New Ways to Track Your Teen Online

April 27, 2009— -- Parents habitually are warned to monitor their children's online activities. They are told to put the computer in a central location, limit kids' hours online and to warn them of the dangers of the Internet.

The problem is a lot of those precautionary actions do nothing to keep kids out of trouble or keep parents from worrying.

As a result, many parents have taken the more invasive step of monitoring every click kids make with monitoring software that records Web sites visited, instant messaging and chat conversations, and e-mails.

The problem here is that kids click around the Web at warp speed. A parent tracking all those sites, the extraneous ads that get listed and the endless drivel of teenage chats will eventually suffer from monitoring fatigue. Parents can't find meaning in the crush of data that monitoring software provides: too many Web sites and not enough time to figure out if the sites are appropriate.

But a new free product from Symantec wants to help. OnlineFamily.Norton.com provides a free software program that streamlines the data from all your computers, so even nontechie parents can figure out if their kids are getting in trouble online.

Instead of a confusing list of hundreds of web addresses, objectionable sites are highlighted for parents to review — and block.

"Parents get the option here not only of seeing all the activity, but anything requiring parental attention shows up in red," said Symantec's Internet safety advocate Marian Merritt.

While parents can look at all the sites kids visit, the best feature of the program is that you can choose to flag just the questionable sites. In the past, monitoring software programs listed hundreds of links that just confused parents: Web addresses of all the pop-up ads, embedded content and the sites known to be kid-friendly.

With this product, parents can opt to just see the stuff that the advisory board at Symantec deems questionable.

Mom or dad can also search through instant messaging conversations, and check Facebook or Myspace profiles.

"With this service you can not only see which social networking sites your children are visiting but what accounts they're opening, what names they're using — even the age that they're putting in as theirs," Merritt said.