In his article “The Undercover Parent” (2008) Harlan Coben informs parents on the dangers of the internet while persuading them to use spyware as a surveillance tool. Harlan Coben describes the problems that parents face and proceeds to state the benefits of spyware. The purpose of this article is to increase parent's awareness of their children's online world in order to promote online safety through the use of spyware. The intended audience for this article includes parents who are uncertain of their children’s online use. The author shares a relationship with these parents because he is a fellow adult and understands the worries and fears of parents. Parents should not use spyware to monitor their children because it is overprotective and intrusive, counterintuitive for leaning, and does not promote trust between teens and their parents.
First, parents should not use spyware to monitor their children. Parents possessing too much personal information about their kids can create problems. For example, in my personal experience, parents tend to gossip about their kids social lives. Sometimes they even tell other kids. No one likes rumors, and they usually don't end well. While others may argue that spyware is the only way to truly
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The internet is full of both knowledge and things to watch out for. Kids need to learn how to safely navigate the internet. Spyware prevents that learning. Some may say that spyware makes the internet safe, but experience is the best teacher. Where will kids learn how to remove viruses, or how to tell if a website is legitimate if they are always protected? If teens are exposed to the internet, they need to know what to avoid and what to trust. For example, through my own experience I know how to tell which websites are safe, I can remove viruses and I know how to stay safe online. I learned all this just by working freely online. Experience it the best
Internet is advancing every day, parents have no idea what their kids are doing in cyberspace and are contemplating the idea of spyware. In the article, “The Undercover Parent” by Harlan Coben, he argues the idea of parents putting spyware on kids’ computer is a good idea to keep the child safe. Many American parents have no idea what happens in cyberspace; sex, bullying, and drugs. Parents are torn between protecting their child with spyware and allowing the child to have privacy. Coben uses his friends’ personal experiences to support his argument without leaving room for counterarguments. By using strong emotional appeals, weak qualifiers, and sugary word choice Coben creates a weak argument that lacks persuasion.
There are, after-all, ways to be an effective, inspiring, and supporting parent without spying on the child’s every online
The expansion of the Internet infrastructure across the world, has brought an increased audience. Which has provided expanded markets for businesses and exploited new opportunities. There are virtually countless social sites and media used by individuals to access and share experiences , content, insights, and perspectives. Parents today tend to believe they should spy on their kids online activity. I argue parents should respect the privacy of a child's social life and his/her internet activity.
Kids now want to be more independent and have more freedom which might scare some if not most parents. A lot of parents look at the internet as a dangerous tool and not a tool where their kids can have some freedom. Although parents need to realize that they can’t protect their kids from all ...
To begin with, spyware can prevent pedophiles from targeting your children on the internet. The Internet has become a common hunting ground to prey on children. Nowadays, more and more young people are using social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.While all these web sites act as a social network to unite people it also contains a lot of personal information that may help pedophiles to find their next victim. by using spyware the parents can be aware of
Some parents care about their children but don’t care about the drama going on at school or who their best friend likes. I can see how parents think it’s an invasion of privacy and some feel like if the child found out about the software they wouldn’t trust their parents because who knows what else they could be hiding. So as a parent I could see why they wouldn’t want to put spyware on their teen’s computer because they are invading in the privacy of their kid.
These parents might monitor their child’s activity online or constantly check their child’s texts. By doing this, they can really scare off their teenagers from talking to them, and make them anxious. They would constantly wonder if their parents were looking over their shoulder, watching everything they did. This would put a lot of emotional pressure on these teenagers, who are already dealing with lots of emotions through hormones and puberty changes. The children would begin to look for new ways to keep their life private from their parents, which can lead to things such as creating fake accounts to hide their activity online. This might lead to the children keeping more and more secrets from their parents, which, if revealed to said parents, can cause more problems in the relationship between parent and
I do not agree with parents eavesdropping some private conversation between their child and their child’s friend. It invades the child’s privacy and it would make him/her feel absolutely down about it since he/she can’t be free from his/her parents. Even if the parents tell their children that they have set up the spyware on their computer, they will always find a way to talk to their Internet friends privately. In paragraph 9, Coben stated, ¨Second, everything your child types can already be seen by the world-- teachers, potential employers, friends, neighbors, future dates. Shouldn’t he learn now that the Internet is not a haven of privacy?¨ First of all, this has nothing to do with Spyware. It is a good argument, but it doesn’t have to do with the parents actually. It’s the boy’s fault to type scandalous things on the Internet and it is his decision to do that. He shouldn’t have done that in the first place to avoid getting into trouble. In paragraph 12, Coben wrote, ¨Yes. But text messages and cell phones don’t offer the anonymity and danger of the Internet.¨ I agree that it doesn’t offer the anonymity and danger of the Internet. Nevertheless, he must’ve forgotten that people have a power to cyber bully other people through texts. Above all, the people who have a great desire to upload it on the Internet, could receive the inappropriate cyber bully. Hence, it also shows the danger of being cyber bullied. In paragraph 13,
If my parents decided to get a tracker and watched me what I was doing, I would not care about it at all. My parents has brought me up in a good way. My personal demeanors are neutral, and I do not have a concrete position about tracking their kids.
To date, while the industry has developed innovative ways to help parents and educators restrict material that is harmful to minors through parental control protections and self-regulation, such efforts have not provided a national solution to the problem of minors accessing harmful material on the World Wide Web. Notwithstanding the existence of protections that limit the distribution over the World Wide Web of material that is harmful to minors, parents, educators, and industry must continue efforts to find ways to protect children from being exposed to harmful material found on the Internet.
Finally, the current parental oversharing of sensitive information is a trending topic, as it is especially affecting today’s children, adolescents, and young adults. The longevity of anything posted on the internet makes it extremely hard to come up with any solutions to this issue, although it could be avoided if parents were more careful and thoughtful when posting anything regarding their
“Parents play an important role in the psychosocial development and well-being of their children” (van den Eijnden). Undeniably, the quote makes a bold declaration that all parents in today’s technologically advanced society should understand and follow. With 90% of teenagers between the ages of 12 and 15 using the internet (Sorbring), it is important for an adult to monitor their daily usage and behavior. “Only 39 percent of parents report using parental controls for blocking, filtering, or monitoring their teenager’s online activities” (Dell’anotnia). Parents should monitor their teenagers’ daily internet use and behavior by engaging in meaningful conversations and dialogue that allow for fostering a healthy relationship.
Many children have access to the internet and are able to search up anything on Google. As with any type of media, there are positive effects and negative effects. Some of the negative effects of the internet for children are that ,since, children and adolescents are more or less technologically savvy than their parents, they are able to search about just about anything and and talk to just about anyone on the internet, this can lead to some very dangerous situations. According to the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, “89% of adolescents report using a computer, 61% report “surfing the net,” and 14% report seeing something that they do not want their parents to know about.” (Villani, 2001) 14% of adolescents reported seeing something that they did not want their parents to know about, this shows how unsupervised the internet is and shows how the internet can lead adolescents to become secretive and , maybe, even violent. Again, this leads to deviant behavior that the child learned from the internet. In addition, according to the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, “... a profile of the recent school killers, noted that almost all were computer-savvy and frequented sites where they could obtain violent, anarchist-oriented material.” (Villani, 2001) This shows that websites that have violent material on the
Internet has become a new equipment to improve violence and disobedience. Teenagers can have easy access to the pornography sites or adult’s chartrooms. As a matter of fact recent researches has shown that Despite the potential negative effects on children using the Internet, more than 30% of surveyed parents had not discussed the downside of Internet use with their children (Internet Advisory Board, 2001), and 62% of parents of teenagers did not realize that their children had visited inappropriate Web sites (Yankelovich Partner...
A good idea would be to have students visit Cyberethics for Kids, at the Web site of the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Teachers are charged with maintaining a safe environment in their classroom. Students (and parents) expect the teacher to provide protection from exposure to danger of any kind. While students are working online in a classroom/lab environment, the teacher should be alert and always in a position to know what students are up to at their stations. Students won 't try to get away with things if they know they 're likely to get caught. Filtering, which involves blocking Web sites that have been deemed unacceptable for children, is not by any means a completely effective solution to the problem of objectionable material on the Web. Not only are filters vulnerable to being circumvented -- accidentally or on purpose "got around" -- filters also too often block Web sites that are perfectly acceptable, leaving teachers frustrated when they plan to use such sites for