In light of recent reports of sexual predator growth on Facebook and MySpace sites, we wanted to mention start-up YouDiligence.com, a service launched late last year that alerts parents and educators to questionable content on Facebook, MySpace and other social networking websites. The company says that business has been exploding since MySpace recently cooperated with Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to hand over the names of 90,000 registered sex offenders that were identified and blocked by the social networking site.
Here’s how it works: When a child (or one of their friends) post inappropriate or questionable content on their page, an email alert is sent to the parent. A pretty comprehensive report is also stored on the user’s dashboard. Reports include time, the inappropriate words used, the context of how the terms was used, where it was posted (i.e., on a profile page, caption, wall comment, or if child writing a comment on someone else’s page) and a link to the exact URL.
From a business model point of view, YouDiligence has had a few hiccups. A paid service, YouDiligence had slow growth after its launch and recently rolled out a 30-day free trial. The cost of the service ranges from $9.99 a month to monitor one child to $19.99 to monitor four or more kids. The company reports that it has seen sign-ups increase since the implementing the free trial. YouDiligence also started using retargeting start-up Fetchback to get customers back to their site. So far, they have a re-subscription rate of 95 percent.
YouDiligence’s technology does has have overlap with competitors in the child internet monitoring space, including ReputationDefender and Sentinel Safe, who partnered with MySpace to find the sexual predators in the social networking site.
Despite the competition, YouDiligence provides a valuable service in a marketplace that can be unsafe for young children.
This enters that privacy into a child’s life matter , but again you can also defend it as a parent’s responsibility.
I feel that they should get rid of the sex offenders depending on the tracking, instead of prying on the kid’s conversations. They are kids but they also have privacy rights.
Children have not privacy “rights” until they are 18 years old and live with their parents, who are responsible for taking care of them and are responsible for their actions.
Those parents that respected their children’s “privacy” were absolutely responsible for the killings at Columbine High School and also for the recent Virginia Tech tragedy.
I totally understand where your coming from and I love this company for taking the right step, I just feel that they need to focus their time and resources to make sure that these networks are free of offenders by tracking past records and so on so that spying on kid’s wouldn’t be necessary in the first place.
parents and grandparents thank TC for keeping the web safe..
At the end of the day, kids can just create a 2nd Myspace profile that their parents don’t know about.
I use Spector & eBlaster remote monitoring. It records everything my kids do including both online and offline activities. One of the neat features is that it gives you a quick report regarding MySpace (and FaceBook) that shows ALL their MySpace profiles along with passwords and buttons to see the profile, log into the profile to delete stuff, who they chatted with and what pix they may have uploaded. Cool stelth features completely hide it.
It is a shop of a delicious Miyazaki dish of Japan.
damn. this is sucha good iddear. so many law & order SVU episodes, preachers & fox news have entreanched into the parental zeitgeist of the need to be over protective paranoid and extreme in terms of ‘preventing’ little johnny and mary from getting chris hansen-ed , err something like that
I feel that they should get rid of the sex offenders depending on the tracking, instead of prying on the kid’s conversations. They are kids but they also have privacy rights.
http://tinyurl.com/acprgq
I think this is a great idea for parents to keep an eye on their children but the site needs to be tweaked a little bit. I don’t understand why they’re not doing anything about the sex offenders on the web. By keeping track of only what your child says doesn’t get rid of sex offenders premanently. The site needs to come up with an idea on how to get rid of them for good.
I think it’s pathetic that any parent would actually do this.
YouDiligence has so many flaws in its protection model it is hard to know where to start. Anyone who knows a Facebook or MySpace account and the password (many kids have friends or contacts who can figure those out easily enough) anyone can moderate anybody’s account.
Example 1: a boyfriend decides he wants to see if his girlfriend is talking about another boy, he nominates himself as a parent, activates the account monitoring and then can snoop in one his girlfriends postings but selecting the keywords.
Example 2: a parent decides to “protect” their child and sets up the account. they list all the possible keywords but because they are not up to speed in cyberlingo some dangerous phrases or symbols are not caught and the child is still exposed. Even if caught beforehand the damage has been done and it is like barring the barn door after the horses have escaped.
Example 3: the parent in their zealous desire to protect their child selects every possible word and word combination and ends up catching a lot of innocent postings, bogging them down in spam from YouDiligence that either gives them cyberfatigue that erases the benefit or consumes their time with false hits.
This service is rearview mirror in its protection, too assuming in its initial setup and much too basic in its parsing that is not realtime with preventitive guards to protect anyone, much less the child.