CurryStew

This was a great article I found HERE written by Annastasia.

The following is the article:

I was included on an email thread by danah boyd along with Henry Jenkins about a new web application called Paralert. The original email was from a writer covering this startup who was disturbed by the idea of parents using this technology to monitor their children’s social media activity. More about Paralert from the writer’s article:

Paralert is an online tool for parents who want to spy on (oops, monitor) their children’s online activity. It is designed for parents of children between the ages of 6-15 years. Paralert scans the child’s activity in social networks and online chats, and sends SMS and email alerts to parents in real time. Paralert uses a real time monitoring service that tracks the child’s activity on the computer on which it is installed. It detects the use of “suspicious” words and messages, and communicates data and screenshots to the Paralert server. The server analyzes the data and automatically sends alerts via email and SMS to the parents’ mailbox or mobile phone. The login-protected section of the website enables the parent to view information captured at the time of the alert, as well as additional information. This provides a context for the child’s activity, enabling the parent to assess the level of risk and offer appropriate assistance to the child. Parents can define or remove “suspicious” words or phrases, according to the type of issue that they would like to monitor. They can also modify the frequency of screenshots, and update profile information such as email address and mobile phone number for alerts.

The writer stated her concerns at the end of the article and ended up receiving several angry emails from parents “telling me that I have no idea what I’m talking about since I have no kids.” I feel her pain. I’ve spoken to parents around the country about these issues over the past couple of years promoting Totally Wired, and have had the same charge leveled against me (of course, now I am a parent but my opinions haven’t changed on this topic yet – but my 14-week-old is also not surfing the Net). I am consistently asked by parents for recommendations on what software to buy to block/filter or monitor their children’s online activity. My response? There is no “better parenting through technology.” No amount of software will replace open and honest communication with teenagers about what they’re doing online and parenting them to become good digital citizens. That said, Henry raised some important issues in our thread worth considering:

I can imagine a hypothetical technology that scanned for key words of concern and flagged them to responsible adults, but did not give them direct access to e-mail and other online activity. Such a technology would help locate the real dangers discussed in the interview — anorexia, cutting, suicide, etc. — but would provide more privacy to the child than the adult simply reading everything they wrote or posted online. I suspect that this tool doesn’t work that way, but imagining one that does helps me to see the difference between one designed simply to locate dangers and one which has an added component of voyeur. In my ideal technology, the one which provided greater privacy protection, it would frame topics that adults needed to talk with their children about and encourage them to have direct and honest exchanges…So, if we accept that adults have a responsibility to monitor risky behavior for kids at risk, you could turn the scenario around and ask that this be done with minimal damage to privacy and then ask how well any given tool met this standard. We do probably need to address what adults should do in cases where communication has already broken down along the lines described, where there is a history of deception and risk, etc.

Bottom line is that as much as we all want to empower teens to make good decisions – some teens are going to end up repeatedly showing poor judgment and/or engaging in risky behaviors online and off. Most of the parents who challenged me had teens who were struggling with serious issues like drug and alcohol addiction. That’s where the “YOU don’t know” is coming from as well as the normal/natural desire to want to protect your children from any sort of harm. So while I personally don’t advocate using technology to monitor children as a replacement for the conversations parents should be having, like Henry, I think that there are cases where parents of teens engaging in risky behaviors need some way of being able to know what’s going on and intervene if necessary. Especially since these teens may not be speaking to their parents or are lying. And for children ages 6 to around 11 or 12, I do think parents should be very involved in what these kids and tweens are doing online and that privacy should be earned, little by little, over time. If they can’t be sitting next to them while they’re on the computer all the time then, using software to help make browsing safer is fine by me. Once they reach 11 or 12, many tweens will figure out how to get around or disable this software, but for younger children, why not keep them from stumbling onto adult-oriented sites.

(“YCM” = Youth Culture Mashup – a thread I run highlighting various youth culture finds/reads)