Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Parental cheat sheet – Hacking your children

Seattle Times

While viewing their [MySpace] profile, note the URL, since she also advises occasionally checking the site alone, as well. She doesn’t see this as violating a teen’s privacy since it’s public information.

Okay… so far, so slippery slope…

If your teen hasn’t shown you his or her site, one trick is to check the history file and click on their site from there. Parents can also search for their child’s e-mail address, MySpace display name or key words (school, club, etc.) on Google.com to pull up a MySpace page. Another trick is to search for friends’ names, and then look in their linked contacts for your teen’s site.

If that doesn’t work, go to www.MySpace.com. For the best access, you’ll have to join. This is quite easy. If you don’t want to use your regular e-mail address, create a free one from Yahoo, MSN or Google. Use this to sign up on MySpace (directions are posted on the site).

Monitoring software

Parents can install software to secretly monitor their child’s computer activities – including Web sites, keystrokes, instant messages and e-mails – but it should only be a last resort, Willard advises.

She recommends a graduated approach, starting with the least intrusive (such as checking the site history file) and bumping to more extensive efforts if teens actively try to restrict parent access (such as erasing the history file), break rules or act inappropriately.

…etc; I find this amusing, since to my eyes what they propose does fall into a legally grey area, or I believe it would if it were suggested or done in the UK.

⊞

Comments

3 responses to “Parental cheat sheet – Hacking your children”

  1. xencat
    re: Parental cheat sheet – Hacking your children

    Being <em>in (loco) parentis</em>, though that’s somewhat recursive in this sense, affords the parents a certain leeway in monitoring their childrens activities. I’m not certain how far the Human Rights Act (along with DPA and RIPA) would extend into the home. My feeling is that unless it was perhaps a case of abuse (physical most likely) and that the invasion of privacy was hampering the childs ability to deal with or resolve that abuse, then the courts’ view would be that what happens in the home is the parents’ business. Even at school, the most draconian monitoring systems are freely allowed, both here and in the US. Nothing surpasses big brother, than in the classroom.

    Reply
  2. Weez
    re: Parental cheat sheet – Hacking your children

    Reminds me of the Cosby episode where the eldest son is moaning about his ‘rights’ with regard to something (the telephone? the television? the car?) and his dad (none to gently) reminds him whose name is on the bills (for the telephone, the electricity, the car insurance) that come to the house every month . . . .

    Reply
  3. Brad
    re: Parental cheat sheet – Hacking your children

    I have to wonder if “maintaining an honest and open dialogue with your child” is anywhere in the graduated approach.

    My kid mistyped a game-site URL one time and got hammered by a whack-a-mole pr0n site. His first reaction was to run tell his mother and I.

    All we’ve had to do was ask what he was up to, and he tells us. I’ve looked over his box a couple of times in the course of making back-ups or removing malware, and found nothing I hadn’t known about. And of course, I told him what I was doing on his box as well.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More posts