Daily Concerns : Child Safety

Keeping Kids Safe Online: Part 5 (Product Review and Helpful Links)

csimmons — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 04:01:00 GMT

It’s been a few weeks since my last entry, life and work got in the way.

I was in the middle of a series of blog entries on Keeping Kids Safe Online. We had recently purchased a new computer so I decided it might be time to evaluate a new tool. An online software review had rated WebWatcher over my favorite tool eBlaster so I decided to give it a shot.

I had high hopes as I first visited their website but was dismayed that they did not offer a free trial period. Instead I was forced to pay $97 for a license just so I could evaluate it. They did offer a 5 day evaluation period in which I could request a full refund. As I’m writing this entry I see that they’ve added a new ad on their site stating “Free Test Drive”. Unfortunately, it simply takes you to a 10 page marketing piece without any real screenshots. That’s hardly a “test drive”.

The most significant difference between WebWatcher and eBlaster is how the keystrokes and usage data is recorded and accessed. WebWatcher is installed on the local computer but sends ALL of its captured data to WebWatcher’s servers in real-time. You can then access the data anytime, anywhere with an Internet connection at WebWatcher’s website. In contrast, eBlaster captures the data onto the local PC and can then email you (and others) the information at a frequency of your choosing.

At first it sounds like WebWatcher’s hosted model is superior. I was able to login and read back the keystrokes my child was entering in real-time almost as if it was a teleprompter (although I did have to hit refresh to see the new keystrokes). Regardless, that’s pretty powerful. This would probably be my preferred method except that the WebWatcher site is poorly implemented. As you can see from this screen shot it’s organized into many, many different layers without any view to see the entire keystroke / activity history for the day.

Unless you’ve used a tool like this before then you may not fully grasp why this is so annoying. Think about it like this. You don’t do all your email, then all your IM chat, then visit websites, one after the other in a linear order. Instead you jump all around. Email this. Chat that. And a website or two mixed in. Often you’re typing into multiple applications nearly simultaneously. So if I’m a concerned parent I’m really not interested in clicking through every category and then every individual application my child has accessed before I can see / review their keystrokes. I do not have that kind of time or attention span. Instead I prefer the whole thing dumped into a single long report which I can quickly scan looking for any troubling entries. WebWatcher’s poor implementation led me to request a full refund 3 days later. (Which they honored, no questions asked)

Functionally, the two products are similar in feature function. But I prefer eBlaster’s choice to send one long report to me at schedule of my choosing. I currently have it set to send my wife and me the full report of the previous day’s activities each morning at 4am. So when we wake up we have every bit of keystroke / activity data in a single email which we can quickly scan.

To be fair WebWatcher said their working on a single view report. For now I plan to stick with eBlaster, its simple interface and email features offers all the things we need.

In closing, here are a few links I've found helpful in my research:

God bless,

Curtis S

Keeping Kids Safe Online: Part 4 (Keystroke Logging)

csimmons — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 23:39:00 GMT

In the previous blog I outlined a number of top selling Content Filtering products and some of the things I felt were flaws that diminished their effectiveness. In this blog I'll explain what tool we did eventually select.

First, here's a quick summary of some of the goals my wife and I established when trying to balance my children's freedoms, ease of use, and practical yet safe Internet usage. We wanted to:

Prevent access to inappropriate web content yet I didn't want to use an inherently flawed content filter nor attempt to pre-authorize each and every possible site my child might legitimately need to use for school work or for safe and fun entertainment.
Mentor, and monitor, our children on a safe way to use email, chat, and instant messenging tools as well as profiles on community sites.
Have a program that didn't require constant upgrades in order to monitor activity with every new instant messenging tool or community site our children might use.
Allow sufficient freedom that if our child understood the rules of safe Internet usage that they might be able to surf to new sites and interact with their friends online without us physically watching their every move.

After doing some research we settled on eBlaster from SpectorSoft. SpectorSoft offers several different programs / versions but the premise is the generally the same -- capture the user's activity either by logging every keystroke made by the user or by taking screen captures at regular intervals. We selected eBlaster because:

We could install it yet it was virtually impossible to detect on the computer or disable.
It captured each and every keystroke made by the person using the computer. And I mean everything. It doesn't matter what application the person is using it captures everything they type and places it into a very nice log file organized by user, time and the application they were using. So if they typed their username and password into their MySpace account we can see in the log that they typed the MySpace URL first, pressed enter and then typed in their username and password and pressed enter. Every action is captured.
It captures BOTH sides of the instant messenging chat sessions for Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Skype, and many others. We can see in the log the back and forth chatter labeled by their usernames from every individual in the chat session.
It can be configured to immediately forward any email sent from the PC to us.
It can be configured to immediately email us if certain keywords (naughty words or personal information) is ever typed.
It can be configured to email a summary and a detailed log of the previous day's activity to one or more email accounts.

It's really been the best solution we've found so far. The first thing we did was to tell our son that we installed the software and how it worked. We never hid the fact that we were capturing everything he did on the PC. We have always been completely open and honest about it. We then explained our expectations and outlined our Internet safety rules. We left the PC in his bedroom and began to read the logs on a daily basis.

What have we learned so far? Well despite the fact that he knew we were able to read in the log his activity from the previous day he still struggled to stay out of trouble.

SoapBox == ON I don't care how much you love your child, how much you trust them, or how perfect you think they are, or how honest you feel they are… I'll let you in on a little secret -- we're all born sinners, no one teaches your child to lie about who ate the last cookie, no one teaches your child to fib about brushing their teeth. It's their native sin nature. And although some may have come to know the Lord personally that doesn't mean they will stop sinning. So do yourself and your child a favor and be involved in their life. It doesn't mean watching them 24x7 or monitoring they're every move. That's impossible, impractical, and doesn't build a confident child. We certainly don't read the log on a daily basis (it's very boring, 99% of the conversations between "tweens" is about NOTHING). But it maintains a level of accountability, transparency, and safety while they're under our roof. Even more importantly is to talk to them and pray with them regularly so that they feel comfortable coming to you when they run into trouble or face a difficult situation. Simply monitoring them with software is not parenting. SoapBox == OFF

Back to what we learned reviewing the logs. (Note that it didn't take long for him to become comfortable with the logging and "forget" it was there.) We discovered that our darling and near perfect child (or so we thought) was interfacing with strangers from 10 different U.S. states and Great Britain, he was getting back up in the middle of the night to use the PC and was then too sleepy at school, he had made friends with people that frequently used foul language, and most disturbingly he was portraying himself to be someone he was not -- someone older, more mature, or overly confident. Behind the façade of the PC he was simply not himself, he had created a new 'online' persona.

We're pleased to report that while there have been difficult moments, times when we had to show him the log and discuss some troubling items we found there, overall it's been a true blessing and my son might even agree. We did eventually have to move the PC out of his room and into the kitchen. But now, after 3 - 4 years of use, the logging has become routine and we rarely, if ever, review it. He's developed very safe habits for using the web effectively and he even mentors his friends on Internet safety. We realize that he'll leave for college in a couple of years and he'll likely experiment with the darker side of the Internet. But hopefully with the firm foundation we've set he will not stray far from it.

Final note: I came across this site, Monitoring Software Reviews, and it rated WebWatcher as slightly superior to eBlaster. I plan to download a trial version soon to see if I like it better.

I'll wrap this topic up with 2 more blog entries. One will summarize a few tips and lists some helpful websites for more information. The other will contain a few of my favorite real-life stories (some funny, some serious) that we've experienced with our children's Internet usage.

Curtis S

Keeping Kids Safe Online: Part 3 (Content Filters)

csimmons — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:00:00 GMT

As I previously mentioned, I initially tried to allow my son some freedom by having an Internet connected PC in his room. I thought I could properly monitor and control his access using some of the popular Internet child safety tools that are readily available and heavily marketed.

I tried Net Nanny, CYBSERSitter, and finally settled on Norton Family Edition. Yet as you'll see none of them worked completely. (Now granted I haven't done a new evaluation in the past couple of years as to the improvements made to these products but my search in prior years was pretty exhaustive.)

Website Blocking / Content Filtering

The first thing you're trying to prevent is having your child inadvertently or on purpose visit websites they shouldn't (adult oriented sites, blood and gore, etc.) These programs attempt to solve the problem a few different ways.

Rating Systems like ICRA are one attempt by the industry to control adult content. Web site authors must include special tags/keywords on their website. The safety programs then block access to any site with these tags. This places the burden on the web site author and inherently doesn’t work as it assumes porn companies are honorable and will always "tag" their content as adult.

A more promising method is Content Filtering whereby the safety programs attempt to block access to sites based on the site's content. This is accomplished a few different ways:

URL filtering is where a particular URL or domain name is identified and/or categorized as an objectionable site.
Keyword filtering is where certain words and phrases are used to trigger the blocking of web sites. Such words might include "sex", "XXX", "porn", "gambling", etc.

URL and Keyword filtering are insufficient, Porn companies WANT you to happen upon their site by porn-napping, cyber-squatting, doorway scams, misspellings, advertising, looping, mouse-trapping, etc.

Dynamic content filtering is where each website's content is evaluated immediately before it is displayed. Dynamic content filtering can use a myriad of ways to evaluate content; object analysis, keyword analysis, source of objects, link analysis, and image recognition. This is relatively new and unproven technology.

Truly a combination of all three is necessary but will never be completely accurate nor sufficient.

I think the following graphic tells the whole story. It's a review of the top selling Content Filters, if you look closely you'll notice something very interesting. Look at the last row, Filtering Effectiveness, note that NONE of them got a perfect 5 out of 5. So your child may still be exposed to undesirable content. The tools are basically admitting that their inherently flawed.

Email / Chat / Instant Messaging

As the statistics showed email is "old school" to most kids. Instead they rely heavily on Instant Messaging tools like Microsoft IM, AIM, Trillian, and the one my kid uses the most, Xfire. And they post messages back and forth on community sites like Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, LiveJournal, etc.

So how do you combat illicit behavior from this messaging tools and online communities? Well some of the filtering tools then and now support time limits on Internet usage, application blocking, etc. However, I found it to be a never ending battle. At the time Norton had controls for instant messenging programs from AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo. But it wasn't long till my kid switched to XFire and then Norton couldn't handle it. And I'm sure that as soon as they did then a new tool would be out and my kid would switch to it.

So I went back to the drawing board in search of simpler yet more comprehensive solution. Tomorrow I'll explain what I do now to control / monitor my children's Internet usage.

Curtis S

Keeping Kids Safe Online: Part 2 (Statistics)

csimmons — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 11:00:00 GMT

We moved into our current home about 7 years ago, my son had just turned 9 years old. Like any good IT person would do I had an Internet connection installed in every room (this was prior to great wireless solutions). Soon after I built a new PC for my son and placed it in his room. I called it "Internet with a door", meaning he could close the door while surfing. Now I realized this was not ideal but I have a good kid and I HAD A PLAN (or so I thought). I would install one of the many available Internet child safety programs on his PC. Boy was I misguided as to their effectiveness and to my son's resourcefulness! The tools were pretty much worthless and my kid was much more clever than I thought.

Before I get into what did and did NOT work, here some facts about Internet usage (stats are from Enough.org and ProtectKids.com, of course most statistical data lags several years so it would be safe to assume the numbers are much higher):

Internet Usage

93% of all Americans between 12 and 17 years old use the Internet
While adults still view e-mail as the must-have, "killer application" online, teens report that they view e-mail as something to use to talk to "old people”; Instead, teens prefer instant messaging — 75% of online teens — or about two-thirds of all teens — say they use IMs, compared to only 42% of online adults

Chat Rooms

50% of high school students "talk" in chat rooms or use instant messaging (IM) with Internet strangers
69% of teens regularly receive personal messages online from people they don't know and most of them don't tell a trusted adult about it
One in five children who use computer chatrooms has been approached over the Internet by pedophiles
30% of teenage girls polled by the Girl Scout Research Institute said they had been sexually harassed in a chatroom. Only 7%, however, told their mothers or fathers about the harassment because they were worried that their parents would ban them from going online"

Parental Control

31% of 7th- to 12th-graders pretended to be older to get onto a website
Only 25% of 7th- to 12th-graders with a computer at home say it has a filter or parental controls on it
Nine out of 10 children aged between eight and 16 have viewed pornography on the Internet. In most cases, the sex sites were accessed unintentionally when a child, often in the process of doing homework, used a seemingly innocent sounding word to search for information or pictures

Online Profiles and Personal Information

75% of girls say their parents have set up rules about online use, but most say parental involvement is limited to prohibitions such as "don't talk to strangers," and "don't give out personal information." (Though 57% say they follow parents' rules, 43% admit they don't.)
Most girls say they can get around parents' rules; 86% say they can secretly chat, 57% can read parents' e-mail, and 54% can carry on a cyber love affair. Nearly half say they're able to set up an in-person meeting with an online friend (46%) and get into a porn site (42%)
38% of high school students sometimes hide their online activities from their parents
71% percent of teens have established online profiles (including those on social networking sites such as MySpace, Friendster and Xanga)
Teens readily post personal info online. 64 percent post photos or videos of themselves, while more than half (58 percent) post info about where they live.
Children aged seven to 17 who surf the net, 29% percent would freely give out their home address and 14% would freely give out their e-mail address if asked
20% of students in middle school as well as high school admit that they have met face-to-face with someone they first met on the Internet

Keeping Kids Safe Online: Part 1

csimmons — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 15:26:00 GMT

Over the next few blog entries I'm going to depart from discussing leadership and technology discussions as it relates to business and instead focus on how they relate at home.

News magazine shows like 60 Minutes, PrimeTime, and Dateline have been popular for many, many years. Sometimes they expose corruption in large companies or government and sometimes some helpful consumer hints from John Stossel. I stopped watching them when the murder mysteries and celebrity interviews dominated their line-up. They had this powerful medium and audience yet focused on gossip.

That's why I was so pleased to see the show "To Catch a Predator", they were finally doing something worthwhile with their airtime. "To Catch a Predator" is a disgusting display of humanity's worst in sin behavior yet it is one of the most important shows you'll ever watch.

The Show's Premise

NBC teams up with local law enforcement and a non-profit group called Perverted Justice. They setup in a home in a neighborhood that probably looks very much like the one you live in. One of them poses as a decoy in an Internet chat room, normally acting as a 13 year old male or female. It doesn't take long for an adult, anywhere from 25 to 75 years old, to contact the decoy attempting to strike up a chat conversation. In just a few minutes the adult predator turns the conversation to sex and lewd acts. I won't go into it details but there are things discussed that only the devil himself could imagine.

In order to help with prosecution the decoy asks the predator to bring specific items over to the house such as a cherry limeade or a particular flavor of ice cream. When the predator arrives at the home they always bring the specific items. The items, along with the log of the chat discussion, makes it easy for the police to show their intent to solicit sex from a minor. Once the predator is in the door then Chris Hansen and the cameras come out to confront the pervert. Amazingly very few run or hide their face. They admit their wrong and make up endless excuses or wild promises that this is their first time to do this.

The predators range from 25 to 75 years old, always men (regardless of whether the decoy was male or female). They are blue collar, white collar, single, married, repairmen, programmers (one from Nickelodeon!) and even pastors and rabbis! Ugh. Even more amazing is that many are familiar with the show or were even caught before on prior episodes, yet the lure of their deviant behavior overrides common sense.

Why is this show important?

Well apart from the obvious (they are catching and prosecuting bad guys) it is educating the public (you) as to the very real danger that exists on the Internet. If you have a child (typically between 8 - 16 years old) with unmonitored access to the Internet then you might as well be driving them up and down the red light district with a "For Sale" sign on them. Children do not need to look for trouble on the Internet, the predators are looking for them.

If you haven't watched "To Catch a Predator" then you need to watch at least one episode. It will scare you into action at home to put controls on your child's Internet usage. Fortunately there are ways to keep your kids safe online while allowing them a few freedoms as well. Over the next few blog entries I'll explain my personal experience and learnings as a father of two children (11 and 15) fighting the battle of the Internet in our home.

Curtis S