Sekiur My Thoughts

Twenty years ago my parents knew where I was and who I was with or so they thought.

Well maybe not but basically it was much easier for parents to keep their kids on the straight and narrow and away from trouble.  It basically consisted of keeping an eye on dubious VHS/Betamax tapes and password protecting satellite channels as well as keeping tabs on friends.

With the Internet, social networks and cell phones; you as a parent basically have no insight on who your children interact with, what they see and what shenanigans they might tumble into.

The morals of spying on your kids is beyond the scope of this post, but I start on the premise that involvement in your children’s lives greatly reduces the probability of them getting into shady situations.

The Internet posed the first challenge for parents to unwanted content most of which was porn. Placing the computer in a common area and restricting access to it sufficed. With the widespread use of Instant Messaging it became harder to just restrict access to the computer and once filtering software surfaced the new challenge of unmonitored communications emerged.

Now what makes online communications so much different from phone conversations we could have had 20 years ago with a friend? Its a fact that the anonymity of the Internet may serve as a dis-inhibitor prompting kids to do things they would not have done while just talking on the phone. Chatting log applications emerged to serve this market.

As instant messaging converted to the web from applications running on the PC at home, it has become more difficult to see what’s happening on social networks and with the wide-spread adoption of smart phones by teenagers and young kids, the methods at home for filtering and monitoring communications no longer work.

Schools have put in place measures to ensure that students don’t have access to questionable content but these are useless when students arrive at school with high-bandwidth enabled iPhones.

As every sword has a double edge so does technology. Even though these devices present a new challenge for parents, it also offers unheard of possibilities 20 years ago like the capability to see where your kids are at.

Google Latitude allows a mobile phone user to allow certain other people on his or her Gmail contact list to track where he or she is. This application requires that the user share their location when Google Maps opens on a mobile phone whether using the on-board GPS or triangulation of cell towers. It will however ask the user to continue sharing their location when you exit the application so its not what you would call stealthy.

Moostrax however does run behind the scene running quietly on the options menu on Blackberries, sending location information at regular intervals to a website. Apart from live tracking on Google Maps, it offers additional nifty features like historical tracking that can be exported to a Google Earth format, GeoFences allowing someone to be notified via e-mail when the phone enters or leaves a certain pre-determined area, Location Tagging allowing the tagging of your favorite locations, and a developer API to integrated other applications.

Ronald Reagan once said: “Trust But Verify” when discussing relations with the Soviet Union

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