I don’t believe that our kids have an ironclad “right” to unfettered Internet access, but if they are responsible about it, they won’t have a problem with me. I do feel that as a parent i have an obligation to guide and protect them, just like learning to drive. I feel that the way I am doing it accomplishes that.

I do have open dialog with my boys, but honestly, it isn’t my boys comments and actions I am monitoring, it is the friends postings that are of most concern.

I like YouDiligence because I know if something I don’t approve of gets posted, I will get an email and I can address it immediately. It has lessened my worry about my kids using Facebook, and saved me a lot of time and energy to not have to snoop through their pages. Love the column.

Skip the spyware and use this as an opportunity to connect with your kid.

First, when a parent creates an account, the account comes with an extensive searchable word list that we match against a child’s Facebook or MySpace page, but parents are also able to add whatever keywords they might be concerned about. We also search image captions, video captions, comments on a child’s pages AND the comments a child leaves on their friends’ pages. And we are exploring image and video technology, so we will incorporate sooner than later, the ability to identify troubling images (for example a bong or inappropriate nudity) and send an alert upon this identification.

Secondly, the platform can actually work in one of two ways–either a parent with a Facebook or MySpace page needs to be befriended by their teen or tween OR the parent could have the child’s login and password itself and they can use that info to search the respective pages.

On the privacy issue, I would argue that children that are acting responsibly might have more privacy with YouDiligence than without. Our service was explicitly designed to be minimally invasive of a child’s privacy. We designed it so that parents don’t need to physically visit their child’s pages to determine whether they are concerned about their child’s activity.

Finally, I’d like to address the privacy and the significant amount of time saving that we truly provide, inside of a single point.

MySpace and Facebook both have sprawling chaotic architecture, and looking for content there is sometimes like looking for a needle in a haystack. We can provide a buffer to all this content, much of which is benign, so an engaged and concerned parent doing their job, is not plowing through all this material. Instead, they only need to review the notifications from their email and dashboard. In this case, the child has more privacy with YouDiligence than without, and they really are saving themselves many hours a week.

We have been working with University athletic departments for over a year.