Parents should be careful about monitoring their children's online activities
Key loggers can be a useful tool for finding out what your child is looking at, but think about how to react if you are discovered
Only a few years ago, parents were saying that children should not use computers until they came of age, but today schools require children to do homework online, bringing issues into the home we have to deal with.
Unfortunately, nothing on our computer networks is safe from spying eyes. We live in a low-trust, high-surveillance world where technology is being used by employers to keep track of their employees and parents to keep tabs on their children. In this brave new digital age, we should raise our offspring to be aware that nothing digital is private, that every video they watch on YouTube, every Facebook post or e-mail they send will be stored somewhere permanently and could get them in trouble.
We can prepare them by monitoring their computer activities to protect them from all the nasty stuff online. But should we be open about this? What about trust? Telling them that their digital footprints are visible to us, and that checking these records may make us feel better about it could also frustrate our attempts at monitoring.
This is a complex moral issue and there are no easy answers. Is the computer a shared instrument or only for a child's personal use? Monitoring a shared computer is easier to justify than your child's personal PC. What age is the child? What is appropriate for a five-year-old will not be for a 10- or 15-year-old. Much depends on whether you trust your child and hopefully you do, at least to some extent. Do they have a history of naughty behaviour? If you trust them it is important to let them know this and one way is to give them some privacy. They are less likely to break the rules if they know you trust them; they will not want to betray your trust. On the other hand, if they know you don't trust them, they will feel they have less to lose by adding to their record of misbehaviour. Remember we are trying to prepare them for life in Hong Kong, not North Korea. Only if teenagers go off the rails, start taking drugs or get into seriously dangerous activities should we monitor them more closely or covertly.
But supposing you have decided to monitor your children because of concerns about their safety which you believe override their right to privacy, what do you do? The humble key logger is an affordable solution for those who do not have an NSA-size technology budget.
What is a key logger?
