The following letter was sent to classkc.org by a thoughtful parent.
Thank you for sharing this valuable information with us about teen blogging.
I was reading your information about Xanga and the dangers of the Internet. I have something very important to add. It is parents' business to KNOW every single thing their kids do on the Internet. It is not enough to talk to them or to check their Xangas. I learned this the hard way.
By the way, I think Xanga is becoming passe and MySpace is picking up in the KC area. MySpace is a much more adult site than Xanga. MySpace is much more complex and includes the option of private messaging that is very similar to e-mail but might get overlooked by a parent trying to monitor their child's activity.
There is also a new high school version of thefacebook.com that has just started up. Facebook appears to be a bit more secure because you can only view information about your friends and friends must approve one another. The college version requires a college e-mail address to join, but I just joined the high school version using my real high school but falsifying my date of birth. I'm not sure about the safety of this site - it appears to be a bit more secure than Xanga and MySpace because you can't view just anybody's info, but a drawback I see is that it's more difficult for parents to monitor.
We have a program installed on our computer called SpectorPro. It allows us to see snapshots of what takes place on the computer at set intervals and also to see every keystroke. This allows for viewing of Instant Message conversations that are normally lost as soon as the window is closed. By viewing the keystrokes we can know the passwords to any accounts our children have set up on the Internet.
It's amazing to me that children will misrepresent themselves on the Internet but it never dawns on them that the strangers they are talking to are also misrepresenting themselves. They also have no comprehension that the whole world can read their blogs. One young teen who is a friend of mine was shocked to learn that I knew her boyfriend had broken up with her. She knows I have a Xanga, but she was still shocked that I knew. Funny thing is, it was supposedly a secret from the boy's mom, yet it was posted on the WWW for the world to see.
Please encourage parents to install SpectorPro (or a similar program) on their computers and let their children know it is there, so that the children will not be shocked or angry when their parents discuss their Internet activity with them. One drawback is that if your children spend a lot of time on the Internet, you will be frustrated trying to monitor it all. But if you discover that they are behaving wrecklessly or just plain wasting time (duh!), you will probably just find yourself limiting their Internet use.