As kids get older and are likely to demand a little more privacy, some basic technological know-how comes into play. Surprisingly few parents realize how easy it is to find out where their kids have been surfing or to make effective use of simple software that would block access to taboo sites. Dale Berger-Daar, a Chicago early-childhood professional, says she can't check up on her 13-year-old son's activities even if she wants to. "He set the whole computer up," she says. "He can do whatever he wants." Tom Horan, a New Mexico lawyer and lobbyist, doesn't check his teenage sons' e-mail simply because, he acknowledges, he doesn't know how. At least Berger-Daar and Horan are honest. While more than 70% of parents in a recent Jupiter Communications survey asserted that they set at least some restrictions on their kids' Internet activities, a TIME/CNN poll of teenagers last week indicated that the kids see things somewhat differently: 62% said their parents know little or nothing about the websites their kids visit.
I think we know whom to trust. Parents who tell a pollster they're keeping an eye on things may really be relying wishfully on someone--anyone--else, probably at school. But schools and libraries stake a claim on too little of the child's time, and inescapable First Amendment issues make it unlikely that any public agency will be or should be able to play an effective role in controlling Net access and content. That can happen only at home. One family may respond to the Web's enticements by disconnecting the phone line; another may simply make them a regular topic of dinner conversation. And because we're each entitled to cleave to our own parenting ideology, both would be right.
But both should also understand that there are tools that can make the task easier and more effective, chiefly filters that bar access to offensive or dangerous content and monitors that tell you where the browser has been browsing. America Online, despite all the odious get-rich-quick or get-horny-quick e-mail that it can't seem to keep out of my own mailbox, has been particularly effective in helping parents give their children an online experience under the firm guidance of its editors: a "kids-only" AOL account blocks young users from all but full-time-monitored chat rooms and prescreened kid-friendly sites.
Many other filtering systems work differently from AOL's, dumbly applying a list of forbidden words against the content of any site the user tries to see or simply blocking access to a list of sites ruled obscene or otherwise objectionable. In both instances, the filter will almost always work like a blunt instrument. If you tried to get to the home page of the Almaden Valley (California) Youth Soccer League and you had a filter, you would be blocked because the filter, tuned to look out for pedophiles, might have the phrase "Boys Under 12" on the proscribed list. If "sex" is labeled taboo, you can't read the poet Anne Sexton. Katherine Borsecnik, the senior AOL official involved in the development of the service's generally laudable parental controls, acknowledges that "if I have a middle school child who's going to do a research report on breast cancer"--a child with kids-only AOL access can't view sites with even straight medical information about breasts--"I might want to turn off the filters" while helping the child with the research.
Yet the most advanced filters available make it unnecessary to do so. CyberPatrol, a piece of retail software from the same company that manages AOL's Web filters, is a customizable system that allows parents to choose which types of sites to block based on the parents' criteria. I may not want to block my children from information about gay and lesbian politics, but let's say you do: CyberPatrol accommodates. So does Net Nanny.
Many parents don't realize that a simple click on the "history" tab on a browser tool bar will produce a list of links to every site the computer has visited recently. It's true that any canny 13-year-old knows how to delete potentially incriminating evidence from the history files. Already, though, there are several programs available, such as Cyber Snoop (at least the manufacturer doesn't euphemize), that create a tamperproof database--a trail of bread crumbs, as it were--so parents can examine every Web address the computer has visited since the last time Dad checked in. But consider this evidence of the complexity of the privacy issue: Susan Getgood, a vice president of the company that makes CyberPatrol, suggests that monitors have their own problems. "If a preteen is a child of an alcoholic parent," she asks, "and goes to a website that discusses alcohol abuse, and the parent finds out, what happens then?"
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