Beware Child Monitoring Software

Boing Boing today lists a story I originally saw break on other sites earlier this holiday weekend. Web monitoring software designed to help protect children is actually collecting information from children's chat sessions and selling it to market research companies.

Sentry and FamilySafe are the two brands at the center of the storm. Parent company EchoMetrix developed a data-mining tool called Pulse to help businesses better tap into the data its software collects. Using that data, marketers could explore the mindsets of children and youth, presumably to aid marketing efforts. For example, the Web monitoring software captures communications from public and private chat sessions to help determine how teens feel about movies, games and other trends.

This is one more reason to avoid software-based Web filtering and monitoring applications. Other reasons are: they're expensive, they rob system resources and slow performance, they cause incompatibilities with other programs and they're easily circumvented.

Better solutions are hardware- or network-based. While not every home can reasonably implement a business-class content-filtering router, Open DNS offers everyone a simple, free service that can block most children's access to inappropriate material. For more information, visit Open DNS on the Web.