Protecting your kids or creepy stalking?

When is a parent being too nosy? Just how much authority does the school have to monitor and discipline out of school activities? How much right does a parent have to monitor his kids friends?

Shane Richmond of the Telegraph.co.uk examines these questions in light of Emma Mulqueeny's experience. He recounts part of her tale (taken from her blog):

"“It turned out that what had happened was that one of the parents of the other girls involved had seen her daughters wall, and chat, had then explored all of the other girls’ walls and records of chats and had set about printing everything that concerned them. This parent created the file of print outs and took them to the school, asking that they do something about this.The deputy head said that she had a dilemma, really, she could not do nothing, nor could she really get overly involved. She decided that the best course of action was to call the girls in, to reprimand them for the behaviour that had concerned the other parent, mainly to teach them that 1. they can get caught doing anything online and 2. there is no such thing as completely private in the digital world."

Perhaps not the best solution for satisfying one parent without offending others, but not bad either. But lets look at what might be the real problem. The first mother was concerned about her child's activities and friends on-line. So she looked at her daughters Facebook. No big deal, especially if the kid is young. But then she started checking out the friends walls and pages. Then she started printing things out. Then she took the printouts to the school and demanded something be done about the kids behavior.

Did she go to far? At what point? If she's friended to her daughter she's going to see some of the friends stuff anytime she looks at her daughters page. That's part of Facebook, and similar to hearing something somebody said because you're in the same room. But then she started going to the other kids pages and gathering data to support her case that they were doing something wrong.

How would you feel if another parent had been scrutinizing your son or daughters pages? Would it matter why?

Want to help shape national cybersecurity strategy?

On Friday Howard A. Schmidt, Cybersecurity Coordinator and Special Assistant to the President, announced the launch of National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. The vision statement states the goal is that:

Individuals and organizations utilize secure, efficient, easy-to-use, and interoperable identity solutions to access online services in a manner that promotes confidence, privacy, choice, and innovation.

The difficult part of that statement is creating a solution that is easy to use, and getting people to use it. Of course, that's the purpose of a vision statement, to provide lofty goals to strive for. The PDF of the draft strategy includes a more manageable set of goals:

More specifically, the Strategy defines and promotes an Identity Ecosystem that supports trusted online environments. The Identity Ecosystem is an online environment where individuals, organizations, services, and devices can trust each other because authoritative sources establish and authenticate their digital identities. The Identity Ecosystem enables:

· Security, by making it more difficult for adversaries to compromise online transactions;
· Efficiency based on convenience for individuals who may choose to manage fewer passwords or accounts than they do today, and for the private sector, which stands to benefit from a reduction in paper-based and account management processes;
· Ease-of-use by automating identity solutions whenever possible and basing them on technology that is easy to operate with minimal training;
· Confidence that digital identities are adequately protected, thereby increasing the use of the Internet for various types of online transactions;
· Increased privacy for individuals, who rely on their data being handled responsibly and who are routinely informed about those who are collecting their data and the purposes for which it is being used;
· Greater choice, as identity credentials and devices are offered by providers using interoperable platforms; and
· Opportunities for innovation, as service providers develop or expand the services offered online, particularly those services that are inherently higher in risk

The purpose of the website is to get public feedback. Go to the site, read the comments, read the PDF (35 pages) and put your two cents in. If we don't tell them what we think, we deserve whatever they put in place.