Sources : Times News Network

Date of Publishing:5/7/2010

Location: Banglore

Fear can be good for business. Just ask the multibillion-dollar insurance industry, for example. Or companies like LifeLock and TrustedID, which monitor people’s credit reports for fraudulent transactions to protect against identity theft.

So it comes as no surprise that, after years of headlines and horror stories about predators, cyberbullies and other dangers to children online, a crop of subscription services has emerged to help parents monitor their child’s activities on social networks. These start-ups aim to distinguish themselves from the older category of software products like NetNanny. Such products sit on a user’s hard drive, primarily to block various websites.

The new companies include SafetyWeb, based in Denver; SocialShield, of San Mateo, California; and MyChild, a service of ReputationDefender, in Redwood City, California. These services scour the web to create easily digestible reports for parents of everything a child is doing online. The companies charge for subscriptions; the lowest costs $10 a month or $100 a year. For harried parents, the question is: Are they worth it?

Certainly not for people who are web-savvy. The services gather data that can be freely collected with a bit of ardent web searching. But many parents are overworked and generally overwhelmed by the rapid pace of technological change and the continuing introduction of social websites. For these people, a simple internet cheat sheet on their child — even at $100 a year — could be a useful tool.

The monitoring services start by asking for a few pieces of information about a child, including his or her e-mail address and the family’s physical address. Then they look through various social networks, checking to see where the child has accounts and, where possible, monitoring what the child writes and what others write about the child.

Long lists of a child’s online activities emerge, some marked as safe, some as potentially dangerous. Other items are explicitly redflagged, like a Facebook friend who is considerably older, or a posting with a keyword like “kill” or “suicide.” But there are plenty of reports about innocuous accounts on sites like Amazon and false alarms (“the band killed last night”), for which the companies do not apologize. “If it’s good, we’ll tell you about it and if it’s something to be concerned about, we will tell you as well,” said Geoffrey Arone, chief of SafetyWeb.

It may seem that there is something of a creepy, cyberstalking element to all of this. But the services look only for material that is publicly available, which is part of their value: many kids, especially teenagers, need constant reminding that what they post online may be viewed not only by their parents but later by colleges and employers. NYT NEWS SERVICE

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