This week, AOL unleashed a new tool to help parents sleep at night, a tool called SafeSocial that protects kids on the internet. SafeSocial grants access to key pieces of information about kids’ internet accounts, social media friends, photos and posts with key words that respond to danger. A signature of the tool seems to be the fact that kids have to agree to their parents’ use of SafeSocial. In other words, SafeSocial is less like spying than say, supervising with permission. Read more
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Monitoring your child’s online behavior can help protect them from threats, but it isn’t always easy to find the time or the privacy to do so. That’s why SafetyWeb has created a new child protection app for mobile devices to help parents monitor their child’s activity on the go. It is designed to send parents immediate alerts if their children are engaging in high-risk online behavior, so that they can act quickly. With all of the privacy and data issues cropping up around the social web lately, this type of application is sure to offer many concerned parents a sigh of relief.
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When I was a youngster there wasn’t much you could do to block me from accessing most websites out there, and there certainly weren’t a lot of websites designed specifically for the kids or teen demographics. But now, with child safety being an important parental concern for online activity and the potential for massive marketing to kids and teens, a plethora of sites, browsers, software and tools have emerged in the years since worrying about what someone will say to me in an AOL chat room.
Below is a list of the top ten sites and browsers out there for the kids and teens of today.
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A new policy in the U.K. will force social networks to promote a service which encourages children to call the police if they are being targeted by online predators. This is a new step in the move toward making social networking sites safer for children. Early in May Anthony posted that social networks may be used by gangs to recruit your children.
This news comes on the heels of a report released yesterday which states that more than a quarter of eight to 11-year-olds who are online in the UK have a profile on a social network. Personally, I didn’t find the research that surprising considering the proliferation of social networks such as Imbee and Club Penguin.
The report also suggested that social networks begin to explore tools that verify users ages as currently there are no systems in place. The U.K. government has been one of the leading advocates of implementing policies to protect children online. Over the coming months and years I would expect to see a continuation of this as more users spend more time socializing via the web.
