Sure, of course you do. That stuff you read/hear about would never happen to you, because you monitor what your children do online. That's why there's no need for you to go to tonight's Internet safety meeting in Naperville for parents, right?
Let's do a quick poll: How many of your kids have MySpace or Facebook accounts? Ever had to order your kid to remove a photo from one of those sites? Ever consider they might be creating additional accounts and hiding them from you?
Do you let your child have a computer in his/her bedroom, with a web cam? That's just asking for trouble.
How about cameras on cell phones? It's becoming quite common for kids to take nude pictures of themselves or their friends and send them electronically to each other, as pranks, or sometimes to spite someone. Have you ever asked to look at the pictures stored in your kid's cell phone?
Just a few thoughts. Creepy predators using the Internet to lure kids is so 2004. Nowadays, it's more about how kids are using technology to embarrass themselves and their families.
My daughter has been surfing "phonezoo.com" so I thought just to download songs onto the phone however, much to my surprise I found they have a folder not only for Ringtones but one for My Zoo! Very simular to FaceBook...download your picture, tell a little about yourself and update status for the day. When I clicked on the Feeds file I was shocked at what I found! Keep you children/teens AWAY from this site!
I have used Spectorsoft software for a long time. There are a lot of stupid parents out there. My next door neighbor is a technology teacher in a high school at a local district and he is dumber than a box of rocks about technology. I teach him stuff about computers all the time. I don't know how he keeps his job.
It's great to see so many parents here who are learning what to do about these issues, and who are being watchful with what their children are doing with technology.
As the original question suggested, to take it a step further, it's not just children embarrassing each other. Some don't think/know that some of the things they are doing are considered an invasion of privacy, and can be illegal.
We have seen several children around this area with their camera phones and video cams recording patrons as they go through drive-thrus, and as customers walk into stores and around the aisles. One customer got the manager involved, demanded that the two teens erase the video, and wanted to get the police involved.
The teens started to claim it was a school project, but when questioned, backed off that story.
Please keep up the great parenting work you are doing, and extend it just a little further regarding privacy, courtesy and responsibilty. I don't think anyone wants to be recorded without his/her permission, or end up a youtube video. Thanks!
Just got back from the presentation. It was an extreme eye-opener, with three different people telling what happened to their family.
The bottom line presented is you can not allow your teen "privacy" on the internet, You must monitor their myspace facebook pages and activity, along with their instant messaging.
He discussed tracking software that records keystrokes and sites visited. Here's the link
http://www.spectorsoft.com/products/SpectorPro_Windows/entry.asp?refer=12901
BTW Naperville has 5 police full time on internet crime issues. The complexity of the schemes constructed to lure girls into meeting for sex and boys into giving parents credit card numbers to see "inappropriate live images", was amazing. As was the inappropriate picture taking by good kids who should know better.
All in all it was a excellent presentation. He does this presentation quite a bit, so if your interested I would think you could call Naperville PD to see when it's going to be scheduled again.
The way to check the MySpace page is have one yourself. They are very easy to set up.
MovableType stripped the quotations from my Google search examples, here are three links that it hopefully won't butcher:
http://tinyurl.com/6h7vbk - Search looking for PHProxy in the title of the site, which is the default name of an unconfigured proxy.
http://tinyurl.com/5pe4hr - Search looking for /phproxy/ in the URL of the site, the default directory.
http://tinyurl.com/595wkl - Search looking for "Start Using CGI Proxy", like the previous search looking for the title of an unconfigured proxy
The problem is reviewing browser histories, checking cookies, and everything else the pamphlets the PTA hands out on safeguarding your children tell you to do are extremely easily circumvented.
For instance-
Checking browser history or cookies: USB flash drives are so cheap they're practically free now days. Your kid probably already has one to use as a storage medium to ferry documents around between computers. Running FireFox Portable from the USB flash drive won't leave a single trace on the computer it's being run on in the browser history or cookies.
Blocking sites on your router: Consumer grade routers have extremely limited network administration functionality. Best case scenario you have either a blacklist or a whitelist of sites that are and aren't allowed. Worst case scenario you have nothing. Consumer grade routers also offer very little in any kind of connection logging, and those that do often do not have the onboard memory to store much of a history to dig through. Router-level blacklist can be circumvented by using any number of proxies online. They're not just limited to the big ones either like Anonymizer. I found 11,670 results most of which are open web proxies with these three Google searches:
intitle:”PHProxy”
inurl:”/phproxy/”
intitle:"Start using CGIProxy"
Is it realistic to create a blacklist of over 10,000 sites? Furthermore, even if you were somehow able to block all of these sites, you still wouldn't stop SSH tunneling which would in effect circumvent EVERY block you have set up on your network.
Content filtering software like NetNanny: These are by far the biggest joke. They're easily disabled, laughably insecure, and often only work with Internet Explorer, which wouldn't stop Portable Firefox, any kind of proxy, or SSH tunneling.
What am I getting at here? Flat out, brutal honest truth, you're not going to be able to keep your kids from doing things online through technical restrictions. Even if you used all three of the forms of "protection" I listed above and your home network is locked down tighter than Fort Knox under a Homeland Security Advisory warning do your kids' friends have parents who have identical network security setups? You could be the most protective parent on the planet but as soon as your kid shows up at Starbucks with a friend that has a laptop all bets are off and they're back to accessing whatever they feel like online.
So how do you solve this problem then? By promoting an open, honest, and active relationship with your kids while instilling good morals upon them so that they know they shouldn't be taking dirty photos of themselves with camera phones and uploading them to FaceBook... because like it or not you're unable to police the activities of your children 24/7. Explain to them that the things they put online are permanent. They may take a photo of themselves and send it to their friend thus creating two copies. They have a fight with their friend, the friend uploads the photo, creating in essence unlimited copies of the original photo which will never ever go away.
At the same time, search engines like Google work by constantly building a cache of the contents of the entire internet. Archive.org also catalogs everything. If your kids post something online and it gets picked up by a search engine or other program combing the internet, it's never going away.
It's becoming more and more common for future employers, organizations handling scholarships, and even colleges to do a little searching around online as part of a small background/character check. If you make it clear to your kids that something silly they posted online years ago randomly turns up for one of these groups of people looking for information... they're going to have a lot of unnecessary explaining to do over something embarrassing they never should have posted online.
Again, it's good parenting that solves this "problem". Not computer software, hardware, or anything else. Get more involved in what your kids are doing and teach them what's right and wrong and those lessons and that relationship will apply to a lot more in life than what they post on MySpace.
We review the kid's computer history, and have their passwords for social networking pages such as myspace. Otherwise, a good upbringing raising the kids as our children instead of our friends seems to translate to them staying out of trouble on the internet.
Embarrassing pictures from cell phones? Our phones do not take pictures, and the kids don't need cell phones...
I'd love to see the Sun do a write-up on Police suggestions and technical expert suggestions on how to better monitor. I wish I knew as much as Joe, but honestly do not. We have a computer in a common area, no web cam, I check cookies and history regularly; what else should I do? We've had serious discussions about the dangers and my kids know the consequences if certain actions are taken, but I want to do more. I know that the NPD does a seminar once & a while, but I have not been able to attend. Anyway, would love to see some type of write up for those of us that do not wear a programmer hat but want to do a better job of protecting our kids. Thanks!
They are going to get into things. However the statement of being a parent cannot be more truer, that means you can use filters but strict iterpretation of First and Fourth Amendments to the constitution are not applicable to my kids computer usage. I can look at what they are doing when they are on the computers whenever I want, I do check their browsing history frequently and I do check on their emails. If they establish secret yahoo or google account they lose computer time. Also don't let them have computers in their rooms where they can hide behind closed doors. Don't rely on electronic checks, be a apart of all aspects.
Is there a way to see your kid's MySpace page(s) without asking them?
Like anything, a little honesty and good parenting will go leaps and bounds in keeping your kids from doing stupid stuff online. Parents need to come to grips with the fact that more often than not their kids are going to know more about computers than they are. Content blocking on any level is easy enough to get around, and if you think installing Net Nanny, router rules, or similar methods are going to keep your kids from posting things online that you don't want them to, you are fooling yourself.
Don't let the MTV, Nintendo, and the Internet raise your kids and you'll be A-OK. Old fashioned good parenting still works even in the information age, believe it or not.
This is becoming a hot topic now as my 8 year old is beginning to branch out from Webkinz and Disney to additional sites to look up baseball players from my old bb card collection. At this point my biggest concern is the ads that flash on the screen: Victoria's Secret is having a sale by the way! But I know that in a short time the stakes will be much higher.
Joe talks of filters and rules, but I'm more of a novice as to how they work. We have one computer in a common area, but are looking to see if there is a kids web site, i.e. Google Kids? The kids log onto this and then "search" only using this site which would have limits (filters?) on it.
Any suggestions?
MS or FB accounts? No
Photos online? No
Creating additional accounts/hiding them? They can not since I wrote the router filter rules and know what they can access and can not access and even block anonymous proxies that are commonly used to bypass these rules. The good news is they never tried to go to these sites. Talking to them prior and explaining the dangers actually works.
Computer in bedroom / webcam? Nope. Computers in common areas and no cameras.
Call w/ camera? Nope. Old fashioned P.O.S. that just does calls.
Personally, I think they'll learn a great life lesson by embarrassing themselves in such a way. If you don't want to be seen doing something stupid...don't do it.