As a parent, you have to ask yourself: “Am I really comfortable with what my child is doing online?” For most parents the answer is – no. And it is because most parents don’t really know what their children are doing online, who they talk to, or what private information they share. No matter how much you trust your child to do the right thing, there are just too many peer pressures and other dangers lurking in cyberspace for you to give them unsupervised access to the net – but it happens.
With the internet as popular as it is, there has been an undoubted major shift from the traditional mailing to instant chatting service. Chat programs are as popular as ever as a means to communicate with friends, family, co-workers, and more. But with this popularity comes dangers as well including internet predators posing as others who may entice your children into giving personal information or even meeting in person to employees simply wasting away the day talking to friends while they should be working.
The Chat Monitoring Software (few listed here) here is a key to surmount your dilemma. It records all chats and instant messages from all the popular chat services such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN, ICQ, AIM, and more.The Chat monitoring software on helps protect your children and users, increase employee productivity, catch your cheating loved one in the act, and much more.
However the reason for my write up is not the advertisement of these softwares but a security concern of the innocent beings where parents may be inadvertently and unknowingly allowing the company to read their children’s chat messages — and sell the marketing data gathered.
2 days back a news reported on Yahoo! revealed how the monitoring softwares may impose a threat to the personal information of kids. It stated that software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands could read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.
The software brands in question are developed by Echometrics Inc. , a company based in Syosset, N.Y.
In June, EchoMetrix unveiled a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms.
EchoMetrix CEO Jeff Greene said the company complies with U.S. privacy laws and does not collect any identifiable information.”We never know the name of the kid — it’s bobby37 on the house computer,” Greene said. What Pulse will reveal is how “bobby37″ and other teens feel about upcoming movies, computer games or clothing trends. Such information can help advertisers craft their marketing messages as buzz builds about a product.
Parents who don’t want the company to share their child’s information to businesses can check a box to opt out. But that option can be found only by visiting the company’s Web site, accessible through a control panel that appears after the program has been installed. It was not in the agreement contained in the Sentry Total Home Protection program The Associated Press downloaded and installed Friday. According to the agreement, the software passes along data to “trusted partners.” Confidentiality agreements prohibit those clients from sharing the information with others.
Read more from Yahoo!
Greene says that the service can let companies “in real time, find out what the kids are saying about your product and
all your competitors’ products…I can’t tell you who said it, I can only just tell you that a lot of kids said it.”
David Perry of TrendMicro, which includes parental control tools in some of its security products, said he isn’t aware of any other parental control products that capture this type of information. “This is a severe case of what we used to call spyware,” he said. Perry worries that even though the software may not collect the names of the children, “those names could be included in some of the chat messages.”
Well the process of inferring the penchants of children at the cost of their personal information being shared is a serious concern. Safeguarding being the objective of these parental control products now turning out into a market of selling private data to others is a major issue. People before clicking onto the licensing agreement briskly must give a thorough reading for unwittingly, you may be the one endangering your own security.
2 Responses
Oh, puhleeze. Google does the exact same thing, for example, in Gmail. Everyone who blogs is hoping to become a money earning site, you see no shame there, correct? So why is the concept considered evil when someone tries the same rubrik with the worlds highest spenders (kids rarely save money and always spend every penny)??
Echometrix Products are Spyware
Many industry experts have raised red flags on the parental security products sold by the company Echometrix. These products are named Sentry and Pulse. What it is marketed to be is security software to protect children from the ills found on the Internet.
After much hype, the products by Echometrix was snapped up by the public. Now the real issues have come up. The software has been found to record conversations done online by the user. The recorded data is then collected by the company and then filtered to obtain what it calls marketing data. This data is eventually sold to third parties to be used to format its marketing campaigns.
The problem arises is in the consent given by the user. Echometrix claims it obtains consent by the questionnaire in the product boot up. Many experts say that this is not in compliance with existing legal requirements on consent to obtain private data. Secondly, there is a clear prohibition on obtaining information from children of any age. The programs sold by Echometrix clearly violated the statutory prohibition.
Now, there has been an Federal Trade Commission complaint filed against Echometrix. This is the start of the opening of Pandora’s box on the problems that Echometrix has created. First, their questionable funding needs to be reviewed. Secondly, how the program operates and obtains information needs to be reviewed for its legality. Thirdly, the marketing data and its users needs to be admonished as to the illegality of the source of the information.