(Credit:
Echometrix)
The Department of Defense has pulled a parental control product from its online store serving military families after learning that the company collects childrens' data, according to documents the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) obtained from the government agency.
EPIC has filed a complaint (PDF) with the Federal Trade Commission alleging that Echometrix, maker of FamilySafe parental control software, violates the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting personal information from children and disclosing it to third parties for market intelligence purposes. Echometrix denies the allegations.
After learning that the Defense Department's Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) Web site offers the Echometrix product for sale, EPIC filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Defense Department.
The agency complied with the FOIA request. Among the documents provided to EPIC were e-mails between Echometrix and a manager at the AAFES Exchange Online Mall who wanted to know how customer information is collected and whether it is used for marketing purposes.
"During the installation process we fully disclose all of Family Safe's procedures and clearly display an opt-out button for all anonymous aggregate data sharing in our (EULA) End User License Agreement," an Echometrix e-mail explains.
"The collection of AAFES customer information (personal or otherwise) for any other purpose than to provide quality customer service is prohibited" by the agreement retailers sign to sell products through the AAFES site, the online mall manager writes in an e-mail. "Giving our customers the ability to opt out does not address this issue. [It] is prohibited in any case. Because of this, we must remove Sentry Parental Controls from the Exchange Online Mall."
Asked for comment, a Department of Defense spokeswoman said the Echometrix product was available on the online mall from September 25 until October 15. "To the best of our knowledge, no military personnel signed up for the service during the approximately three weeks it was available," Air Force Lt. Col. April D. Cuningham, the public affairs officer, wrote in an e-mail.
Echometrix collects information from children to help parents filter out Web sites, analyzes that information and then sells it to third-parties for market intelligence research, said Kimberly Nguyen, the EPIC lawyer who is handling the case.
The data includes personally identifiable information of children, including IM screen names which can be linked to e-mail addresses, she said.
"The collection of childrens' data raises serious privacy concerns, and even the Defense Department realizes that," Nguyen said in an interview.
Echometrix denied the allegations.
"Echometrix does not collect personally identifiable information or expose the source of any digital content. The company has never and will never collect, distribute or sell personal information as defined by COPPA (the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act)," the company said in a statement.
The FTC did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.
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.
UPDATED: Corrected list of supported messaging protocols.
Known for its security software, Symantec on Tuesday launched a new program aimed at educating parents about their children's online usage. Norton Online Family, now available in beta, is a parental control suite with multiple levels of restriction and an emphasis on usage reporting.
Norton Online Family makes your child's surfing habits available from any browser.
(Credit: Symantec)Citing a Rochester Institute of Technology study that found a huge gap between the percentage of parents versus children who report no online supervision, Symantec says that Online Family is intended to bridge that gap by "fostering communication" between parents and their kids. According to the RIT study, only 7 percent of parents think their children have no online supervision, while 66 percent of kids think they go unsupervised.
To address that, Online Family uses a desktop client called the Norton Safety Minder for Windows and Mac that reports to the parents' Norton Family account with options to e-mail notifications, too. Norton Online Family features parental-controlled customization levels based on the computer's user accounts, so that multi-child families can have different monitoring levels for different kids. It runs in the system tray, too, so that its presence is obvious to all users.
Online Family can log Web sites, block sites using both a topic blocker or a traditional blacklist, and report on social-networking activities. When it tracks visited Web sites, it automatically filters out advertisement URLs that get pinged when visiting media-rich sites. This makes the log easier to parse through.
Online Family includes some innovative features that lend credibility to the claim that this is more than just a souped-up keylogger or blacklist. The blocked sites feature, for example, can be set so that kids can "appeal" to their parents for approval via either e-mail or a Norton-based chat app. It can also be set so that it lets kids through to see the flagged site, regardless of parental approval, but then the parents' log flags the visited site. The responsibility of discussing the content, of course, is left up to parental discretion.
Online Family uses a clean design to make control settings easier to change.
(Credit: Symantec)Importantly, Online Family tracks how children represent themselves on social-networking sites, and alerts parents when a child misrepresents their age. Age misrepresentation, Symantec said, was often an indicator of a child associating with people or groups that the parents weren't aware of. It also keeps track of how long a kid has spent on a social-networking site, what time they log in and out, and how often they visit the site.
The new program monitors client-based instant messaging, too. This includes Google/Jabber, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, AOL, Skype, ICQ, Trillian's native chat protocol, as well as Trillian's multi-protocol features and Digsby's, too. However, site-based messaging can not be tracked. Once a child logs into Facebook, for example, Online Family won't be able to follow what they're doing within the site.
Other monitors include a personal information blocker, where personal information specific to the child can be blocked from being sent out from the computer, a parental notification whenever a kid creates a new account on any site, a time monitor to enforce a "computer curfew," and a notification for when the Norton Safety Minder is turned off.
Online Family requires a Norton account, and the registration is free until the program leaves beta. Final pricing for the Online Family stable release that's expected in the spring has yet to be announced, but the beta trial is free for now. Symantec has said that they want to make Norton Online Family affordable, though, so it's unlikely that the price point will be exorbitant.
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