Web Safety NZ New Zealand Internet Safety
Social Networking Sites – Know What Your Kids Are Doing. Children spend hours on the internet, and parents often don’t know what they are doing. There is a growing gap between what parents THINK their kids are doing on the internet, and what they are ACTUALLY doing.
Social networking sites are huge for our children these days. Its all about communication and keeping in touch. It is often the case where kids try to out-do each other in the number of connections or ‘friends’ they have, attached to their profile.
My 15 year old daughter has 342 connections and rising. One area to consider, when a child has so many connections, is the amount of people who have access to your personal information. Not all connections attached to children’s social networking sites may be close friends. As such, there is cause for concern to monitor certain activity.
At www.imsafer.com they market a product that does just that. It monitors chat activity. The free product monitors chat programs such as MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger. However, the paid product that costs 25.95 UK pounds annually will also monitor popular social networking sites such as FaceBook, Bebo, MySpace and others.
It works like this: It’s a downloadable safety device for parents that analyses their children’s online chat and social network conversations. Once installed on a home PC it scans communications, analyses content, detects inappropriate relationships and alerts parents of any potentially harmful behaviour or contact from other users. If imsafer™ does spot something worrying, a child sharing inappropriate personal information, the signs of cyber bulling or the threat of an online predator, the parent immediately receives an email alert and/or SMS.
A product that identifies conversations about bullying, threats, sexual grooming and even self harm is a product worthy of paying for. It provides peace of mind to any parent, and takes a responsible approach in identifying any behaviour we ought to know about.