TopChoiceReviews Blog

According to the September issue of the Journal of School Health, around 75% of teenageers who use the internet have been a victim of online bullying. Of those, about 50% of the incidents came from schoolmates and about 45% came from someone they only knew online. The bullying typically involves name calling, insults, password theft, threats, sending inappropriate photos, and spreading rumors.

According to child psychologists, most teens who are bullied online rarely tell their parents for fear of getting on trouble, or having their internet access being taken away or restricted. In turn, most child bullying victims suffer in silence. Psychologists have also found that victims of bullying (whether online or offline) are likely to become depressed, withdrawn, and develop a general disliking for school. This makes them a greater target for further bullying and harassment and also interferes with the ability to concentrate on schoolwork, and in extreme cases, genuinely hate anything associated with school.

As the prevalence of online social networking grows, I would expect the numbers above to grow.

This website - Stopinternetpredators.org - holds the opinion that Google Map’s street view feature is a danger to the security of children and families. They say that the street view feature can be misused by child predators to target children.  They have unleashed a campaign in which the sole purpose is to ban Google street view.

Sample Google street view image:

What do you think? Are they being too overprotective? Is this a valid concern?

One of the newest ways child predators are targeting kids is through online gaming. Online computer gaming is very popular amongst children and teens. Most popular game consoles such as XBOX and Playstation also offer a way to connect to the internet and play various games online with other gamers. Playstation 3 also has integrated text and voice chat as well as the ability to download photos. Child predators are now taking advantage of the online gaming community by posing as a child in an online chat room where children look for gaming teammates. Once they gain trust of the child, they will typically attempt to communicate with them through another method such as email or though instant messaging programs such as MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger and try take the relationship further. There have already been several investigations with online gaming predators.

If your child participates in online gaming, the best thing you as a parent can do  is to educate your children to watch out for strangers online asking them about things other than gaming, especially personal things such as where they live, etc… to tell them to go away and stop communicating with them. We also recommend that you take a proactive approach and consider installing parental control or parental monitoring software which will allow you to monitor and control your child’s email activity, chat activity, websites visited, etc…

If you would like more information about parental control and parental monitoring software, see our parental control software review site where we gather, compare, and review the most popular parental control and parental monitoring software available.

Myspace recently announced that they will now allow parents to submit their child’s email address so when they attempt to create an account using the email address, it will prevent them from creating the account. I really don’t understand the logic behind this. A new email can be created in less than 5 minutes and most teenagers are aware of this. It’s great that they are trying to do something, but I don’t see it being very effective. Any thoughts…?

Let’s face it, children love to play around on computers. They are curious, energetic little creatures. However, there are some things that they just shouldn’t be getting into such as: email, chat programs, personal finances, business related programs, etc… Fortunately there is software our there which allow you to disable various programs on your family computer. You can even take it a step further and disable various programs during various times, for various users. There are a few good ones out there which give you this control, of which you can find at our parental control software site. Whether it’s protecting important email from being deleted, or preventing your kids from chatting with strangers, be comforted knowing that there is a way to control this.

I have actually heard a horror story from a friend who allowed her 11 year old  access to her home office computer, in which she stored important business data.  He  ended up  deleting some Quickbooks data as well as thoroughly messing up various other things. Of course, she probably shouldnt have given him access to her home office PC, but if she used some sort of parental control software with program management capabilities, it would have never happened. Lesson learned.

If you’ve read our review Web Watcher, you know that Web Watcher allows for real time remote monitoring - what you may not know is that Web Watcher also has the ability to track and organize monitored content based on specific words that you choose called ‘alert words’. Think of this as a filter to quickly find specific monitored screenshots or text. Why is this helpful? Well, here are a few reasons:

1. Let’s say you’ve overheard your child talking about a new adult oriented concept that he’s learned. You can enter that word or phrase into Web Watcher’s online control panel and anytime that word is typed by your child or appears on the screen in front of your child, you will know.

2. You can instantly know if your child is giving away personal information such as a name, address, etc.

3. You can instantly know if your spouse is chatting with a specific person or about a specific topic.

4. You can instantly know if your employees are colluding with your competition behind your back or doing something that you’ve specifically told them not to do.

Of course there are many other uses for this feature. What would you want to track?

For more info about Web Watcher, click here.