Facebook app lets parents monitor kids' activity

A “panic button" feature generates a report for law enforcement agencies containing child profile information, and the most recent photographs and activity, to help them deal with emergency situations.

REDMOND, Wash., June 15, 2010 -- Faced with growing incidences of inappropriate social media contacts, cyber bullying, and more online activity now as the school year ends and summer begins, parents more than ever crave guidance on how to keep their children safe when using social media sites. To give them better tools to oversee family rules, Schakra is introducing GoGoStat Parental Guidance, a new, free Facebook application that lets parents monitor their children’s activity.

Created by a team of former Microsoft employees with research and input from various law enforcement experts, GoGoStat Parental Guidance identifies risky behavior and provides information for parents to share with their children. Parental Guidance alerts parents so they can act quickly, notifying them when pre-established “family ground rules” are violated, inappropriate text is posted, new contacts are made, or photos of their children are uploaded.

Statistics about kids’ online activity and the potential dangers are eye-opening:

• More than 40% of all teenagers with Internet access have reported being bullied online (National Crime Prevention Center)
  
  
• One in five U.S. teenagers who regularly use the Internet say they have received an unwanted sexual solicitation online, yet 75 percent of children do not tell a parent when contact like this occurs (Crimes Against Children Research Center)
  
  
• Two-thirds of households with Internet access are not using any kind of software to protect or limit their children’s online activity (Center for Missing and Exploited Children)

Using GoGoStat Parental Guidance, parents define the rules and criteria to be monitored on Facebook, the first social networking site for which Parental Guidance is available. Parents and children exchange a parental security code to ensure that only parents can legitimately establish a monitoring relationship. In addition to alerts from postings and uploads if rules are violated, parents are alerted to their kids’ new ‘friending’ actions if outside a specified age/geographic range, to ensure they’re being safe and not socializing online with potentially dangerous individuals.

"GoGoStat Parental Guidance has managed to find the balance between a teen's privacy and their safety. Setting expectations by maintaining a presence while respecting boundaries will help guide children to making the right decisions about their social networking behavior," said Lori Getz, founder of Cyber Education Consultants and nationally recognized cyber safety expert. Lori’s company helps to bridge the gap between a young generation of digital natives and their parents and teachers.

GoGoStat Parental Guidance notifies parents about details in their children’s profiles that may expose private information that could lead to unsafe situations such as personal contact information, accurate age, etc. Parents learn of new status messages containing unsafe or potentially offensive comments to know how their teens are interacting online. A “panic button" feature generates a report for law enforcement agencies containing child profile information, and the most recent photographs and activity, to help them deal with emergency situations.

“We all know by now that the Internet and social networking sites can be extremely risky for children and teens, yet there’s an immense draw for them to participate. We are working to keep social media safe by helping parents become more effectively involved,” said Bala Balabaskaran, Vice President, Products and Chief Architect at Schakra. “Allowing parents to define their own ground rules and monitoring criteria sets the stage for an honest dialogue with their children on social media usage.”

Parental Guidance is the second application released on Schakra’s GoGoStat platform that enables a new model of applications which bring together the value of social media, along with the emerging power of automation from user context and intent, to provide an intuitive and valuable experience. GoGoStat Sync, the first application made available in April 2010, helps people maintain and update their personas and postings across multiple social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and many others.

GoGoStat Parental Guidance beta is available for free at www.gogostat.com.

A premium feature version which will include additional capabilities, trending reports, and GoGoStat Sync premium features, will be available by subscription for a small fee beginning in the Fall of 2010.

Source: Schakra