There's a story in the Houston Chronicle today that really troubles me. The article talks about two teenaged girls who vanished from their homes just outside Houston nearly a week ago. The girls are thought to have left home on their own accord, possibly to travel to California to meet a person or people they met over the Internet. The girls' parents and the police have pieced that much together based on remnants of digital conversations still on their computers. (The girls deleted any other conversations that could be used to trace them. Computer forensic experts are digging deeper to see what else can be learned.)
What bothers me is that a software package that costs about $30 could have prevented this situation. My company has been testing a product called ContentProtect from ContentWatch [1]. The consumer version of the product makes it possible for parents to monitor their kids' activity online, including email and IM conversation, and visits to websites like MySpace.com. Had ContentProtect been installed on the girls' computers, their parents could have viewed logs of entire conversations, or been notified of trigger words such as "sex" or "drugs."
Instead, the girls apparently flew to LAX after arranging to meet "Dan the Man" somewhere in southern California. They've been gone for a week, and their whereabouts are still unknown.
I wrote about the enterprise version of ContentProtect [2] a few months ago. Yes, network administrators can use this tool to oversee employees' online activities. Perhaps more importantly, parents can use the consumer version of the tool to keep their kids safe. As the mother of one teenager and one pre-teen, I view 30 bucks as a small price to pay for the peace of mind of knowing what my kids are doing online.
Links:
[1] http://www.contentwatch.com/
[2] http://www.networkworld.com/newsletters/techexec/2006/0227techexec1.html