Police Chief Teaches Parents To Keylog Kids

Hugh Pickens writes writes "LiveScience reports that James Batelli, the police chief of Mahwah, NJ, and his detectives conduct seminars that teach parents how to outfit a computer with keystroke logging software, giving them access to the full spectrum of their kids' online activities. Batelli explains that kids put themselves in potentially dangerous situations online every day, especially on Facebook, where they run the risk of coming into contact with child predators who troll the social networking site. 'When it comes down to safety and welfare of your child, I don't think any parent would sacrifice anything to make sure nothing happens to their children,' he says."

Comments

Nope

[Anrego]

I don't think any parent would sacrifice anything to make sure nothing happens to their children

If you are so out of touch with what your kid does online that you need this.. then you forgot to sacrifice something somewhere along the way.

No, you can't watch your kids all the time .. and at a certain age you can't just say "internet only when I'm around" either.

You can however educate your child on the risks out there, and have a good understanding of your childs judgment is.

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

"In order to save the village, we had to destroy it" comes to mind.

Or "never time to do it right, always time do fsck it up and try something even worse" perhaps.

If parents'd done their homework, there'd be no problem. But they haven't, so this guy's "teaching" some half-assed catch-up technique that doesn't scale next to the drawbacks of being highly unethical and is bound to lose the parents their childrens' trust if (inevitably) found out. So the value of teaching this is mostly in how it's eventually self-defeating. The fact that a holder of public trust thinks its acceptable to teach this I find... telling.

As a parent you can insist that no internet access happens unsupervised ("training wheels") until it's time to take off the training wheels. If you don't understand that, then internet access is the least of your parenting worries.

Re:Nope

[houghi]

Reminds me of a girl in my class. She was not allowed contact with any of the other kids. He parents were very over protective. Then at 18, she was old enough according to her parents and was left loose. In about 3 months she became the school slut, because she had no idea how to correctly interact with others.

It is also like kid-proofing your house. Don't. The kid will get some bumps and that is how you learn: by failing.

It is basically the standard: do not take candy from strangers. I was raised in such a way that I would not even take candy from neighbors and if my parents were there and some neighbor wanted to give me candy, I would aks my parents first.

Education on what to do is the best thing you can give your kid. Not only so he won't get raped (which happens way more with people they know then with people they don't) and murdered, but s they have a basis for the rest of their life on how to handle situations.

As a parent you are NOT the babysitter and you are NOT their friend. You are the parent and YOU need to see that they learn as much as possible. Putting them in a cocoon will take the ability to learn away.

Protection is a short term goal. As a parent you need to look at the long term goal. 20+ years from the start.

Re:Nope

[HungryHobo]

I spent most of my free time for a big chunk of my childhood from about age 8 to 12 down at the local river /stream building damns and rafts with some of the neighbourhood kids about a mile from home.

when going out the door I'd call out "going out for a few hours, if not back avenge death."

In that time I never put myself in any more danger than I did climbing trees in my parents garden. Some danger but no more than the norm.
My parents had a fair idea of roughly where I was and had instilled in me the basics of not killing myself.

When we got an internet connection when I was 12 or 13 they instilled the basics of "don't give out your details online, don't give out your location online" which is really really really easy to follow if you're not an unusually thick child.

being a 13 year old boy I looked at quite a lot of pornography, went on a lot of forums and a lot of chat rooms but not once did I ever get approached by any kind of child predator or anyone trying to dig my location/details out of me.

the fear of child predators online is wildly over the top.
Your children are vastly more likely to run into them in real life than online and it's almost trivial to stay safe.

Re:Nope

[PopeRatzo]

Reminds me of a girl in my class. She was not allowed contact with any of the other kids. He parents were very over protective. Then at 18, she was old enough according to her parents and was left loose. In about 3 months she became the school slut, because she had no idea how to correctly interact with others.

And yet she was still able to become the governor of Alaska.

Shows the resilience of the human spirit.

Re:cue 100% of comments...

[HangingChad]

> But since they did, it means they want to keep an eye on their kid to make sure they turn out as they wish

My brother is one of those fat, old "the ends justify the means" right wingers. He felt it was okay spying on his kids because the ends justified it. What he didn't know was that my nieces and nephews were way ahead of him. I got a clue when they started asking me about running Ubuntu from a live CD and various ways someone might spy on a cell phone. It got to the point they were running "wild weasel" missions to cover one another. I don't think my brother knows to this day.

I mark the time we started going downhill as a country as the day those BABY ON BOARD stickers started showing up on cars. The dawn of the overprotective helicopter parents. After that it was locker and backpack searches, drug tests, fences, badges and metal detectors. On the way to the golf course a bunch of us drove past what I thought it was a minimum security prison. One of the other guys corrected me that it was a school. When we raise our children like prisoners, how do we expect them to behave as adults?

Classes like the one the police chief is teaching do little more than highlight the extent of decay our society has experienced the last 40 years.

Re:Came to say this

[hairyfeet]

Hi Matt! You won't have any problems as long as you are honest with your kids and actually know them. With my two boys I had them playing with my hand me down PCs almost from the time they could walk, had them a little LAN set up so they could play each other (no net access of course) at around 6 and gave them timed access to the net (most routers have time based settings) when their schoolwork started requiring research. I finally gave them full access at around the time I was giving them the talk at 15.

Funny part is I knew damned good and well what was gonna happen when I let them loose. I gave them the whole spiel about how many porn sites have bugs but I knew damned good and well the oldest would think I was full of shit and just saying that to spook him. Sure enough about 3 days later his little brother drags me towards his room laughing his ass off and there is the oldest with his head in his hands as "YOU CAN HAVE A BIGGER DICK!" and "HOT SEX IN YOUR AREA!" pop ups just flooded the screen. I looked at his little brother and we both just died laughing. A month without his PC along with having to learn how to do a spyware removal was a valuable life lesson IMHO.

So as long as you're honest with them, take it one step at a time, and realize they WILL fuck up occasionally and that ALL teens will eventually want to look at the opposite sex naked, everything will be alright. Now the oldest is in premed and the youngest is deciding whether he wants to be a chef or go into CAD, so I figure I did alright. One thing I got lucky with was dope, as my ex brother in law became a full blown meth addict which gave the kids a really great example of what drugs can do to you close up. I'm just glad I never lied to the boys or covered for him because now neither one wants a damned thing to do with any drug after seeing him fried with holes in his face where he picked himself bloody.

The world can be a scary place, but as long as you are honest with your kids and actually explain WHY there are rules (other than "because I said so!") then you'll do alright and they turn out just fine. Every friend I went to HS with that had trouble with his/her kids did the "Because I said so" bit and without a better reason the kids just thought they were being asses and pretty much ignored them when they turned teen. But other than the oldest thinking he knew more about computers and the net than me (BWA HA HA HA HA!) I never had a lick of trouble by simply being honest and giving them freedom in slowly larger increments. A little trust goes a long way.