, the wrong approach.”
And so, Armed with a new understanding, the Symantec team created OnlineFamily.Norton, a hybrid of a website and software installed on children’s computers. The tool can be used to set rules, monitor activities live, and deliver e-mail alerts of violations, including circumvention attempts. It also tells kids that it is running – awareness that can help facilitate family discussions, Mr. Trollope said. The service is available for free until at least 2010.
Meanwhile, network giant Cisco Systems Inc. has also been working to revise its approach to child and home safety in the digital world.
“We’re bringing features of enterprise-level security to the home user,” said Spencer Huang, a product manager for digital services at Cisco.
The networking company, which makes Linksys wireless routers, has teamed with Trend Micro Inc. to embed the software vendor’s Home Network Defender threat and parental controls into its hardware.
This means the Trend Micro-embedded routers can block threats before they can enter the network, parental controls can be applied to any or all connected devices, and parents can review reports of network activity down to the device level, Mr. Huang said.
“More and more, we found that the people setting up home networks are mothers,” Peder Ulander, a senior director at Cisco’s consumer business group, told the Globe and Mail on a visit to Toronto. He said that even the most tech-savvy moms – and dads – found it increasingly difficult to run home networks as they needed to add devices.
In response, the San Jose, Calif., company released a new version of its Network Magic software, which lets users control security, file-sharing and connections for all network devices by pointing and clicking on a map of the network.
But in spite all of the tools to help parents protect and guide their children, risks remain, Mr. Gillespie said.
“With text, cellphones that are basically computers now and Internet everywhere, 90 per cent of children have access outside the home,” said Mr. Gillespie, who pioneered the Toronto Police Service’s child exploitation section and initiated the development of the Child Exploitation Tracking System built by Microsoft Corp. – currently seen as the most advanced investigative tool to track online predators who create and trade in images of child sexual abuse.
“These predators are on the networks where these kids are downloading their music, literally a click away from these horrific abuse images,” Mr. Gillespie said. “The thing we haven’t been able to come out with is a way to monitor and choke them off.
“We know what these pictures are, but we’re allowing all of this free-for-all to flow and for our kids to see. It’s so frigging overwhelming We need something to get in there and stop it.”
Interesting that the owner of the software that couldn't block Bing porn talks about other filters that don't work. Heal thyself…
The creators of the program above are ignoring the fact that monitoriing software like our PC Pandora exists and does everything they say current parental control software does not do.
Nice write up. But…
Symantec is trying to push the sales of it AV software by selling a 'new' concept of parent-child communication (what many products are already doing).
Cisco – well they are taking their Trend-Micro coprporate oriented filtering product and twicking it to the home base market.
Both will not work.
You need a company that specializes strictly on child safety – where that is its bread and butter.