Please note: The reports in this section are not product reviews or tests; they're meant to spotlight options for you to consider, as well as milestones in children's online-safety technology development. Comments from readers on their own experiences with these products and services are most welcome - and, with your permission, we publish them. Do email us your own product reviews anytime!
Surf Monkey's new parental-consent system & animated chat for kids (Feb. 4, '00)
SurfMonkey.com has two new features, one for fun and one for safety. Safety first: With a new parental-consent system in place as of last weekend, Surf Monkey is among the first companies to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. The law prohibits Web sites from collecting personal information from children under 13 without a parent's permission. The US Federal Trade Commission came up with the rules for compliance last October; Web sites must comply by April.
How to obtain parental permission was the tricky part for Web sites, not to mention the FTC, in figuring out the compliance rules. Surf Monkey's solution is to give parents a choice of faxing, snail-mailing, or phoning their permission in. For that last option, Surf Monkey has a voicemail system by which parents can leave a message. The company keeps record of all those calls by storing the messages. Two people have been hired to monitor and manage the messages (e.g., to make sure they're not from high voices trying to sound low).
Surf Monkey CEO David Smith told us they were a little nervous the new consent requirements would slow down registrations. "But for some reason," he said, "the number of registrations we got over the weekend was about 300% higher than before. We got more than 1,000 consent calls from parents. We can't pin it down to any one thing," he added. "We haven't done any significant advertising yet."
The company also recently put its site through an online-safety audit and added a parental-controls feature to its site and tools. Called "CyberFriends," it's like an email buddy list, only it works for Surf Monkey's chat and bulletin board areas too. Parents choose who gets to be on their children's lists, so they exchange emails only with people on the pre-approved list. The same goes for private chat rooms and discussion boards. Kids have to be registered members (with that prior parental consent) to participate in the Monkey's public chat and bulletin boards.
Surf Monkey's new fun feature is avatar-based chat. A child picks a character (avatar) she wants to assume, then goes into a 3-D chat room and chats. Words appear in a cartoon-like bubble above the avatar. She can also click on and animate objects in the room. David Smith said they plan to have six or seven rooms (each with its own décor) available soon.
Already the company's noticed something fun about kids' behavior in chat rooms, David told us: "You're standing in a chat room, and a child will come right up to you [your avatar], give you a wave, say hi, and then say, 'Hey, let's chat.' They'll chat facing each other. They've quickly created their own protocol." It's already different from regular text chat, it seems - more like chatting with someone in person. Maybe 3-D chat has more politeness built in. It will be a fascinating thing to watch as the technology and people's use of it develop! Stay tuned: We'll be revisiting this topic in a future issue.
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