Selling out your kids online chats
Parents generally try to do the right thing when it comes to the amount of time their children spend on the web. They do everything they can to try and make it a safe experience even when it means installing software to monitor their children’s actions while surfing and chatting.
Because of that concern there are many companies who market all kinds of software to concerned parents wit the promise that it will make them feel better about a child’s time spent online. Generally companies like Symantec, McAfee and others like CyberPatrol treat much of what they track as confidential information between them, their software and the parents who install it.
Unfortunately not all companies have the same moral and ethical foundation. Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands of software, have been discovered to have been selling collected data to businesses looking for ways to better tailor their sales pitches to children. They do this by monitoring the children’s private chats on service like Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services for conversations about movies, music and games.
The software brands in question are developed by EchoMetrix Inc., a company based in Syosset, N.Y.
In June, EchoMetrix unveiled a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms.
EchoMetrix CEO Jeff Greene said the company complies with U.S. privacy laws and does not collect any identifiable information.
“We never know the name of the kid — it’s bobby37 on the house computer,” Greene said.
What Pulse will reveal is how “bobby37” and other teens feel about upcoming movies, computer games or clothing trends. Such information can help advertisers craft their marketing messages as buzz builds about a product.
Source: AP – Web-monitoring software gathers data on kid chats
