What to Do If You Think Your Child Is Abusing the Rules

Most of the tips we provide in this section are well known, but some of these solutions can be considered an invasion of privacy because the child (or spouse) will not be able to detect the monitoring tools used. It is always best to be upfront with your children (and spouse); when someone is knowingly violating household rules, however, we believe that it is your right to take action.

Activity Loggers

If you reach the point where you believe a child is not playing by your rules (for example, you think they may have dark circles under their eyes from instant messaging with their friends at 2 a.m. each night) and you have exhausted all other measures, it is probably time to try some Internet activity tracking and logging.

They work like a VCR for your computer screen and can be played back later. The best ones operate in "stealth mode," meaning their operation is nearly impossible to detect even by savvy computer users. Some programs even send screen captures to a website that allow you to view the screen remotely. These programs are a bit more expensive than the typical filter programs mentioned and are usually used as a last resort.

Here are a couple of Internet-tracking programs that are recommended by various computer magazines:

• Activity Logger http://www.softactivity.com/

• AceSpy http://www.acespy.com

• Spector http://www.spectorsoft.com/

Very Important

These programs can also be useful for monitoring spouses who may be doing some stuff online that is … how should we put it … not exactly conducive to the marriage. Now, the authors are not marriage counselors, and if a spouse will seek out these venues on the Internet, chances are there are serious problems in the relationship anyway. As the saying goes: Where there is a will, there is a way. But, this section would not be complete without mentioning that the same Internet activity logger tools that can be used to track what a child is doing on the Internet are also just as useful for tracking spouses. Enough said.

Each monitoring program is different, and we obviously cannot cover them all here. So, we chose one named Activity Logger because the name is easy to remember, and they had a free trial download. The installation of Activity Logger is straightforward, and so in the interest of space, we skip it. However, it is worth pointing out that during installation several options are presented related to how "hidden" the program is in the computer. Hidden is good. In general, you want to follow these guidelines:

• Do not create any icons for the logger. If a new icon appears on the desktop or the Windows toolbar, you are busted.

• Do not have the running program show up on the Windows toolbar as a running task.

• Do not have the program show up under the Add/Remove Programs function in Windows.

• Do have the program start when Windows starts. You want the program to always be running when the computer is being used.

You can set the logging options you want by accessing the program's setup function (because it is hidden, you probably have to launch this directly from the installation directory on the hard disk). Set up whatever logging options you want (see Figure 6-15). Set the log file size to be large enough for how much usage time you want to capture.

Figure 6-15. Configure Your Logging Engine

Now that you have the program set up to log and hidden, time to sit back and let it do its magic. After some period of time (overnight or whatever makes sense), you can go view the logs. Figure 6-16 shows a sample Activity Logger log.

Figure 6-16. Sample Log from Activity Logger

Very Important

Remember that logging of this nature captures everything done on the computer, good and bad. There may be lots and lots of good to wade through to see any bad. Lots of data will be logged. So, do not take logging lightly. If you really need to go to this level of monitoring, prepare yourself for some time needed to wade through lengthy logs.

From Figure 6-16, we can tell that someone used the computer around 10:21 p.m. First, they used Internet Explorer to go to Yahoo! Personals. Next, they started an AOL IM session to someone with an IM nickname of SassyChick573. So, right there we know something is up.

Here's another pretty cool feature of Activity Logger (and other programs have it as well): It can take full-screen snapshots at intervals so that you can see exactly what was being displayed on the computer screen while the person was using it. Figure 6-17 shows a sample of a tracked session.

Figure 6-17. Sample Screen Shot of a Tracked Internet Session

Now, we can actually see what the person was doing on Yahoo! Personals. Much harder to claim, "Oh, I just landed on that page by accident" if you have screenshots of the person doing searches and interacting with people. We can also see the actual text being typed on both sides of the IM conversation. In this example, the originator typed, "Hi baby, my wife is out of town tonight. Let's hook up!" Yikes, let's see someone explain that away.

Very Important

We are pretty sure that using the programs discussed in this chapter is legal when you are monitoring your kids, but not sure what the laws are regarding tracking of spouses. Check the laws in your state. We are not lawyers; trust us, neither of us had the attention span to sit through law school.