For the last couple of years, Internet parental control vendors have struggled to adapt to the challenged posed by social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, which are hugely popular among teens. The two main approaches to parental controls – filtering and reporting – aren’t appropriate tools for the job. Filtering is usually only good at blocking whole websites, and this approach is far too restrictive for parents who want their teens to responsibly participate in social networks. Traditional web reporting consists of simply recording the URLs a teen has visited, so a long list of Facebook.com URLs tells the parent almost nothing about what the teen is doing while spending time there.
The obvious solution is more detailed monitoring software that tracks conversations and looks for signs of inappropriate information being exchanged. In the recent months, Symantec, McAfee, and Net Nanny have all upgraded their products to include Social Network Monitoring.
An early developer of Social Networking Monitoring was Safe Eyes, which in June, 2007 announced that Safe Eyes 5.0 would offer the ability to “Monitor, track, and record personal information—street address, phone numbers, school name, and more—that a child posts on sites like MySpace and Facebook. Safe Eyes can also record web posts that contain profanity or sexually suggestive terms.” Safe Eyes sells for $49.95.
Net Nanny 6.0, released in November, 2008 features a “Social Networking Dashboard” that records Facebook profile information. Net Nanny plans to add MySpace, Bebo, and other social networking sites. Net Nanny 6.0 sells for $49.95
In May, 2009 security industry heavyweights McAfee and Symantec both announced Social Networking Monitoring products. Online.Family.Norton from Symantec is currently free. Online.Family.Norton tracks visits to all the most popular Social Networking sites, including Bebo, Facebook, Friendster, hi5, MySpace, myYearbook, Netlog, Orkut, Tagged, Xanga, and Windows Live Spaces. It only monitors logins and the age entered.
McAfee released McAfee Family Protection, which sells for $39.95. McAfee Family Protection monitors personal information, as well as profanity and sexually explicit terms posted on social networking sites.
These products represent the first generation of Social Network Monitoring tools, and they will doubtlessly improve over time to cover all major social networks, and provide even more granular options for viewing questionable content that is being transmitted or received. But Social Network Monitoring programs represent a solid response to the challenge these sites post for Internet parental controls.
Filed under: Filtering, Internet Safety, Social Networking
[...] 2009 by filteringfacts In order to manage Internet access in the more complex world of Web 2.0, parents are increasingly turning to monitoring software, often in combination with filtering software ( a recent survey found that 27% of European parents [...]