Covering Your Tracks in Cyberspace? Or Spying on Your Children?
“The things you put on mySpace can come back to haunt you later in life when you are applying to college or looking for a job.” Many a school administrator, parent, teacher, and/or internet safety expert has uttered these words to groups of kids who generally receive the warning with varying levels of disinterest, fear, or shrugging shoulders.
Now, an internet startup has launched Reputation Defender, which promises to seek out and potentially erase our little lapses of judgment hanging out in the dark corners of the internet. This Wired News story examines the new site at length. What interests me is the “My Child” area, where parents can pay to have their child’s online presence monitored month-to-month. Obviously, parents want to protect their children but is it me, or is this also giving technophobic parents a way to spy on their kids? Dad can’t Google and Mom doesn’t have a Facebook account, so they pay someone else to keep an eye on their children in cyberspace. Convenient, but whatever happened to just talking to your kids?
