Monitoring and Filtering

Because of concerns about MySpace, more and more parental-controls software companies are adding social-networking monitoring to either their products or their marketing of these products, and new MySpace-specific products are coming on the market. The line-up is changing fast, so for a comprehensive view of what's available, you'll need to do a product search in a Web search engine to get product ads or a list of search results. Search using phrases like "monitor MySpace," "blog monitoring," or "MySpace parental controls."

Monitoring Services

The most useful thing about the MySpace-specific services is that they alert you to changes to your child's profile, assuming that the profile is public.

Key Parenting Point

There is an important difference between services that monitor changes to your child's public profile and monitoring software that records everything your kids do on the PC. The former is simply a convenient way for you to see what anyone else can seewhat your kid is posting in public. PC monitoring software can be used to spy on everything your child types and sees, including private messages.

MySpaceWatch.com, which is not affiliated with MySpace, offers both a free and a fee-based service to help you track what's happening in your kids' profiles. The free version will monitor one profile and crawl (look for updates) twice a day. The $6-per-month version monitors up to five profiles and provides a list of your child's friends and updates every 6 hours (Figure 6.15).

Figure 6.15. The paid version of myspaceWatch lets you view a summary of your child's profile, get updates on comments, and see who your child's "friends" are.

Services like this provide limited information, but they do make it easy to get updates, assuming that your child is registered under his or her real name or an email address you know about. There is also the possibility that you're spending a lot of time monitoring only one of your child's accounts, and it may even be the one he or she intended you to see. That kids can establish multiple accounts on multiple services is a distinct limitation of these products. They can give you a false sense of security.

As of this writing, MySpaceWatch was still available, but another similar service, KidQuery, folded as we went to press. In a June 29, 2006, article "Keeping an Eye on MySpace," CNET's Stefanie Olsen reported that KidQuery "closed after one of the engineers realized it could violate the terms of service of MySpace, which restricts other services from crawling and lifting data from its network."

Monitoring Software

Monitoring software can log and report to you everything your child is doing on that particular computerall the keystrokes, whether in IM or email, on social networks or other Web sites, or in word-processing and other programs.

One problem with monitoring software is that, like filters, they can't be everywhere; they work only on the machine where they're installed. As the Internet becomes available in more and more places and on growing numbers of portable devices, "parental controls" software is getting less helpful.

An even greater potential problem is that monitoring can lead to distrust if your kid knows or suspects you are "spying" on everything happening on the PC. We're not here to judge the choice you make. All parents need to do what's appropriate for their families, but we urge you to be very thoughtful before installing monitoring software or signing on with a monitoring service. If you do decide to use it, consider telling your kids you've installed it so that they know it's there; they might figure it out anyway.

"Tracking software presupposes a lack of trust between parent and child, and it is very difficult to go back. Indeed, this is a 'last resort' approach," wrote parent and technology educator Jeff Cooper in our BlogSafety.com forum. We agree.

If you're interested in using monitoring software, the leading provider is SpectorSoft. Another is (appropriately named?) IamBigBrother (Figure 6.16).

Figure 6.16. For better or worse, lamBigBrother lets you "see everything your family is doing online."

Filtering

Numerous programs are available that are designed to filter the Web (block kids from visiting certain types of sites on your home computer).

Software like CYBERsitter, Net Nanny, CyberPatrol, and Norton Parental Controls generally do a good job of keeping kids away from porn, hateful messages, and other areas of the Web that parents want to keep off limits. You can also configure most of these programs to add or remove sites, so it's possible to use one of these programs to keep your kids from visiting MySpace (and many are adding social networking to their lists of blocked sites).

As you might have guessed, we don't recommend that you filter out social-networking sites, especially for teenagers, for several reasons:

• All you would accomplish would be to block your children on the computer at home. Filters will do nothing to keep them from visiting the sites on other computers or on cell phones or other devices.

• Although these filters can be effective in keeping small children from visiting certain types of sites accidentally, they are pretty lame when it comes to computer-savvy teens who can probably find a way around them. Plenty of proxy sites help in-the-know teens bypass any filters that their parents or schools put on a computer or network. Sites like UnblockMe and HideUS (and there are many more) allow users to go anywhere they want, despite filters and without detection.

• As we've mentioned several times throughout this book, even if you could keep teens from using MySpace, you might wind up driving them to other, less accountable or more dangerous sites, in effect encouraging them to go underground for their social networking.