IMs Being Monitored At Home, Work

One Long Island Dad Keeps Tabs On Kids While Virgin America Watches Employees

(CBS)  The use of Instant messages, or IMs, is increasing. Businesses have found they improve productivity and save money. At home, it's used by kids to stay in touch with each other.

One Long Island family found that what is sent in an instant can lead to instant trouble.

"Thirteen-year-old boys asking my daughter if she would like to have a drink. I found friends of hers telling her how they would go into gay men's chat rooms and trying to get gay men to say inappropriate things to them," Jeffrey Supinsky, who monitors his daughter instant messaging, told The Early Show correspondent Susan McGinnis. "All of this over instant messaging."

Supinsky has monitored his three children's computer use for three years and said the first time he saw a conversation, he was shocked. Supinsky is a consultant for SearchHelp, a program that monitors the computers in his home. It sends him an e-mail alert when a conversation deemed inappropriate is taking place and lets him stop it immediately. He can even watch what the kids are doing in real-time.

"One of the boys asked her just this weekend, 'Do you want to come over? My parents are away. Would you drink?' And I immediately spoke to her about it," he said. "Within a second she said, 'nope.' "

Jordan Supinsky wasn't pleased when she learned her father was monitoring her instant messaging, but said she got over it. She now thinks twice about what she sends.

Jeffrey Supinsky doesn't think he's invading anyone's privacy. He believes he's protecting his children. He says what his generation found at the local park or on the streets just doesn't compare to what his kids might find on the information super highway.

"When you're on the Internet, you could go so many different places and interact with so many more different people than you could with leaving the house," Supinsky said. "But parents never ask that question because they think they're in their house they're safe. They're really not."

Businesses also monitor instant messaging.

"Corporations can indeed read your instant messages and take appropriate action if they find that you are doing something inappropriate with that instant message," said Bill Maguire, Virgin America's CIO.

At Virgin America, Maguire is mostly concerned with keeping company secrets. IMs are monitored by a piece of hardware in the company's data center. Maguire doesn't mind a little idle chatter and no one has been fired because of instant messaging at Virgin, but Maguire has seen it happen elsewhere.

"In one particular case, we had somebody connect to inappropriate sites that were obtaining pornographic information," he said.

More companies will take heed from Congressman Mark Foley's experience. Foley was caught sending inappropriate instant messages to male teenage congressional pages and resigned amid scandal. The ePolicy Institute says less than 10 percent of companies now monitor instant messages, but that's changing as instant messaging takes off.

Each day last year, about 12 billion messages were sent.

"It's huge," said Lance Ulanoff, an editor at PC Magazine. "Just think about how much money you save if you have offices in the U.S. and Paris, and instead of picking up the phone, you're just doing quick messages back and forth."

Add in the number of children using IMs and it's easy to see how important it is to learn what disappears in an instant can have a lasting effect.

Keep tabs on IMs:

Learn more about SearchHelp here.

Visit the ePolicy Institute online.

Visit Akonix here.

[angryliberal-2009]

I wish every parent went through this trouble to protect their kids.

[sykosam-2009]

Wow, that's a great way to show your kids you trust them... Big Brother much?

[siddin-2009]

Yeah, thats an idea, tell all the kids you have all these rights from the constitution, but none of it applies... Try something else next time.

[drew30319-2009]

When I attached my daughter's PC to the Internet we had two rules:
1) Whenever she was on the computer, her bedroom door would stay open and I was welcome to enter at will.
2) Everything went through my network and I made it clear that I could read everything that she saw and wrote.

She also had an account on MySpace and we made sure she realized that we could monitor her profile. My cousin (her Godfather) was added as a "friend" so that her profile was always available to him.

Basically I feel like I did all of the things that a responsible parent should do when it comes to technology and our children.

In February she was killed by a kid from down the street. Shot in the back of the head the day after Valentine's Day and left in the woods.

Protect your children online but don't think that the danger ends there. Things have not changed. We still have the same dangers that we've always have had. Technology only presents new avenues.

Teach your children about the dangers not only of being online, but also off-line. Estimates of teenage relationship abuse range from 10% - 30%. Do the research and share it with your kids so that you don't have to spend Halloween like I am, crying over the memories of Halloween's past.

Drew Crecente, Director
Jennifer Ann's Group
www.JenniferAnn.org

ps. Always remember to say "I LOVE YOU," I'm so glad that I did the final time we talked.

[sharncedar]

Big business is bad. The reason we use IM at work is the presumption it is not recorded/spied like e-mail. I find people are honest under those conditions, for example, they will tell you honestly they made a mistake, never in an email. More work gets done, better work gets done.

Not good enough for corporate America. They want to destroy all honest or private conversation, what scum they are.

Kids are kids, and parents are parents. To explain it to a teen, use metaphors they would understand - Kids are essentially "newbies" to the whole world, it is our job as the high level players in life to teach the newbies how to survive to reach the same or higher levels we did. They have to go on the quest of school and earn enough points to qualify for the quest of getting a good job. There will be trials, where they have to pick the right decision, but guess what - if they don't know the answer, they are allowed to call on a higher level player to give it to them, with no penalties!
Until a situation comes up, they can bluster all they want, but they may not know how to react. What if the person they wanted to impress most in the whole world (their current crush, say) asked them to do something inappropriate. How much will power does the average teen have? How sure are you of your teens ability to resist temptation when it is presented by someone who is everything to them?
Yeah, kids know and talk about a lot more than parents think they do - you probably did as a teen too. Keep them safe, instead of worrying about what foul language they use with friends. Forbidding doesn't really work, teach them understanding, instead.
It isn't Big Brother to be checking who your kids are talking to online any more than mothers calling all their kids friends 30 years ago to see if little Johnny is spending the night where he says he is. Times change, parenting needs to change with it.

[ihave4rugratshelp]

This has more to do with protecting our kids, which by the way is part of what being a parent is than whether or not we are playing Big Brother and not trusting them. I monitor not only who my child talks to on the internet, but also who their friends are, where they go, etc. You can call it being Big Brother and denying them their rights and any other garbage you would like, but I am responsible for protecting their life to the best of my ability, until they are old enough to do it for themselves. That is what parents do. And I take that responsibility seriously.

[dcd915]

I just 'love' to constantly hear and read from people who complain that kids dont get rights and freedoms. Well maybe somebody should start to explain that those things are for adults in the basic scope, and hopefully mature ones. People who tist word meanings etc to get 'their way' are just showing how immature selfish they are.
Kids need to be educated and protected, THATS the rights they have.
I wonder if the adults who complain about kids 'rights' are just unhappy kids who got caught being dopes as kids, now just grown up, just not grown up enough.

[dcd915]

Big Brother? Rights? They're kids, the rights we speak of from the Constitution etc are basically for adults. The rights kids have in our society are: education and protection. They dont have the right to act destructively.
I always believe that the people who respond to programs (computer and social) like that are just kids who got caught being dopes when they were young and now that they're grown up (not enough usually) give a voice to ignorant or immature thinking.
No kid should have the right to do whatever they want. Why the heck do you think we put age restrictions on many things? Talk to someone who lost a child through inaction or denial, I bet you might just change your mind about how you deal with kids. Esepcially the 'perfect' ones in everyones household...

[talsian]

Make yourself the admin on your computer. Turn on the firewall and block all IM programs. It takes 5 mins and it couldn't be much easier.

[mtredhawk200]

We need to worry a lot more about what people, including kids, DO rather than what they are saying to each other. Most teens talk a lot badder than they are! Big brother is watching you and your kids, and what you say or look at can get you or your teenager 5 years in Federal prison. What a teenager posts can get a friend arrested. Arrests for looking at sexually suggestive pictures on free websites has gone through the roof, because most of the stuff on the net is posted by Federal entrapment forces. A friend's 19 year old son was just convicted of "child porn" for looking at pics of 16 and 17 year olds. Didn't buy sell transmit or create images, just looked. That's another thing we need to warn our teens about!

[sykosam-2009]

I love the fact that people seem to think being a good parent means having so little faith in your own abilities that you have to spy on your kids.

Grow up already. They are human beings just like anyone else. Sure, know where they are and what they are doing, but have faith in them enough to RESPECT them. Giving them absolutely no privacy is NOT the way to be a good parent. It is punishing them before they even do anything wrong.

But I guess being a good parent means smothering your children to death.

btw, Big Brother wasn't about just watching over someone to be sure they were okay. Apparently you parents need to read 1984 again. EVERY MOVEMENT AND SOUND was watched and listened to and controlled. Nobody had any freedom at all. That is certainly NOT the way to raise a child.

Have some faith in your own parenting abilities.