Se pasaron ahí!!
Parents fret all the time about protecting their kids on Facebook, but many of the products and services I've seen that aim to help are intrusive, and inject the parents into the child's normal, healthy online social life in a way that's awkward for both. You could co-manage your child's account, or "friend" them on the service, which technically has a minimum age of 13. But those are time-consuming and embarrassing practices, especially when the offspring are teenagers, who generally crave some degree of privacy, even if they don't merit full treatment as adults. So I've been testing a service called ZoneAlarm SocialGuard that I think strikes a good balance between safety and privacy, between a parent's peace of mind and a teen's sense of freedom. Every five minutes, it monitors kids' Facebook accounts for approaches by potential predators and strangers, cyber-bullying, age fraud, account hacking, and links to inappropriate or malicious websites. It uses algorithms that look for certain types of language, profile data, or other clues that unwanted activity may be under way. However, SocialGuard does this in a way that is invisible to the kids' friends, and doesn't require the parent to be on guard all the time, or even to be on Facebook at all. If the service finds a possible problem, it emails the parent, the child, or both. This happens outside of Facebook itself. The service doesn't give the parent the ability to directly read, or leave comments on, the child's Facebook wall. ZoneAlarm SocialGuard comes from a veteran security firm, Check Point Software Technologies. It costs $2 a month or $20 a year, though there's a free seven-day trial (the company is also randomly testing a free 30-day trial.) It takes the form of a stand-alone computer program connected to a back-end monitoring service, and can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/hgo0C5. A new version coming in August will add several features, including a toolbar that can deliver SocialGuard warnings when you use Internet Explorer or Firefox.
Before I get into describing how it works, let me note several caveats about SocialGuard. First of all, the program (and toolbar) only work on Windows PCs. There's no version for Macs, Web browsers, smartphones or tablets—and no definite plans for such versions. However, it can monitor Facebook accounts that are accessed by your kids via Macs or mobile devices, or via different Windows PCs. |
No comments:
Post a Comment