Company Helps Parents Keep Kids Safer Online

RIO GRANDE –– What can parents do to keep their children safe from Internet predators? A Houston, Texas-based software company says its services can help.
Following the Herald’s story Aug. 22 that reported 269 New Jersey sex offenders were found to have MySpace profiles, representatives from IMSafer contacted the newspaper to describe their security program.
The program offers parents a summary of their children’s social networking site profiles.
Brandon Watson, a former Microsoft manager, parent and founder of IMSafer, said his company compiles the information from
these sites to let parents know what their kids are putting out there for other Internet users to see.
A parent would be able to make sure their children aren’t providing too much personal information or creating sexually explicit profiles.
“It’s like an onramp for parents to their children’s online activities,” he said. “Parents need cues about what their children are doing online so they can help them.”
IMSafer offers another service.
“Our application also monitors kids’ instant messaging (IM) conversations for dangerous, inappropriate or threatening words, phrases and themes,” Watson said.
He explained that it does this by using a language interpretation engine that scans messages and sends e-mail alerts to parents when dangerous dialogue is detected.
According to Watson, the program would detect language commonly used by predators including age, location and sex related information or questions like “are your parents home?”
Watson described IMSafer as a security tool, not “spyware” that infringes on kids’ privacy by secretly monitoring their behavior.
“We try to maintain a child’s privacy by not providing parents with full transcripts of IM conversations, but only extract language that could be dangerous,” he said.
“Privacy is one of the tenets upon which this company was founded.”
He said if children feel like they’re being spied on, they will try to hide their online activities, but since IMSafer works in the background, they quickly forget they’re being monitored.
Watson suggests that parents inform their children when they install IMSafer and explain how the program works. He said when something is flagged “it’s better to have a discussion about the problem and not about whether parents are spying or not.”
He developed IMSafer in response to reports of predators luring young victims via IM and decided there had to be a better approach than the parental control software in use that blocked children from viewing certain sites with pornographic content.
Watson said his program is not a substitute for parents communicating with their children about their online activities, but hopes they’ll gain peace of mind having the profile information and knowing their kids are protected using IM.
For information visit www.IMSafer.com.