fraudulent transactions to protect against identity theft.
(Geoffrey Arone, left, and Michael Clark founded SafetyWeb to help parents keep track of what their children are doing online. Such services watch for red flags on sites like Facebook. )
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 Web sites.
The new companies include SafetyWeb, based in Denver; SocialShield, of San Mateo, Calif.; and MyChild, a service of ReputationDefender, in Redwood City, Calif. 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 Web sites. For these people, a simple Internet cheat sheet on their child — even at $100 a year — could be a useful tool.
I tested two of the monitoring services, SafetyWeb and SocialShield, on myself, various family members and a baby sitter and found the reports to be a bit unpolished. Both 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 red-flagged, like a Facebook friend who is considerably older, or a posting with a keyword like “kill” or “suicide.”
As you can imagine, 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.
When it comes to Facebook, often the center of children’s online lives, SafetyWeb takes a more discreet and privacy-respecting approach. It asks parents to link their Facebook account to the service, assuming that they are friends with the child on the site. If a parent is not a Facebook friend of the child, SafetyWeb can do little more than record the existence of the child’s account.
By contrast, SocialShield asks the child, not the parent, to link his or her Facebook account to the monitoring service. That gives SocialShield constant access to a child’s Facebook account, even if the child and parent are not friends.
That ends up being a more thorough approach, but it may also be more intrusive. The service collects more information, but the child typically knows about the monitoring.
Because SocialShield is in the business of finding red flags, it is worth noting that the firm has something of a red flag itself. The company said that one of its consultants is Robert Maynard Jr., a co-founder of LifeLock. Mr. Maynard resigned from LifeLock in 2007, after it became known that he had previously agreed to be banned for life from the credit repair industry amid Federal Trade Commission allegations of deceptive practices at one of his past companies. Arad Rostampour, a co-founder of SocialShield, said that Mr. Maynard was not an investor or a board member but had helped the company to market the service over radio and television.
Neither service can offer truly comprehensive protection from threats like cyberbullying. They miss private e-mail exchanges between children, as well as anything that happens over a cellphone. The companies say they are working on mobile components, although for technological and legal reasons, they cannot peek into text messages, a major channel of communication among teenagers.
PARRY AFTAB, executive director of WiredSafety, a group that educates about online safety, says the services are no substitute for good parenting techniques, like frequent conversations about Internet activities.
“I don’t think they work terribly well, and I think they are far too expensive for what they do,” she said.
She also worries that these new companies may have a commercial interest in stoking exaggerated fear about child safety, in an effort to sell more subscriptions.
The companies vow to avoid that.
“We are not trying to do any fear-mongering,” said Roger Lee, a partner at Battery Ventures, which recently invested in SafetyWeb. “Parents don’t need SafetyWeb and anyone else to scare them. They hear about these heartbreaking situations already. We are just trying to give them a product to help solve the problem.”
NYTimes
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