Info/Law

In the wake of the disturbing on-line communication between Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) and underage former Congressional pages, I suspect a number of parents are re-visiting questions about whether to monitor their children’s activities on-line. There are two possible tactics parents could adopt. One is to block teens from certain on-line material. This could be through rules – “You can’t post to MySpace and that’s final!” – or through technology – “No, I won’t turn off the pornography blocking through SmartFilter.” The challenges are that rules require enforcement (what happens when parents aren’t home, but teens are?) and that technology can be bypassed (think proxy servers) or is behind the times (how quickly does it detect and block new inappropriate sites?).

The second tactic is monitoring. This can occur at different levels of intensity: reviewing sites your teen visits, reading their e-mail and IM messages, to recording each keystroke entered on the computer (which would divulge passwords as well). Here, the challenges are good relations with your teen (who may be incensed at the surveillance), technological difficulties (parents are often less savvy than their kids with computers), and defining permissible conduct (what if your teen searches for sex ed material on-line, or is researching about tattoos?).

Part of the problem parents face is assessing risk. There are a lot of entities with a vested interest in portraying the Internet as a scary and dangerous place, and it’s tempting to instill, or install, really tight controls. I think there are two risks to this approach, though. First, the Internet has a wealth of highly useful and credible information. Some of it may not be information that parents are comfortable with teens having – for example, is marijuana really addictive, or what are reliable methods of emergency contraception? – but it’s hardly dangerous. Second, a large part of keeping teens safe is maintaining a certain level of trust and dialogue with them. Overly intrusive monitoring can drive activities underground – and potentially towards less accurate and reliable sources of information (including peers).

Years of work with the OpenNet Initiative have made me think a lot about questions of access to information and the virtues, or drawbacks, of monitoring on-line activity. The difficulties are assessing the tradeoffs – which risks to accept – and in defining dangers. I suppose few people, though, would have anticipated the need to monitor their kids’ e-mail exchanges with their Congressman…

Filed under: Filtering, Intermediaries, Internet & Society, Media, Privacy, Security