IMSafer, a new service designed to protect children using instant messaging from online predators.
Part of this solution is software that you download to your computer. It monitors IM traffic for text that's likely coming from (or going to) a predator or pedophile and sends an e-mail alert to the person who set up the service. IMSafer does not allow parents to spy on everything their child is saying in IM (who has time to read IM logs anyway?), only the context around words and phrases that it flags as potentially dangerous. Parents should also know that IMSafer is not a totally stealthed application. While the monitor runs very unobtrusively, it can been found and disabled if your child knows how to do such things.
What's clever about the service is that if the software is installed on another computer--say at a friend's house or at your kid's school--alerts generated from your child's IM account at that location will be sent to you, not to the owner of the other PC. Likewise, if a friend of your child sets off an alert at your house, their parent will get the alert. Of course, you do have to get other parents and schools to install the software for this to work, and unfortunately there's no Mac version yet. Also, the program checks IM traffic from only AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo; support for other services (including IM embedded in social networking sites) should be added soon.
Setting up IMSafer is very easy, and you don't have to know the IM screen names your child has; it tracks all conversations on the PCs you install it on, then it watches for those accounts to be used on other PCs that have IMSafer installed. The Web site could have offered parents more control over which accounts are managed, however. For example, if your child first logs on to an IM account at another location, you won't get his or her alerts, and it's unclear to me how you could claim this user ID as your child's even if you knew that it was.
Thanks to http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6648254.html?...
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