Webware

Although some of us remember life before computers and the Internet, there's a new generation of children who don't. From an early age, they're on PCs, playing games, and in many cases, learning about the Internet.

That's why it's so important to safeguard your children while they're surfing the Web. The Internet can be a scary place, but these resources will help keep the bad stuff away:

Glubble Glubble bills itself as a family "social network" and browser. Although I'm not entirely convinced that it's a social network, it does do a fine job of ensuring your kids stay safe online.

Glubble lets you upload content like photos, videos, or special moments for your family to see. But where it shines is in controlling what your kids can do on the Web. All the sites they can browse are approved by you. Whenever they go to different sites, it's recorded so you can see what your kids are up to when they use the computer. Glubble provides your kids with several activities, including games and puzzles. It's a nice app for both the family and the children.

Set up your kids in Glubble.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Kido'z Kido'z is an Adobe AIR application that safeguards your children as they browse the Web. But unlike normal browsers, Kido'z determines what your kids can and cannot view.

After you download Kido'z, you'll be brought to a page showing icons for a handful of popular franchises for children, including Mickey Mouse, Dora the Explorer, and others. When you click on one of those options, you'll be brought to the subject's respective Web page within the app. You can click around as you would if you were using Firefox. Kido'z works well and it will help keep your kids safe from some of the Web's dangers.

Choose between these services to help keep your kids safe.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

An Internet safety study (PDF) just released by Cox Communications shows that teens may be a bit more safety conscious than previously thought.

The survey, which was done by Harris Interactive, asked 655 13- to 18-year-olds about their online and cell phone behavior, specifically addressing issues of cyberbullying and sexting. The study was in partnership with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and "America's Most Wanted Host" John Walsh.

For the purposes of the study, cyberbullying was defined as "harassment, embarrassment, or threats online or by text message," while sexting referred to "sending sexually suggestive text or e-mails with nude or nearly-nude photos."

(Credit: Cox Communications Teen Online & Wireless Survey)

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of teens (72 percent) have a social-networking profile, while 73 percent use cell phones and 91 percent have an e-mail address.

What they know vs. what they do
The study raises an interesting contradiction. 59 percent of the teens say that posting personal information or photos on public blogs or social-networking sites is either "somewhat unsafe" or "very unsafe." Only 7 percent say it's "very safe," while 34 percent say it's "somewhat safe." Yet, when asked about their own behavior, 62 percent of the kids post photos of themselves, 50 percent share their real age, 45 percent the name of their school, and 41 percent the city where they live. When it comes to more private information, only 4 percent post their address, 9 percent "places where you typically go," and 14 percent post their cell phone number.

The study's executive summary explains, "Though they are aware of the risks, many teens expose personal information about themselves online anyway."

That revelation appears alarming but after looking at other research about teen online risk, I actually find it reassuring.

What kids say they know about online risks appears to be what adults have been telling them for years. But when you look at the real risk factors, their behavior isn't nearly as dangerous as even teens say they think it is.

An in-depth and academically rigorous 2005 study from the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center found that posting personal information online does not, by itself, correlate with risk. As all of the studies show, millions of kids engage in this practice and very few encounter any serious problem as a result. Let's face it, the whole premise behind sites like Facebook and MySpace is to share that type of information and despite some of the hysteria, there have been very few reported problems of young people being victimized as a result of them putting this type of information online.

Of course, nothing--including attending school--is 100 percent safe, but the 34 percent who said that posting personal information online is "somewhat safe" are getting it right.

Cyberbullying and sexting numbers not as bad as thought
The cyberbullying numbers are also quite reassuring, especially when you compare them to some earlier studies.

The summary points out that "Cyberbullying is widespread among today's teens, with over one-third having experienced it, engaged in it, or known of friends who have who have done either." But that one-third is cumulative of bullies, people who have been bullied and even people who know someone who's been bullied.

The survey found that approximately 19 percent of teens say they've been cyberbullied online or via text message and that 10 percent say they've cyberbullied someone else. The largest group, 27 percent, say they have "seen or heard of a friend who was bullied" online, with 16 percent saying they've "seen or heard of a friend who's bullied others online or by cell phone.

Of course any amount of bullying is unacceptable but the numbers from this survey are lower than several previous studies.

There is also good news about sexting. The most widely quoted study on sexting from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy reported (PDF) that 20 percent of teens "say they have sent/posted nude or semi-nude pictures or video of themselves." But the data from the Cox survey showed that while 20 percent of teens "have engaged in sexting," that number, too, is cumulative. Only 9 percent "sent a sext," while 17 percent received one, and 3 percent forwarded a "sext." Again, that 9 percent number is too high but it's less than half the 20 percent figure commonly used. And 90 percent of the kids who sent sexts said that nothing bad happened, even though 74 percent of the kids agreed that sexting is "wrong." Twenty-three percent felt that it's OK if both parties are OK with it and only 3 percent said "there is nothing wrong with it."

This survey, said Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use Executive Director Nancy Willard, "clearly demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of young people have not engaged in risk-taking online behavior or been harmed online. Also, it appears that teens are sensitive to the potentially damaging implications of the material they post online."

While the news from this survey is mostly good, there is still a significant minority of teens who are harming others, being victimized by other teens, or putting themselves at risk. That's why it's important for parents to talk with their teens about appropriate use of the Internet. Don't scare them or shut down their use, but do remind them to mind their manners, think before they post, and seek help if someone is bullying or harassing them.

As a followup to my post from Tuesday about the ability for someone to view porn from within Bing, I just heard from a Symantec spokesperson that the company's Internet monitoring and filtering service, OnlineFamily.Norton (review), can't yet prevent Bing users from searching sexually explicit terms for Web sites or videos. The company plans to add Bing to its protected search engines in the next release. Other major search engines, including Google, are covered by the software's SafeSearch feature.

In the meantime, Symantec recommends that parents use OnlineFamily.Norton to block access to all of Bing--which isn't particularly good for Microsoft.

OnlineFamily is a free Windows and Mac application that can be used to block sites and monitor a child's online behavior. Unlike some Internet-monitoring programs, it doesn't operate in stealth mode so, if parents use that feature, kids know that their Web activities are being watched.

Because Bing plays videos within its own site and doesn't require the user to click through, checking the browser history or using monitoring programs like OnlineFamily would only show that they visited Bing.com, not what videos they watched from within the site.

Editors' note: In the original version of this blog, we used the beta name for this product. The official name is OnlineFamily.Norton.

Back in February, Symantec debuted a new security program that sought to help parents talk to their kids about how they use the Internet. OnlineFamily.Norton has been a free beta since then, but this Monday at midnight, the program will leave beta and remain free at least until the end of 2009. The program was originally called Norton Family Online.

OnlineFamily.Norton makes your child's surfing habits available from any browser.

(Credit: Symantec)

This parental control suite provides parents with an interesting and possibly unique approach to online child safety. OnlineFamily.Norton does provide a blacklist, boilerplate for most parental control software. However, the suite offers more than just an On/Off switch, and provides tools that encourage communication between parents and their children.

There's a wide range of control over what sites a child can access. The restrictions can vary from a strict no-access policy that can block specific sites and site categories, to a more lenient notification e-mail sent to the parents when the child visits sites that parents merely want to be warned about. On the child's side, kids are given the option of e-mailing their parents when they're blocked--if the parents allow those e-mails in the first place.

Jody Gibney, product manager for OnlineFamily.Norton, said, "We want to encourage a different philosophical approach, encouraging parents to talk to kids instead of setting up an adversarial relationship." To further that, the program's House Rules can be customized to suit the needs of individual children within each family, a useful feature since a teenager will have different browsing and social-networking interests than an 8-year-old.

The dashboard for OnlineFamily.Norton will change slightly from the beta release, highlighting the options available to parents.

(Credit: Symantec)

It's impossible for a kid not to know that OnlineFamily.Norton is running on their computer's background, since it warns them that it's activated. The log-in process requires that the Norton Safety Minder for Windows and Mac be installed first. The program allows kids to view the House Rules independently of their parents. Parents, on the other hand, are able to see what sites their children have been visiting, including search results for terms the child has queried.

However, the program doesn't provide "reams and reams of information," as Gibney put it. "We want to provide [parents] with enough information to start a discussion without overwhelming them." The program will flag social-network profile inconsistencies, such as discrepancies in a child's stated age or name, for example.

The differences between the beta and the free version are apparently limited to interface enhancements designed to streamline the setup process and provide better access to the information that OnlineFamily.Norton collects. The free version will be available at midnight on Monday. A one-year subscription starting January 1, 2010, is expected to cost $60.

Facebook has removed 5,585 registered sex offenders from its service since May, the Associated Press reported late Thursday.

The tally comes from a joint announcement of two state attorneys general who have made online safety a priority, North Carolina's Roy Cooper and Connecticut's Richard Blumenthal.

This follows several years of back and forth between major social networks and state authorities who have insisted the sites aren't doing enough to keep sex offenders out of their ranks. It's a significant issue, considering social networks' popularity with anyone who's hit adolescence.

Earlier this month, the News Corp.-owned social network MySpace announced that it had removed 90,000 sex offenders' profiles since 2007. Considering Facebook is now bigger than MySpace, the 5,585 seems a little low. But Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer, told the AP that the social network's requirement that members use a real name rather than a nickname may have deterred sex offenders from membership in the first place.

Facebook offered a statement from Kelly later on Friday: "We have been working productively with General Blumenthal and other attorneys general to keep sex offenders off Facebook, and to assure that those who attempt use our site in violation of their parole or other restrictions are brought to justice. This is one of many measures that we continue to take to make Facebook a safer and more trusted online environment."

This post was updated at 9 a.m. PST with comment from Facebook.

In one of the more sordid accounts of online predation we've read recently, the Associated Press reported on Thursday that a Wisconsin teen used a fake Facebook profile to blackmail his classmates into giving sexual favors.

Eighteen-year-old high school student Anthony Stancl is accused of creating a Facebook profile belonging to a nonexistent teenage girl and then, between approximately the spring of 2007 and November of 2008, using it to convince more than 30 of his male classmates to send in nude photos or videos of themselves.

Stancl then told many of them that unless they engaged in some sort of sexual activity with him, he would put the photos or videos on the Internet. At least seven of them have said they were coerced into sex acts, which Stancl allegedly documented with a cell phone camera.

There were about 300 photos of underage males, some of which were as young as 15, on Stancl's computer, police in the teen's hometown of New Berlin, Wisc., told the AP. Stancl had originally come under police scrutiny in November, after he issued a bomb threat that temporarily closed New Berlin High School.

The emergence of the case comes at a time when social-networking safety is back in the spotlight. After a subpoena from the Connecticut attorney general, the News Corp.-owned networking site MySpace handed over the names of 90,000 registered sex offenders that had profiles on the site, and pressure mounted for Facebook to do something similar.

What's important to keep in mind, lest this incident set off more hysteria about the dangers of teens and Facebook profiles, is that this sort of activity could have happened over an instant-message client, another social network, or an online message board.

It's true, however, that the Internet can cloak a criminal in anonymity or a fabricated identity--in one particularly tragic case, a woman posed as a teenage boy on MySpace and allegedly harassed a 13-year-old girl to the point of suicide.

A recent report from the Internet Safety Technical Task Force concluded that threats to minors online are more complicated than the stereotype of a lone adult seeking out vulnerable teens: in the case of Anthony Stancl, for example, the sexual predator was one of the victims' own high-school classmates.

MySpace announced on Tuesday that it has deleted 90,000 accounts owned by registered sex offenders. It's good news for families, for MySpace, and for the state attorney general of Connecticut, who demanded last month that the News Corp.-owned social network turn over a roster of names.

It's especially good news for Sentinel, the security company that MySpace used to track down the accounts. And now Sentinel appears to be trying to take advantage of its success with MySpace into a PR campaign partly aimed at getting Facebook into signing a contract as well.

John Cardillo, the CEO of Sentinel, gave an interview to TechCrunch in which he said thousands of those who were banned from MySpace can now be found on Facebook--not yet one of Sentinel's clients.

"As the first and only social-networking site to use state-of-the-art technology to identify and remove registered sex offenders from its site, MySpace is proud of its leadership position and hopes that Facebook follows our lead in providing their members with the same protections," a statement from MySpace read. "As part of our long-standing partnership with law enforcement and state attorneys general, we will continue to readily provide information on these removed offenders for their investigations."

Unfairly accused? With the headline of the TechCrunch post referring to sex offenders on Facebook as "refugees," and Cardillo calling the Palo Alto-based social network a "safe haven" for them, you'd think that there was some kind of mass creation of Facebook profiles on the part of sex offenders who had seen their MySpace profiles axed. There is, however, no evidence of that. Millions of people have profiles on both social networks, so it's safe to assume that sex offenders probably do as well.

Facebook's representatives weren't thrilled by the "safe haven" allegation, to say the least.

"For a company that has a mission to keep kids safe, we find it irresponsible that they wouldn't share this with us," representative Barry Schnitt told TechCrunch in an addendum to the tech blog's original post. "Or, if not with us, how about with law enforcement? This could have been an announcement that Sentinel and Facebook removed 8,000 potential sex offenders. We still don't have the information on who they are. If you are willing to share that with us, we will investigate immediately."

Later, Schnitt told CNET News that while about 4,600 of the 8,000 names on Sentinel's list were directly tied to Facebook user IDs and have now had the corresponding accounts disabled, the rest only matched up to names. One of the names on the list, for example, was "Aaron Smith"--which has more than 500 member matches on Facebook.

Chris Kelly, Facebook's chief privacy officer, also described in a reaction to the story how Facebook monitors its service to protect minors. "We have not yet had to handle a case of a registered sex offender meeting a minor through Facebook," he said in a statement.

PR scuffles between Facebook and MySpace are nothing new. In this case, however, it appears that a third party, Sentinel, is using its success with one client (MySpace) to force another (Facebook) into signing up for the service as well--and is doing so by manipulating media coverage to back Facebook into a corner.

What we would prefer to see is a more pragmatic and methodical policing of social networks for ongoing threats. Shock-and-awe press tactics aren't the way to go, especially because threats on the Web are much more complicated than they may appear.

Let's all take a deep breath and remember that this is about the safety of kids everywhere, not about marketing or selling a product, or looking better in the eyes of the world than your industry competitor.

From a MySpace-related suicide to hate speech on YouTube, the world of user-generated content has been plagued by plain, old nastiness since its early days.

That's why, as part of the Family Online Safety Institute conference in Washington, D.C., YouTube parent company Google has unveiled an "Abuse and Safety" resource guide.

According to a post on the official Google blog, the new section of YouTube's help center features "straightforward safety tips and multimedia resources from experts and prominent safety organizations" regarding topics like cyberbulling, privacy, spam, and sexual exploitation.

YouTube also said that the resource guide will make it more straightforward to find out how to manage privacy and safety settings.

The dark underbelly of online video was in the spotlight once again when a Florida teenager used live-streaming service Justin.tv to broadcast his suicide last month.

Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. subsidiary that owns social sites MySpace and Photobucket, has signed on as the latest member of the Family Online Safety Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to "identifying and promoting best practice, tools and methods in the field of online safety, that also respect free expression."

As the first social network to become a nationwide teen craze, MySpace became a frequent target for safety advocates--including state lawmakers, who ended up working with the social network to create a safety plan for kids and teens online.

Other prominent members of FOSI include AOL, AT&T, Cisco, Comcast, Google, Loopt, Microsoft, Ning, Verizon, and a number of international telecommunications carriers.

"FOSI has been a dedicated leader in promoting online safety and we look forward to contributing to the work they do," Fox Interactive Media Chief Security Officer Hemanshu Nigam said in a statement Friday. "Internet safety is a key priority for us as we strive to keep all teens safer online. This new membership will further strengthen our efforts and will also allow us to share our expertise with other members."

FOSI holds an annual conference about online safety: this year's will be on December 11 in Washington, D.C.