Keeping children safe from predatory adults in online communication is a service in high demand, but in order for children to participate the parental control needs to be kept to a minimum. IMSafer is a service that launched today and promises to filter IM communication for conversation deemed potentially predatory. The company says it worked with law enforcement specialists to develop its filtering rules and some of them are quite interesting - the phrase “you’re a good girl” is believed to be common language for building a dominance/submission based relationship, for example. Only questionable excerpts from IM conversations will be shown to parents; the company hopes that this relative privacy will help buy-in from kids.
When an offending statement is made, an email alert is sent to the parent in real time. The IMSafer dashboard displays conversation excerpts that the system believes are unsafe. The parent can then vote on whether they believe the conversation to be inappropriate and those votes go into a common pool tied to IM screen names. Other parents will be notified if their child enters into conversation with someone who has had conversation filtered and voted as inappropriate by any other IMSafer participating parent.
IMSafer is a Windows desktop application and it couldn’t be easier to begin using. It currently detects and tracks IM conversations going through Microsoft clients, AIM and Yahoo! Support for MySpace, GTalk, Skype and Mac is forthcoming, the company says. The MySpace filtering tool is ready but hasn’t been pushed to the IMSafer client yet and MySpace IM use is relatively limited.
The program is free initially and the company says it hopes to build a critical mass of users before requiring payment. Houston, Texas based founder Brandon Watson took angel funding from past contacts from his time working at Soros and Microsoft. The company will soon begin distributing free copies to pilot school districts in hopes that parents will want to be able to have a seemless monitoring system between home and school use. While multiple screen names can be tracked at home, the company is working on a tool to associate different screen names across school and home to notify parents. IMSafer is also in talks with PC manufacturers. The company will soon begin offering free SMS alerts and premium features like VOIP call alerts and a special filter for bullying.
Obviously children could get around this type of monitoring, but the company advises that parents tell their children it’s in use and that they are not spying on entire conversations. Will children accept this? I won’t pretend to know how to manage the little beasts, I can barely stand the obstinance of my dog. But IMSafer’s approach does sound smart. There is no fail-safe solution and I would think that many children will appreciate the hands-off approach of IMSafer. Some people contend that educating children to watch out for themselves is the only effective way to keep them safe, but given how difficult it can be to watch out for your own interests in conversation between adults it’s clearly not sufficient to put all responsibility on self defense by children. While much of the system is based on family trust, Watson also told me that his team used to be the geeky kids trying to get around systems like this and IMSafer was built with that kind of knowledge. For further discussion on kids an online safety check out BlogSafety.com
In demand, easy to use, apparently effective, relatively appealing to children and aimed at some solid distribution channels. Sounds like a particularly viable service to me.
Oh Dang! This is exactly the product señor Foley should have been using!
Oh well, overall this product looks good, and hope it catches on as protecting children is becoming more and more impossible.
Wow, thanks for the kind and gentle review. Must be our southern hospitality rubbing off on people. We are really excited about what we have built, and definitely tried to build something that both parents and kids will be OK with. At the end of the day, we want to hide the tech so that parents can be parents, and kids can be kids.
“Little beasts”??
Texas is not in the South.
That sounds like a fantastic idea, and I wish them the utmost success.
It’s about time someone put forth some innovative ideas to protect children on the internet. It seems that many parents alone aren’t having much success.
An interesting idea, although I think “selective spying” would be more accurate than “filtering,” since they’re not blocking communication, but instead reporting it to the parents.
Based on my experience with various kinds of filters, it’s very hard to weed out any kind of “bad language” (however you define it) without generating a lot of false positives. Human language is just too slippery. And in this context, false positives may be a serious problem. It sounds to me like they build profiles on people and assign them some sort of threat rating. In this context, giving someone a high threat rating is more or less equivalent to saying, “we think this person is a sexual predator.” If you’re going to make that statement about someone to hundreds or thousands of users, you’d better be sure you can back it up, or you could be facing some painful defamation suits.
Finally, I wonder if they’ve anticipated the possibility of griefing. Teenagers aren’t known for temperance, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a few tech-savvy friends decided that it would be amusing to log in as parents and vote someone into “level 5″ status.
Georgia Peach posted:
“Texas is not in the South.”
Really, genius? Please, provide a geography lesson for the rest of us then.
tjvm –
those are great thoughts. you are right, the human language, in all forms, is a challenging beast. that’s one of the reasons why we a) started with English only, and b) are targeting a specific problem - the inappropriate relationships with children.
the language and patterns that people use to initiate, develop and maintain inappropriate relationships with children are pretty well understood. our engine is built in such a way that it can evolve and be tuned. no solution is perfect, but we believe, and our customers have told us, this is a far better solution than anything on the market.
with respect to the griefing you mentioned, a person can only leave feedback when our engine flags something in a conversation, and feedback is numerical and can only be negative. further, you cannot look at someone’s profile rating unless that person makes IM contact with an account you are monitoring *and* something in the conversation gets flagged, so that certainly insulates some of the defamation issues you bring up.
this is great feedback, and we love hearing from current and potential customers. i hope you don’t mind if i address this at length over at our blog. parents will be very interested to see more of this type of discussion.
Good service. I hope it’s realy Childsafe.
This is a great idea, I hope that parents use it in conjunction with online safety conversations and resources like the Cybertipline where they or the child can report anything sketchy. I think that this sort of software can help parents become more tech savvy and keep up on what’s going on online, but nothing can replace parents discussing what’s appropriate and what’s not online.
This sounds like a great idea, especially for teens. It give parents a way to try and keep their kids safe online, while still giving teens a reasonable amount of privacy. Everyone wins (except the predators and we like it that way).
It is a good idea, but I think parents need to start using their own controls as well. They need to talk to their kids about the internet before throwing them into it and never explaining anything about it. So many kids can just go find whatever they want and have nobody ever check on them.
I think it’s a great idea. Very noble for someone to come up with it. I still feel that the problem can be solved if parents would educate and monitor their children more about using pc’s and the internet.
This is overkill. Everybody knows that to stop 99% of communications from sexual predators, all you need to do is block *.gov. It’s amazing. It stops all Senators and Congressmen from hitting on your children!
Cablevision has a good resource for parents and children at http://www.powertolearn.com. There is a really good two part article about protecting kids on social networking sites at http://www.powertolearn.com/ar.....html?ID=12 and http://www.powertolearn.com/ar.....html?ID=13