Off-the-Shelf Spyware

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August 13, 2008

This is a nice summary of everything wrong with surveillance software:

“When the PC Pandora site opens, for example, a trim lady in a pink shirt pops up and cheerfully declares: ‘At this very moment, there are over 50,000 pedophiles on the Internet trying to take advantage of our children.’ Well then, I better install a program that records everything my kids do online and then spend my afternoons scanning the logs! In the eyes of these monitoring-software companies, MySpace is the devil’s playground. The promotional copy often gives the impression that setting up a page on MySpace is but the merest pretext to an after-school Roman orgy. The message: If you don’t know what ‘LMIRL’ or ‘NIFOC’ or ‘POS’ means, you might as well drop your daughter off at a truck stop right now. (That’s ‘let’s meet in real life,’ ‘naked in front of the computer,’ and ‘parent over shoulder.’)

“It’s also worth noting how these sites stress their excellent phone support—the software packages are being pitched predominately to the technically clueless. If Mom and Dad did know how to use a computer, they could easily find a recent study by the University of New Hampshire’s Crimes Against Children Research Center, ‘Online ‘Predators’ and Their Victims: Myths, Realities and Implications for Prevention.’ Or, quicker yet, they could read an excellent summary of the study by Benjamin Radford at LiveScience. As he explains, the biggest threat to kids is still their parents, the Internet has not increased the amount of sexual abuse of children, and most Web predators rarely use deception as ‘most victims are well aware that the person they are communicating with online is an adult interested in sex.’ Monitor your kids if you want, but recognize that you are spying on them, not protecting them from a new strain of evildoers.”

(Link)