The Famundo Blog: Category Internet Safety

Protecting Student's Privacy Online

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 12:44:00 -0400

The internet is a powerful and cost-effective way to distribute information to a large group of people. This is especially true for schools. A school can post their schedule online where students and parents can get up-to-date information quickly and easily. It is hard to imagine any school not having their own website today with some sort of schedule information on it.

But there have concerns raised recently about who has access to this information. Just as this information is available for viewing by the student body, it is also viewable by those who don’t have the best of intentions. Predators can have easy access to information such as what time school gets out or where a field trip might take place.

Famundo solves this problem by providing multiple layers of permissions (5 layers to be exact) to their online calendar solution, so only those given permission have viewing access.

How does this work? A school creates a Members Group that has a single sign in and password.

This information is distributed to the student body, which can then log in to see their schedules. No one without the sign in and password would be able to view it. A new Members Group can be created every year or as often as necessary.

The default view access for events should be set for All Staff and Members Only, so that going forward, any events will only be viewable by someone who has the correct sign in and password.

For those events that you want viewable by the public, such as a concert or sporting event, can be set on the fly when creating the event.

We would love to hear from you about any ideas or suggestions on ways you have used Famundo to solve problems within your family or organization. Thank you.

MySpace to offer parental notification software

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 11:44:00 -0500

The Wall Street Journal reports that MySpace is planning to offer free parental notification software

Parents who install the monitoring software on their home computers would be able to find out what name, age and location their children are using to represent themselves on MySpace. The software doesn’t enable parents to read their child’s e-mail or see the child’s profile page and children would be alerted that their information was being shared. The program would continue to send updates about changes in the child’s name, age and location, even when the child logs on from other computers

Here is the way the software, code named Zephyr, works.

A parent can download the free software onto his or her home computers. The software will identify any user who logs onto MySpace from those computers and collect his or her user name, age, and hometown. That information will be stored on the hard drive and parents (actually, whoever has the administrative privileges on that computer) can access it using a password. That information is also publicly available to anyone who visits MySpace’s Web site, but many parents have trouble locating their kids’ profile pages because kids often don’t use their real names.

Of course, this might be too little too late and may have the effect of turning off many of it’s younger users, who are moving to social networking sites like FaceBook and Xanga.

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes down. To read the entire article, click here.

Cool tool for CyberSafety

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 15:03:00 -0500

Here is a cool tool for finding a cybersafety solution that will work for you, GetNetWise.

It allows you to select the type of solution you are looking for and specify your operating system, so you don’t have to find a product you like, only to find it doesn’t work with your system.

Zoo: A New Kid-Safe Search Engine

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 07:08:47 -0500

Via LifeHacker there is a new search engine, Zoo.com, that promises to protect kids from inappropriate web content by filtering out sexually explicit material.

Zoo makes searching the Internet easy by bringing together results from the best search engines and content providers around. Using Zoo to search the web gets you results from Google, Yahoo!, and Wikipedia. When you search using the news tab, you see the latest from ABC, Fox and Yahoo! News.

Add this one to your arsenal of parenting tools.

The internet safety debate continues

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 10:59:09 -0500

From the Wall Street Journal

A federal court this month is revisiting the Child Online Protection Act, which threatens criminal penalties for commercial Web site operators that allow children to access material that is “harmful to minors.” The law, passed by Congress eight years ago, has never gone into effect because of a legal challenge from free speech advocates. The Supreme Court has ruled the law is likely unconstitutional and prevented the Justice Department from enforcing it until it is reviewed by a lower court.

The Wall Street Journal Online invited Richard Whidden of the National Law Center for Children and Families, a nonprofit group that has lobbied for COPA and similar measures, to debate the issue with John Morris, a First Amendment lawyer who helped lead the Supreme Court case that overturned COPA’s predecessor, the Communications Decency Act.

To read their conversation about this issue, click here.

Cybertipline

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 17:28:52 -0500

We received the following e-mail this afternoon and I wanted to make sure I posted this asap.

I am working with National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to increase awareness of an important resource – the Cybertipline. I am contacting you because we need your help in spreading the word about this significant cause.

Over the past few months, the issue of online predators and the safety of children online have come to the forefront in the media. NBC Dateline, Oprah and the New York Times have all done features on this increasing danger.

If you are not familiar, Cybertipline was instituted in 1998 and aims to “empower the public to take immediate and direct action to enforce a zero tolerance policy regarding child sexual exploitation.”

Did you know?

Approximately 1 in 5 children is sexually solicited online, but only 1 in 4 tells a parent about the experience.

70% of unwanted sexual solicitations to children occur while the child is using a home computer.

As you can see, there is an urgent need to educate parents, teachers and children alike that there is a safe place where they can report these types of crimes.

It is important to know about resources like this. For further information, click here.

Have a Happy and Safe Halloween from all of us here at Famundo.

MySpace is sooo Last Year

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 19:41:37 -0500

An interesting article in the Washington Post about social networking sites and their fickle teen audience. What was hot last year is now so not hot.

Take Xanga, the hot social networking site before MySpace: In October 2002, the typical Xanga user spent an average of 1 hour and 39 minutes a month on the site, a figure that declined steadily, reaching only 11 minutes last month, according to Nielsen-NetRatings. Friendster, another older site, hit its first usage peak of 1 hour and 51 minutes in October 2003, and then hit another peak of 3 hours and 3 minutes in February 2006. But last month, the average user was on Friendster for a mere 7 minutes.

MySpace usage ramped up heavily during its first year and a half, hitting 2 hours and 25 minutes in October last year. Then it dropped to about 2 hours and held relatively steady there for the past year. Facebook, a younger networking site, is still on a gradual incline, reaching 1 hour and 9 minutes last month .

Read the article here.

Parent Covenant

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 16:03:27 -0400

We just had our annual parent meeting at our daughter’s middle school this week and, as we did last year, we ended the meeting with, for lack of a better term, a parent covenant. This is where parents agree to set limits on what our children are allowed to and not allowed to do, especially when it involves activities that include other children in the class.

This provides a real safety net when your children are having a sleepover or visiting a friend, you know that the other family has agreed to certain standards won’t be broken. It makes a very powerful statement when you can tell your child that the parents in the class have decided this as a group that some activity is not acceptable.

It is interesting how the concerns of parents have changed over the years with changes in technology . Although the Internet and e-mail is still a concern, there was much more discussion over issues like social networking sites, such as MySpace, and text messaging. These weren’t even on the radar when our son started middle school three years ago.

You can read my post regarding last year’s meeting here.

We are very appreciative that our school provides this opportunity and actually encourages this dialog among the parents.

CommonSenseMedia

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 06:55:00 -0400

I am very excited that Jim Steyer, founder of CommonSenseMedia, will be speaking at my son’s school next week. His talk is on The “Internet: Do You Understand How Much It Affects Your Children, How It’s Changing Their Lives and What You Can Do about It.” I’m very interested to hear his perspective on this topic especially now that I have a high schooler.

In case you are not familiar with CommonSenseMedia, get familiar. It is an incredibly valuable tool for parents, on topics covering all media, including the internet, movies TV.

You can sign up for their weekly e-newsletter, which covers all the latest releases.

I’ll report back after I hear his talk.

IM monitoring for parents

richard.kuhlenschmidt@famundo.com (Richard Kuhlenschmidt) — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 07:34:00 -0400

Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Vascellaro talks to Jean Lee about how parents can use Web filtering software to help protect their children from online predators

See the video here. (3 min 16 sec) October 18, 2006

Some of the software mentioned in the video:

IMSafer – basic version is free

SearchHelp – $79.95 for a one year license

BeNetSafe – $19.95 per month or $79.95 per year

SnoopStick – $59.95 plus $24.95 per year