Keeping kids under lens

Surveillance software lets parents keep tabs on their children’s online activities, raising questions about appropriate parenting, says Somini Sengupta .When her children were ready to have laptops of their own, Jill Ross bought software that would keep an eye on where they went online. One day it offered her a real surprise. She discovered that her 16-year-old daughter had set up her own video channel.

Using the camera on her laptop, sometimes in her bedroom, she and a friend were recording mundane teenage banter and broadcasting it on YouTube for the whole world to see.

For Ross, who lives outside Denver, it was a window into her daughter’s mind and an emblem of the strange new hurdles of modern-day parenting. She subscribed to the channel’s updates. The daughter in turn just let Mom keep watching. “It’s a matter of knowing your kids,” Ross said of her discovery.

Parents can now use an array of tools to keep up with the digital lives of their children, raising new quandaries. Is surveillance the best way to protect children? Or should parents trust them to share if they are scared or bewildered by something online?

If, a few years ago, the emphasis was on blocking children from going to inappropriate sites on the family computer, today’s technologies promise to embed Mom and Dad – and occasionally Grandma – inside every device that children are using and gather intelligence on them wherever they go.

A smartphone application alerts Dad if his son is texting while driving. An online service helps parents keep tabs on every chat, post and photo that floats across their children’s Facebook pages.

The spread of cellphones and tablets in the hands of children has complicated matters, giving rise to applications that attract the young and worry parents. In Richmond, Virginia, Mary Cofield, 62, struck a deal with her 15-year-old granddaughter last year. The girl was offered an Android phone with full Internet privileges, so long as Grandma could monitor her every move.

“My theory is, you’ve got to be in the game to help them know what’s wrong and what’s right,” she said. “Keeping them from it is not going to work. You can either be out there with them in the game – or they’ll be out there without you.”

Cofield, a retired government tax agent who runs an online travel business, chose a tool called uKnowKids.com, which combs the granddaughter’s Facebook page and text messages. UKnowKids sends her alerts about inappropriate language. It also offers Cofield a dashboard of the child’s digital activities, including what she says on Twitter, whom she texts and what photos she is tagged in on Facebook. It translates teenage slang into plain English she can understand: “WUD” is shorthand for “What are you doing?” Cofield checks it daily.

Surveys, including by the Pew Research Center, have found that two-thirds of parents do check their children’s digital footprints and nearly 40 percent follow them on Facebook and Twitter. But the Pew study suggests that this monitoring is also likely to lead to arguments between parent and child.

What’s more, technology is at least as nimble as adolescents, and neither parents nor the technology they buy can always read a teenager’s mind. Very often they speak in code designed to stump parents.

Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research who studies U.S. youth online, offered the example of a teenage girl who was growing increasingly frustrated with her mother’s leaving comments on everything she posted on Facebook. Once, when she was feeling particularly low, she posted the song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
Her mother took it literally, which is what the girl had wanted. Her friends, however, read it for what it was: The girl was sad, and her post was meant to be ironic.

Technology companies now market tools for parents of children at every age group.
The next version of Apple’s mobile operating system will offer a single-app mode so a parent can lock a toddler into one activity on an iPad.

Security companies like Symantec and Trend Micro offer computer software that detects when a child tries to visit a blocked website or creates a new social network account. Infoglide recently introduced a tool called MinorMonitor, which like UKnowKids mines children’s Facebook pages for signs of trouble.

The market for family safety tools is large. are hard to come by, and most companies do not release sales information. But that the market is large – and growing – is evident in two things: Every security company and cellphone carrier is pitching such products, and startups in this field are popping up every month.

A text message application for the iPhone called textPlus allows Kyle Reed of Golden, Colorado, to be copied on every text message his teenage son sends his girlfriend.
“I feel torn a little bit. It’s kind of an invasion of privacy,” he said. “But he’s 13. I want to protect him.”

Dan Sherman of Jackson, N.J., is what you might call the alpha monitor of his children’s digital lives, which is not surprising considering that he works in computer security.
At home, he has installed a filter that blocks pornographic sites and software that tracks Web visits. He has set parental controls on the iPhones of his 8- and 13-year-old daughters so they can’t download applications. Access to the app store on the 8-year-old’s Kindle Fire is protected with a password. And the older daughter’s Facebook account is tracked by MinorMonitor, which alerts Sherman if there are references to bullying or alcohol.

Does he worry that his daughters think he doesn’t trust them? Sherman says they should learn that they will be monitored throughout their lives: “It’s not any different from any employer.”

Ross, of Colorado, once had a tool that disabled Internet access in the house after a certain number of hours. But her children kept turning it off. Now another program helps her keep an eye on how much time they spend online.

Last Christmas, one of Ross’ friends, Lynn Schofield Clark, gave her 11-year-old daughter a disabled iPhone on which to listen to music. The child brightly said that a friend at school had showed her how to download an app that let her send text messages and make calls – which is not what her parents had in mind.

Clark, who has written a book about parenting styles and technology called “The Parent App,” says she was relieved her child had confided in her. She hopes she will continue to confide, so she doesn’t have to track everything her daughter does online. “It’s too easy to get involved in surveillance,” Clark said. “That undermines our influence as parents. Kids interpret that as a lack of trust.”