A child-safety advocate over the weekend expressed fear over the growing number of parents installing leading brand software that would allow them to personally monitor what their kids are doing online, saying that these parents are “unwittingly” giving away marketing data to the software developer.
In a statement, child-safety advocate Parry Aftab revealed that the Sentry and FamilySafe software not only allows parents to read any private messages their children input on private chats like Yahoo Messenger, MSN, and AOL but it allows the developer to gather information about their kids and sell it to businesses that are looking for ways to tailor-made the marketing information they will send to the youth.
The culprit in question is the software developed by New York-based EchoMetrix Inc., which insisted that they give the parents an option whether they want to share or not the information of their child to such businesses.
These businesses may gather marketing information from children 7 years old and up, Aftab added in the statement.
“This is scary. This software is far the worst and scariest thing that I have ever seen with the use of monitoring software. The software and the developer literally, with the parents unwittingly knowing, are putting children’s information at risk,” the advocate said.
Despite keeping the anonymity of the children involved (since their names, address, and other identifiable were not included in the data), the developer is able to know the kids’ ages due to an optional customization program that would allow parents to control the permissive sites to visit depending on age.
Meanwhile, five other similar software providers said that they do not sell data of kids’ chatting history to marketing or advertising business. These parental-control makers include Symantec Corp. and McAfee Inc., which claimed that they respect the children’s right to privacy.
Another program provider, CyberPatril LLC, also said that they would not engage in such activities, saying that confidential information of the kids should always be protected.
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