Ever wonder what exactly the rating letters on your children’s video games really mean? Does “A” stand for Anyone or for Adult? I did, so I searched and found the Entertainment Software Rating Board site that explains them all in detail.
Bad News from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, reports of online child sexual exploitation have increased 400% over the last 4 years, including both US and global figures.
Hopefully, some of that increase is due to better reporting, but even so, that's a stunning and scary number.
Strangely, this article also failed to include any mention of using parental controls technology to help protect your children. While it isn't foolproof, being in control of who can communicate with your children is a tool some parents will want and will be able to use effectively.
There was one great suggestion for parents in a sidebar to the article:
As far as computers go, be aware of technology, trends, and especially a child’s online activity. “Parents [are perceived as not being] up to speed with the technology. It’s a great conversation starter to say, ‘OK, what websites are you looking at? How do I create an [instant messaging] account?’ ” That can be a subtle way to monitor a child.
USA Today created a good chart explaining the various "parental guidance" ratings systems for video games, movies, TV, and music content.
Occasionally the question comes up "why can't we use something like that for web pages?"
In some ways, all the fuss around Grand Theft Auto illustrates how hard that is. In my personal opinion, all the violence in those video games is more than I would want my child exposed to, but families make different decisions.
At least with video games, there are a finite number created and sold each year, and a general agreement on how to rate them.
There are so many more web sites out there that the problem is a lot more complicated. Plus, the content on many sites changes and evolves over time.
How violent is appropriate for teens? Kids? How much suggestive or sexual content? Who decides? How is the decision enforced? Who pays for the enforcement? Should the rules be the same in the US as they are in France? In Saudi Arabia? What about for web sites in other countries?
Every company that offers parental controls makes the decisions about what to allow or block for our consumers. At EarthLink, we think we've struck the right balance for our customers, but we also build in the ability to override our allow and block lists, in case an individual parent disagrees with one of our filtering decisions.
Laura Matthews had an interesting opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor last week, about negotiating appropriate Internet use with her kids. She thinks that blogging has helped teens to become better writers, among other benefits. Matthews also has some excellent, pragmatic suggestions for Internet use rules for kids and teens -- including helping them understand the risks of downloading spyware and malware.
ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which is the international body responsible for creating new top level domains (like .com and .net) announced today that they have approved creation of a new top level domain for adult entertainment content, which will end in .xxx
While this may make some filtering easier, the new domain is entirely voluntary, and it seems likely that many well known sites will keep their current .com addresses. So although a filter that just blocks ".xxx" won't overblock much, it will probably miss a whole lot of objectionable material. Still, it's an interesting idea.
Internet activist/policy expert Ben Edelman released a study last week in which he found that spyware vendors actually target children.
Edelman comments that he wondered who would actually download the various software products associated with spyware, and how spyware vendors could have the large numbers of users they claim.
This report focuses on the Ask Jeeves Toolbar, which Edelman says uses the same tactics that spyware uses, in order to get people to download it. Personally, I'm uncomfortable calling the AJ toolbar spyware, but Edelman raises some troubling points:
* The toolbar is associated with kids game downloads, including games like Junk Food Jack, Skoolrush, and downloading custom smileys.
* Although the EULA asserts that children under 13 can not download the toolbar, the download process doesn't ever ask the user's age. Children under 13 are protected by COPPA, which requires parental permission for a web site to collect personally identifiable information from a child.
If you remember only one thing about Parental Controls technology, let it be that there Is No Magic Protection Bullet. Parents MUST keep an eye on their kids and know what's going on in their lives -- who are they talking to and IM-ing? What are they doing?
According to the Associated Press, a young woman has recently filed a lawsuit against AOL, saying that one of the former monitors of their kids chat rooms solicited her for sex and persuaded her to send him nude pictures of herself when she was a teen.
It goes without saying that what that monitor did is outrageous. AOL says that the perp was fired immediately when they found out, and that their monitors are "rigorously screened and trained." I have no doubt that's true -- this is a nightmare scenario for any parental controls provider. And there may well be room for improving AOL's training and screening processes. But there is no perfect system to keep "the bad guys" from targeting and exploiting vulnerable kids.
Parental controls tools can help parents, and can provide kids and teens with a safer experience than the full and open Internet, especially in the area of chat and IM. But parents MUST MUST MUST talk to their kids, find out who they're communicating with, how they know the people, what kinds of things they're doing online, etc.
Those parents can't have known their daughter was sending nude photographs of herself to people she met online. They just can't -- but maybe if their daughter said she exchanged pictures with her friends, they would have asked to see the pictures, or they would have looked for JPEGs on her computer.
Kids may be defensive and not want to talk about it or let their parents see what they're doing, but just like offline dangerous behavior, parents cannot let themselves be stopped by that or by the fear that they -- the parents -- don't know enough about computers to understand the answers. Not being engaged with their children and insisting on understanding what they do online leaves those kids vulnerable, and there's no technology in the world that can replace old-fashioned, labor-intensive parenting.
Last week, the Pew Center for the Internet & American Life released a study on Protecting Teens Online.
Among the most interesting findings, nearly 65% more parents use Internet filtering and similar parental controls technology now, than did in 2000. Parents with MIDDLE SCHOOL aged children were the most likely to use it, more than either parents of young children, or high school aged children. Also interesting: 13% of teens don't use the Internet!
One safety message that's been repeated and repeated over the last decade seems to have gotten through loud and clear: 73% of teens say the Internet-connected computer(s) in their house are in a public place.
Here were the 2 most alarming findings, IMO -- and parents and teens reported numbers within 2% of one another in both of these cases -- approximately 80% of parents and teens say that teens are not careful enough about giving out personal information online. And approximately 65% say teens are doing things online that there parents do not know about.
Both of those are issues that have no easy technology silver bullet. There are tools that can help, but nothing beats parents setting rules, asking questions, and staying engaged with what teens are doing on the computer.
One of my favorite Internet safety sites for parents is NetFamilyNews, which summarizes interesting articles on families and technology from all over the world. Editor Anne Collier also interviews parents and industry experts, and asks for reader opinions on all kinds of issues facing families online.
In the current issue, Collier links to information about a new tween cell phone that requires all numbers to be pre-programmed, and then comments, "Personally, I'd like to see cell-phone companies providing parental controls for regular phones. How 'bout you?"
Great question, IMO. And as more people use their cell phones to surf the web, check email, and exchange text messages, how should computer parental controls and cell phone parental controls work together?
