Monitoring Your Children Online

I was reading GaiaOnline's Privacy Policy (don't ask), and at the end they're talking about not collecting personal information from children under 13. This is COPPA, Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Then they list a couple of sites to check out if you're a parent.

The first two links are the same, though they're listed as different. They go to Control Kids. I click on one of these, stare in horror at it for a few moments, and then the page decides to go somewhere else. It now tells me that this site has been reported for putting unsolicited spyware on visitors' computers. It doesn't give me this warning every time I go there, just occasionally. Worse, though, is that I can believe the warning.
A malicious site posing as a site meant to "protect" children? It makes perfect sense. The kids would never go there, but the adults, who are far more likely to be taken in by ploys to get you to download things, would. And the adults wouldn't know not to click on a popup that offers a free popup blocker, obvious as those can be.

The second one, CYBERsitter, is even more frightening than Control Kids. This one offers a program that monitors what your child is doing, in real time, or in a log. It monitors Where your child is online, When your child is there, the Title of the page they're on, what Usernames and Passwords they're typing in... Is anyone else scared now?
First, this is frightening from the viewpoint of a child. I learned to get around COPPA my first experience with the internet. It's not hard to lie about your age, because sites, although they are legally obligated to say that they don't endorse use by children under 13 without parental consent, actually want younger children. The reason COPPA is in place is because younger children are more malleable from a marketing perspective. COPPA protects children mostly from market research, not from child predators. Child predators are out there, but they're not nearly as many as so many parents are led to believe. Much more harmful (and what COPPA is much more useful against) is advertising. If a child sees an advertisement for This Really Cool Toy, they're very likely to go to their parents and ask them to buy it. Children are easy marks for advertisers.
General rule of thumb, at least among these children it seems, is that if you're not smart enough to get around these ridiculously simple obstacles, you're not ready to. Having your parents monitor your activity so closely... *shudder* When people don't understand something, they have a fear of it. It's quite understandable. Unfortunately, parents don't have a big reputation for listening to their children, and children don't have a big reputation for trying to talk to their parents. If my parents were different people and they were watching my activity on the computer, they would have blocked me from just about everything. All of those "time wasters" like social networking sites. And then where would I be? Would I have been recruited for Power Users and gotten introduced to the world of SFI? Not a chance. If my parents had blocked me from all those "time wasters", I would probably working in some dead-end job selling someone something. Because they didn't, I help middle and high school students learn to program, sit on a board, make graphics and websites, and get paid well for most of it. I know not everyone is me, but I'm me in part because I didn't suffer having paranoid parents.
Second, how many parents would be able to install this themselves? They're afraid of the internet, of the computer, because they don't understand it. What makes them think they'd be able to install this without someone's help? Someone who understood all this stuff? Say, their children? I don't think I have to go further to convince you. But who would be able to install this, aside from the children? Well, people who've adapted to this strange, unknown beast of the computer. Possibly... people looking for your bank account numbers? Your personal information? Every time you type something in, it's recorded. What if someone less than benevolent gets hold of that log?

NetNanny looks like the most traditional "solution" to keeping your children safe online. In which case I can shoot it down with one small question. What happens when your child is researching breast cancer?

Seriously. These things are flawed by design. On top of that, how long will it take someone adept at using the internet, say, your children, to climb over this hurdle in order to get what they want? There are generally several ways to approach this, and children often know them all. Mine was always argument and information, "I'm learning how to run a business through Neopets." and remaining pouty when they took the power cord away, even though I knew perfectly well that the printer had the same cord. But technically too. How easy is it to find a proxy? How easy is it to get someone off site to put something up somewhere else that isn't blocked?
Easy for the internet generation, hard for anyone who didn't grow up with it.

There's a very simple solution to keeping your children safe online. Listen To Them. Yes, they'll keep things from you. No, they won't tell you everything. That's ok. What they will tell you is very likely to give you the keys to this digital kingdom.
Be nosy. Ask them what sites they're visiting and sign up for an account of your own. If you're on the site too, they may even decide not to go there anymore. Play with them on Neopets or whatever it is. Ask them to help you put up your own MySpace profile. You don't see the point in such "time wasters"? Well, they do, and they'll get around you every time, so get over it.