What Do You Get When You Combine 3 Pre-Teens and Common Sense?

No Facebook accounts.

Unfortunately common sense seems to be the missing part of the equation, as kids under 13 with Facebook accounts is a steadily rising population, according to the latest poll from Reuters showing that 17 percent of parents are ok with 10-12 year-old children having an account on Facebook or Myspace.

Two...

Being in the online safety industry, I read a good bit about new technologies and the reactions to it.

Take, for instance, the reaction of Anne Collier as reported by Larry Magid, to the new photo-sharing app Color, which creates location-based photo sharing networks:

Anne Collier worries that the service could be used by “a bunch of 11-year-olds in various stages of undress, snapping away...

According to the unofficial biopic “The Social Network,” Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg first gained notoriety at Harvard for creating a site called “FaceMatch” which pitted photos of females against one another in a battle for perceived hotness.

What made FaceMatch different from predecessor HotOrNot.com was that it pulled from local populations of girls at Harvard, making users ...

Safe Eyes Occasionally we look at anonymous data from our userbase to see what our users are blocking, and to check our own notions of how our software is used against the way that it is actively being used.

We were pleased to find that our users are utilizing the wide range of filtering options that Safe Eyes offers. Though filtering software is often talked about primarily as a porn-blocker...

Check out this video that the folks at Safe Eyes have on their site. While you watch it stop and think about the actual numbers going by and our children.

- Brian

The unfortunate practice of “sexting” has spurred a new and more potentially damaging hazard into teen lives: Sextortion.

Sextortion describes blackmailing someone into performing sexual acts, ranging from posing for webcams to physical intercourse, and usually happens in the following way: a teen will upload revealing/embarassing photos or videos of him or herself via text, social network,...

In this video, we show parents exactly how kids can access chat rooms and what a potentially dangerous environment they can be. It only takes seconds for a would-be predator to solicit who he thinks is a 13-year-old girl. We also demonstrate how easily Safe Eyes can block chat rooms, thus keeping kids safe from predators like BigMan234.

To see the Video from Safe Eyes; please CLICK HERE.

A new study released by the Girl Scouts Research Institute reveals the shocking news that there is a great deal of disconnect between the online profiles teen girls post and their real selves.

The report tells us basically what we would expect, that teen girls tend to play up personality traits that are considered more “cool” by their age group when they are representing themselves online,...

It’s usually the standard #2 tip in all online safety tips, right below keeping the computer in the common room, but checking browser history to find out what your kid is doing online. Despite this being fairly common knowledge, I see this “tip” repeated everywhere from ZDnet to WiredSafety and CommonSense Media. To try and help clear the air for parents, I’ve created the following video to...

In an attempt to make parents’ heads explode, Facebook introduced another possibly perplexing wrinkle to their ever-expanding social web. Places is a new app that will allow users to share their real-time location data, commonly referred to as geolocation, with their friends and possibly friends of friends.

Places is a natural extension of Facebook’s core functions as a social network....