The Nanny Notes

Not Reporting Potential Child Predators is Dangerous

Ben Beck

Grooming is a process child predators use to desensitize potential victims and to eventually trick them into meeting in person. Grooming most often begins in a chat room. The predator often poses as someone who can better relate to the person (such as a teenager of the same age). Other times they are honest about their age but instead put on a show of sympathy about the child/teenager.

Net Nanny has a great tool whereby a parent can receive alerts if a child has an instant messaging or chat conversation in which a stranger uses grooming language. In fact, this tool recently helped a mother in New York discover that her teenage daughter was being sexually abused by an online predator. You can read about how Net Nanny helped catch a predator HERE.

Net Nanny provided this mother with incontrovertible proof that her daughter was being abused. Hence, she was quick to contact the police and take aggressive action. But, what if the proof wasn't so incontrovertible? What if, after viewing the Net Nanny alerts, she just had a hunch her daughter was being groomed? Where would she go? Who would she tell? Would the police give her the time of day? This ambivalence, which is common among unsure parents, can be dangerous. The following are two resources you can use to easily and quickly report a potential child predator.

Tool 1: Web Browser Pedophile Reporter Plugin
This web browser plugin can be easily installed in all the popular web browsers on Mac and Windows computers. When installed, it places a small button at the top right of your web browser. When you're on a profile page of the individual you think is grooming your child, you click the button and it sends the webpage to an investigator. It also opens up an email you can put additional information in to send on to the investigator. It is simple enough to use that you could teach your child how to use it, so they can send up an immediate report if they feel grooming is occurring.

Tool 2: The Child Predator CyberTipline
This tool, while not as easy to use as the web browser plugin mentioned above, is backed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It provides a very detailed reporting tool that forwards your tips on to law enforcement.

It is important to remember, that these reporting methods should only be used to report "potential" child predators. If you have any evidence that child grooming is occuring, you need to contact your local law enforcement immediately. If they don't take any action on your report, take it to a higher level and contact your local FBI offices.

Learn To Cook With SPAM

Ben Beck

As a lad, I had several opportunities to eat SPAM, most of which occurred on scout camps. I know, interesting how taking away your child's cell phone in today's world is child abuse and yet feeding children SPAM back in the day was not.

Because my experience with cooking SPAM is limited to dumping SPAM into a dutch oven with cream of mushroom soup and some green beans, I don't think I'm one to give any good advice on cooking with SPAM. If you did actually come to this blogpost hoping I'd make you a SPAM cooking connoisseur then I don't want you to go away un-fulfilled, so HERE's a link to some great SPAM recipes.

For those of you who'd like to figure out how you can decrease offers for discount Viagra and offers to claim your unknown Uncle Harry's jagnormous inheritance, read on. I'll attempt to teach you how to overcome that pesky spam problem that has overtaken your email box.

First off, we need to think like a spammer. Read this sentence three times: "I want to make a bunch of money for doing the least amount of work possible." If we can get a few million email addresses to send spam to, eventually we'll get some poor sap to click our link and give us their credit card number or bank account/SSN. Here are several cheap/easy ways we can harvest email addresses to send spam to:

1. Peddle porn. Porn is pervasively moving into homes across the nation. Never has it been so easy as it is now, with the recent release of the Interweb (side note - spammers are not the most educated folk... many of them probably do actually believe the Internet is called the 'Interweb' and that it was just released yesterday) to get pornographic images into the hands of unsuspecting men, women, and (agahst) even children. Because my cost to put up a website and offer porn on it is just a few bucks a year I'm going to put up 300 free porn sites. As individuals click on images I'm going to either a) infect their computer with a tiny software program that sends out spam to all their friends OR b) ask them to sign up with their email address to access the special "members only" section of my website. With 300 sites infecting computers and harvesting emails it's just a matter of months before I've got a few million emails addresses I can send to.
2. Give away a free iPad for being the 1 millionth visitor of a website. There are still enough sheep out there that haven't heard of my crazy email stealing tactics that I can still offer free iPads (that I'll never actually send) to the 1 millionth website visitor (oh darn, looks like I didn't program this website correctly so it is somehow thinking every visitor is the 1 millionth) if they just enter their email address. I should be able to get a ton of email addresses from this too.
3. Search the web for publicly visible email addresses. I'll just buy a cheap program to search through the web looking for email addresses that are publicly visible. This takes a little more effort but is sure to bring in a bunch of email addresses too.
4. Post something of interest on Facebook. That's right... by simply posting something attention grabbing, such as "Wow, I can't believe Britney Spears is buying that new handbag" (yes, there are actually people out there who would find that interesting) and linking it to a fake Facebook page that harvests login credentials I can likely use those same login credentials to access other accounts of theirs - gaining more than just an email address, but also access to all the email addresses in their contact book.
5. And the list goes on...

So, now that I've got you thinking like a spammer, here's a few of the most important steps you can/should take to prevent further spamming, account theft, and worse - identity theft:

1. Don't look at porn. Installing an Internet filter will greatly decrease the chance that someone in your household will visit a site that is infected with a virus or is harvesting email addresses. Even if you don't feel like shelling out a few bucks needed to get the advanced protection of Net Nanny, you should at least have something - take a look at some of the free Internet filtering solutions out there.
2. If it sounds too good to be true, it is. Don't fall for it. If you want to take advantage of some offer that may sound too good to be true then use an old email address you are willing to receive spam in - and be extra attentive to NEVER give away any personal info to any site you do not know 100% as being legit.
3. Don't put your email address online. Wonder why companies most often have "contact us" forms instead of just listing their email address? Because they don't want to get spammed. Never type your email address into forums, blog comments, social networking, etc. If you do, it will likely be made publicly viewable, and your email account will see a jump in spam.
4. Be careful of what you click on. If you get an email from a friend's Facebook account with updates, or from your bank telling you about a new product be sure to not click links in the email to get to the offer. If it's a legitimate company you should be able to go straight to their site (via typing their web address in the url box at the top of your browser) and find the same offer or update.
5. Protect yourself. Get Net Nanny.

Towards a Safer Use of the Internet for Children in the EU

P. Ferioli

A very enlightening analytical report has come out of the European Union, conducted by the Gallup Organization, upon the request of Directorate General Information Society and Media. You can read the full report here.

This survey was designed to study parents views about their children's use of the Internet, to determine parents strategies to supervise their child's Internet usage and their own awareness of safety measures.

Some results of note:

• Half of the parents who did not use the Internet themselves said that their child had online access. Nine out of 10 children — who were Internet users — accessed it from home.   
• The biggest risk in parents eyes (65%) was that their child might see sexually or violently explicit images on the Internet: 45% were very worried.   
• Parents in all countries mentioned that they have various rules and restrictions when their child used the Internet. For example, approximately eight out of 10 parents listed online shopping, talking to people that their child did not know in real life and spending a lot of time online as activities that were not allowed for their child.    
• Almost three out of 10 Dutch parents (28%) and a quarter of the parents in the UK (24%) said that, when their child asked for their help, this was because they had been contacted by a stranger, were bullied or harassed online or saw violently or sexually explicit images online.  

On the use of monitoring and filtering software

• Half of the parents participating in this survey answered that they had installed filtering software on the computer that their child used at home. Monitoring software was not as popular, but was still used by almost four out of 10 parents (37%).    
• There was considerable variation across countries in the use of monitoring and filtering software: more than half of the British parents used such software compared to only 5% of the parents in Romania and Bulgaria.  

Reasons for not using monitoring and filtering software

• More than six out of 10 parents — who did not use filtering or monitoring software — simply saw no need for such software since they trusted their child on the Internet. Fourteen percent of the parents who did not use filtering or monitoring software did not know how to obtain or use it. Only a minority (3%) did not use such software because they did not believe in its efficiency.  

There are many observations that come from reading this detailed look across the countries that make up the EU about cultural differences and parental perspectives. One that sticks out to me is how many parents trust their kids on the Internet, without using the Internet themselves. This is a generation gap that must be crossed. As a parent, I find this issue to be particularly troubling. I trust my kids, and I know what TV shows, movies, games and books my kids read or view, I know what friends they are talking to on the phone or whose house they are at...why wouldn't I want to know what they are doing online?

Taking the Task Force to Task

P. Ferioli

Yesterday, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force(ISTTF)publicly released its report of findings and recommendations for improving online child safety, in particular on social networking sites. I suggest that you head over and read the report yourself.

Kudos goes out to John Palfrey, Faculty Co-Director of The Berkman Center for Internet&Society at Harvard University and the members of the task force for attempting to tackle such a complex and important issue.

I had the opportunity to attend and present to the ISTTF in September 2008, and as I suspected then, the results of the task force do little to nothing to advance the issue of verification and identification of minors online.

The ISTFF concluded in its report, "Enhancing Child Safety&Online Technologies," that online bullying is the top threat to kids on the Internet and not all kids are at equal risk online. It's not the Internet itself, but the child's environment that's a real indicator of their risk, the report says: "Those who are most at risk often engage in risky behaviors and have difficulties in other parts of their lives. The psychosocial makeup of and family dynamics surrounding particular minors are better predictors of risk than the use of specific media or technologies.

Another conclusion that is obvious to many of us in the parental controls and Internet filtering industry is that today’s parental empowerment technologies combined with involved and responsible parenting, communication and education is by far the best method for protecting children online today. We understand that parental control software is simply a tool to assist parents in the layered approach to protecting their kids.

The task force could have saved it's valuable time and resources if they had simply read Adam Thierer's book "Parental Controls and Online Child Protection. It is, bar none, the most comprehensive look at today’s technologies and best practices in protecting kids online. It also comes to the same conclusion as the task force.

We need to take the “three-legged stool approach to attacking the issue of online safety and behavior, the legs being education, legislation and technology. Education is the most important. It needs to begin in the home and then we must require our government to take action in school classrooms and build awareness through traditional media. We need solid legislation that is enforceable and is not designed as a “feel good solutions. Lastly, we need to continue to invest in technologies like Net Nanny that continue to focus and keep up with the ever-changing dangers to kids on the Web, be it inappropriate contacts, conduct or content.