Being a 42 year old man with no kids of my own, I am blissfully unaware of some of the things that teenage kids are up to. Since growing up before the Internet, I am also unaware of the some of the problems and threats that the Internet has introduced to teenagers.
First. This one is scary. Here is an article in the New York Times profiling a teenage boy who discovered that he could get money with his bedroom computer and an inexpensive web cam by allowing pediphile pervs to watch him. It is a very interesting read because it illustrates how the child-porn industry has changed. It in past, it was assumed that the children where manipulated or forced into the performances. But now, the kids are taking the initiative and selling themselves.
There is still the agent of this crime... the adult(s) that manipulates the child into this. But these ease in which a child or teen can, by themselves, produce, distribute, and profit from their exploitation is mindblowing.
Second: How much do you know about IM? IM is "Internet Messaging". It is similar to texting messages back and forth between cell phones. Every teenager I've ever met IM's friends all the time. I suppose that this can be compared to the teenage girl who used to tie up the telephone for hours on end chatting endlessly to her girlfriends. But IM is different. It allows the scale of the communications to grow enormously. They are not just talking to one person at a time. Instead, it can be dozens, all over the world.
I recently helped a friend of mine prep her old laptop for use by her mother. My friend has a teenage daughter who used to use this laptop. I purged all of the unneeded software, removed tons of viruses and spyware, and fix a lot of problems. The I installed MS Messenger, Microsoft's IM product. I plugged the laptop into the internet and within seconds I was being bombarded with IM messages from strangers.
From the content, it seemed like most of the messengers where other teenage boys. When I failed to respond to their IM's, or I did not respond right, they got weird and starting asking me of I was so-and-so, the teenager daughter of my friend.
So I appears that when I installed IM, it registered itself as the teenager's profile from when she had installed and used MS Messenger before. So to these boys, it appears like she was online.
Anyhow... I found it quit disturbing. I also noticed that when I went over to their house to pick up the computer, the teenager was working online with MS Messenger on the new laptop. Whenever I or her mom would walk into the office, the daughter would quickly minimize the IM screen. Obviously she did not want us "adults" to see what was being written.
It just wrote it off as typical teenager paranoia and privacy demands. Still, if it were my kid, it would bug me.
Third, and last: File Sharing and the dangers to the home PC. I was talking to my sister the other day and the subject of the home computer came up. My sister mentioned that the family computer had died thanks to a very nasty virus that her teenager daughter had introduced. My sister told me that the computer had become unusable before it totally died. Viruses had taken over the browser, forcing user to porn sites, gambling sites, etc, etc. Millions of pop-ups were showing up. There was spyware everywhere.
The cause of these problems on their family PC was their teenager daughter's habit of downloading any file-sharing program that struck her fancy. In her reckless attempts at getting and sharing the latest songs, she failed to take even the simplest precautions to prevent the infection of the computer by rouge software.
Conclusion: The conclusion to me is that parents that allow their children unlimited and unsupervised access to the Internet are risking no only their computer systems, but their children as well. I think some simple precautions should be in order.
(1) Remove modems and WiFi NICs from the child's computer. The only way they should be able to get online is by plugging into the family's broadband router.
(2) Put the router, and better yet, the computer, into a centralized family office. This will force all online activity to be performed in an area that can be supervised, versus hiding in their bedrooms.
(3) Webcam? Unless the kid can provide some compelling reason as to why they need one, then they don't get one. Keep in mind that there are other ways they get images online... such as using their mobile phone camera and transferring them to their computer.
(4) Restrict online hours. You need to password protect the router and have it only one for certain times. Access outside of those time are on as ass-needed basis and have to be explicitly permitted.
I don't think parents need to be paranoid. Common sense will go a long way. The computer and online access should be controlled just like television and gaming. The parents have to control the quantity and quality of access to all these things.
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