Parents Still Struggling with the Ethics of Using Parental Control Software.
http://www.prleap.com/pr/5982/
I am not a parent (not yet, anyway), but I understand how they want to protect their children, and the Internet poses all sorts of problems. Especially with child predators.
However, programs such as Net Nanny go too far, in my opinion. I realize a lot of parents let their children know they are being monitored, but some don't.
What a lot of parents don't know is that these programs can be easily disabled. There are web sites and blogs that tell you how to disable programs such as Net Nanny. Children these days are very technically oriented and they know how to find these sites.
So, what is a parent to do? The problems of predators are bad enough, but also the ready access to pornography. I am very liberal, but I think pornography and children is a bad mix. They are too young to see these images.
Perhaps a compromise would be some sort of block for pornographic sites, but not so stringent that if a child searches on "Breast cancer" they would be blocked from legitimate content.
On the predator side, the onus lays with sites such as Myspace.com and Facebook. Myspace is notorious for attracting pedophiles. There are documented cases where such predators, using MySpace have, lured children away from their homes into meeting them. Myspace has implemented procedures to deal with these people and I think some progress has been made.
Parents in this day and age are nervous and they are using net monitoring programs such as Net Nanny and even microchipping their children. This is understandable, but the children do have rights. A balance needs to be found to make the children safe, but not take away their rights. I think as technology improves we will find the proper tools.
2 comments:
If you think monitoring software goes too far then, yes, clearly you are not a parent. You have to look at it from this angle: never in the history of the world have children had unprecedented access to the world. Not only do they have access to the world, but the world has access to THEM! Furthermore, this isn’t the world of even just one generation ago. This is a world where sex and violence are EVERYWHERE, and now they are at your child’s fingertips.
But enough of the fear mongering. There is the simple ideal of as a parent just knowing what your kids are doing. Letting them surf the internet blindly (meaning the parents are blind) is the equivalent of parents letting their kids travel to NYC at 3AM in the mid-80s. You just don’t do it…
Last point I want to make is that there is a HUGE difference between spying on your kids (as many like to refer to it as) and being a responsible, aware parent… and being an ignorant parent. It’s a two way street. You CAN give your kids privacy while spot checking their activity. You don’t need to know who has a crush on whom or other sorted tween and teen growing up details… but you DO need to know if your child is a victim of a vicious cyberbully – or worse – if they are a bully, you need to know if they are talking to jacqui15 online… or loveslittlegirls49. Kids won’t tell their parents these things. The same studies that show that kids are not really falling victim to predators show that those that do fall victim or start chatting with strangers don’t tell their parents. Same goes for cyberbullying. The studies also don’t show the number of sickos that get arrested every month for trying to solicit kids online kids may not be falling victim in drives, but the perverts out there trying in droves. (My blog has a weekly post where I present the week’s round-up of Internet predators arrested across the country)
Bottom line: if you REALLY want to keep your kids safe online, you need to know what they are doing on the computer. Simple as that. Blocks and filters are easy to get around as you stated, but if you have monitoring software, like our PC Pandora (www.pcpandora.com), you will know everything they do and will be able to talk to them about it. If you aren’t monitoring and don’t know what they are really doing, how can you be sure they are safe? How can you be sure they are using the Internet responsibly and not putting themselves into bad situations? How can you be sure they aren’t being bullied or BEING a bully?
Don’t be so quick to dismiss monitoring. And don’t be so quick to dismiss parental intelligence. Remember, we have the upper hand in life lessons. Not to mention that the tech-savvy gaps is rapidly closing. Parents who have little kids now HAD the Internet in high school and college and they are certainly going to be ahead of their kids when the time comes.
Gosh, these are blogs we post for our college class Science, Technology & Society - I'm in awe somebody from the "outside world" even read my post. ;>)
You're right I'm not a parent, and chances are my view could change if I was.
But again, remember kids are smart today. You can find cracks for Pcpandora too. Just search on Pcpandora and crack.
Post a Comment