Family Tech: New online-safety solutions! (November 1, '02 issue)
It's been an eyebrow-raising couple of weeks for those
of us who follow children's online safety. For the first time since the dot-com
meltdown some 18 months ago, new or updated tech products and services are
being announced - all at once, as if timed to the US President's focus on
Net safety last week (see our 10/25
issue). Though tech tools can never replace loving, engaged parenting,
new ones certainly signal that increasing amounts of creative thinking (and
funding) are being applied to kids' constructive use of the Net, which is
good certainly news. The latest developments include:
- A kids' Internet service provider
- A safe private children's network
- A newly marketed and upgraded kids' Web browser
- A new monitoring product for AOL-subscribing
families
- A significant upgrade for an old favorite of
parents
- And don't forget a site for kid-safe community.
[We alert you to these with the proviso that - though
we wish it were possible - this small nonprofit organization does not have
the resources to test new software and services for you. But you can help
fellow readers by emailing us what you think of a product or service so we
can make your comments available to other parents - via feedback@netfamilynews.org.]
The children's browser/network/safe e-playground solutions
all have similar, tried 'n' true features - with, not surprisingly, increasing
emphasis on communications, especially IM. Instant-messaging has become "the
killer app" of online kids, and products new and old are all indicating this.
- The
Children's Internet. It makes sense that the company that created
this subscription-based safe e-playground (or walled garden, as they say
in the UK) has decided to upgrade, becoming "the only children's Internet
service provider." They launch as an ISP next week, at $12.95/month for
complete dialup access, creative director Soraiya Hamedani told us this
week. The service turns home access into "a completely protected," real-time
child's-eye-view of the Internet - until a parent clicks on the little padlock,
types in a password, and gains unrestricted Internet access (at that $13/month
price). Features include a "white list" of thousands of Web sites approved
for children; an "E-budds" buddy list not restricted to the service's own
users (but only parents can create the list of allowable addresses); a child's
own customizable calendar/scheduler; monitored chat; homework help; child-safe
searching; electronic books read to children; and other
features we described last year, when the service was basically a kids'
browser.
- KidsWorld.
It's not the first time a closed children's network has been tried (see
our 3/2/01 issue to read about the now-defunct eKIDS
Internet). KidsWorld is a private network that works with your regular
Internet service, locking all aspects of the computer and Net away from
kids "until the parent actually signs the child out and unlocks it," KidsWorld
president Judy Lastrina told us this week. The program takes up the entire
computer screen, giving kids something more like a CD-ROM experience than
an online one. "We protect the kids but the kids don't actually know they're
being protected," Judy said. [Not being up front with one's kids is not
an approach we'd normally suggest, but we'd like to hear from you
about that - would this work for your family?] There are about 1,500 child-appropriate
Web sites on the KidsWorld network, all approved by staff as well as the
company's Advisory Board, with about 200 more being added each week, Judy
said. The service is ambitious, with seven channels, among them Entertainment
(games, movie reviews, music downloads), Learning (with homework help),
Creative, and Community. Children can chat, email, and instant-message only
with other kids on the service.
Many of you already know that even a completely
closed network can't be a "total" (24/7) online-safety solution, if such
were possible, because kids can log on in places outside the home (school,
friends' houses, libraries) that have less-restricted Net access.
- MomsandDads.com.
This is kids'-Web-browser technology that used to go by the name of Crayon
Crawler. Features include parent-controlled communications (IM coming),
a personal-info filter (so kids can't give it out), and a safe-Web-sites
database, or white list, to/from which parents can add/delete. Features
not found elsewhere include a cartoon character who reads email to a child
(for pre-readers) and provides (parent-configured) "Encouraging Words" and
"Chore Reminders." The $69.95/year service works with your own Internet
service and has multiplying branding relationships (in a revenue-sharing,
your-brand- our-technology arrangement) with the likes of Garfield the cat,
Noah (for the Christian community), and football star Trevor Pryce. For
more details, see our item on Crayon Crawler, 3/2/01).
- Watch Right.
After receiving an email from Bob DeMarco, CEO of IP Group, about his company's
new monitoring product for AOL subscribers, we asked him about something
we'd suspected: "Do you find that parents use monitoring more for finite
periods of time than 'permanently' - e.g., when they sense a child is at
risk in his/her online activities in some way?" He said, yes, the parents
his company talks to tend to be "worried" when they download Watch Right
- "they already had a problem," he wrote. Watch Right monitors and records
all URLs a child goes to and everything a child says in instant-messaging
and email (sent and received), as well as in chat and on discussion boards.
Its controls are behind a password, and the parent can choose which screen
names are to be monitored (not necessarily everyone using that PC). What
do parents look for in all this recorded text? Some of Bob's examples were
sexually explicit or violent-sounding screen names of people that might
be communicating with a child or date, time, and name of a chat room used.
"Specifically, they can look for private rooms which usually have a 'kinky'
name. Private rooms can mean trouble. They can click on the name of the
chat room and see a copy of the entire chat. That includes everything typed
by every person in the chat room." He emphasizes date, time, and name of
chat rooms because those are the kinds of specifics police look for when
they're called about a child at risk.
Monitoring appears to be the way more and more
parents are going. Josh Finer, CEO of Software4Parents.com
(which sells both filtering and monitoring products) told us this week
that "the market is clearly starting to show a lot more acceptance for
monitoring products - I used to sell way more filtering, now it is the
other way around."
There are other products that monitor AOL as well
as other IM and email applications, such as IamBigBrother and Spector
PRO, which are among the products Software4Parents sells. For file-sharing
services like Kazaa (music, video, images, etc.), "Cyber Sentinel has
done the best job," Josh said. "It works with almost any Internet-enabled
application." Software4Parents says it tests and reviews the products
it sells.
- Net Nanny 5.0.
A significant upgrade, the latest version adds IM protection, among 25 other
new features. It's blanket protection, though - not all parents will want
to eliminate instant-messaging altogether (blocking rather than monitoring
IM activity). According to Instant Messaging Planet, Version 5.0 can block AOL's, MSN's, and
Yahoo's IM services, as well as file-sharing client software such as Kazaa,
online games, and pop-up ads. Filtering is better too now, IM Planet says,
employing both a blocked-URLs list (parents can add or delete Web addresses)
and keyword filtering (which blocks pages containing inappropriate words).
- Don't forget 6-month-old Kidfu.
As we wrote last April , this is
not a tech tool. Parents can only encourage kids to go there, but there
are reasons why kids will want to. Kidfu is like a safe haven of totally
kid-driven interaction out there in cyberspace; when kids hang out there,
they can relax and have fun because they know the place is safe. Here's
a piece about Kidfu in the New
York Times this week.
Please note: We do not promote filtering or monitoring for every
family, per se. By its nature, technology is flawed, and what does work for
some families doesn't for all. Sometimes technology is a useful addition
to family online-safety rules and agreements, but nothing can replace hands-on
parenting. If you try a product - the above or any online-safety software
- please let us know what you
think so we can make your comments available for the benefit of other
parents.
