Yes, I track my kid’s internet history
First of all, I’m in support of responsible freedom of speech and expression. For reasonable and responsible adults, we have the ability to self-monitor and make good decisions. I hope one day, my daughter will develop her own set of ethics using mine as a starting point. But until she is older, I am still responsible for her words and her behavior. For this reason, I track her virtual activities and review her internet history on the phone and her computer. And you should, too!
Every workplace I have been to, they have given me a laptop and a cell phone. It is for me to use for the duration of my employment. But I should have little to no expectation to privacy as my employer can, at any time, review my electronic activities. It is their equipment and their network; they pay for the bandwidth so I can perform work for them. Even legal challenges have been attempted and failed. I partly use this rationale to randomly review my daughter’s electronic activities.
I was up front about this when I gave my daughter her fully functioning cell phone with a SIM card. I told her that the phone belongs to daddy. The number belongs to daddy. It is used for communication with family and close friends. She can also use it for games and videos. But she is not to share it or lend the phone to anyone and at any time, I can ask to perform cleanup and diagnostics on the device including reviewing content. It’s not so much I worry about my daughter accidentally stumbling into the dark web since going there actually takes effort; many adult web sites can be filtered or require a secondary confirmation before they allow causal users to browse. It’s the content in the communications, attachments, popups and unknown callers and texters that I want to control. That’s why at this age, safety trumps privacy. My daughter accepts this as a condition of use; just like I accept the condition of use for work equipment.
It’s the content in the communications, text attachments, popups and unknown callers and texters that I want to control. At this age, safety trumps privacy.
But I don’t check on it every day or even weekly. In fact, initially she would simply hand me the phone to ask if I can help her with installing a game or change some settings. Then as she runs out of memory on her phone because she’s taken so many pictures and videos of mundane things, I’d have to either delete or move files for her. It is moments like these that I would have an opportunity to review content of relevant context, not just harmful context.
But what happens if your child resists this search? My daughter didn’t want me to read her text between her and her boyfriend. I get it: she wants a level of privacy. I am aware enough about these situations so I don’t need to openly pry and violate her space. I also know my daughter well, so there’s little in her phone that would surprise me. A few flicks of the screen confirm a benign dialog. But what if a child actually accesses inappropriate content? This is a tougher one to solve. Short of installing firewalls and layers of monitoring software, we really are reliant on web site owners to provide age verification and other bot-checkers. These, too, can be circumvented. But taking the device away as a punitive response is probably a knee-jerk reaction that will exacerbate the problem; a child may simply use a friend’s device.
As with anything, teaching children about digital resilience is an ongoing matter. It is never a set-it-and-forget-it approach. Anyone with tech background knows that even our computers get cluttered with digital junk which needs to be purged. Engage your daughter and tell her that access to phones and PCs are little different from watching TV: there are age appropriate content for the viewer. Some content has harsh language; some with violence, either real or enactments; yet others are adult documentaries.
There’s no golden rule I use to keep my daughter safe in the online space. But I involve her in my decisions and actions and teach her to be aware of her digital breadcrumbs. This is a much better approach than an action-reaction approach. In fact, when she can make informed choices, she may actually choose not to make them! As with almost all things, discussion free of judgement will go a long way to teach her that technology is neither good nor bad; it’s the software in her brain that determines what is suitable for her. In time, she’ll monitor her own use and that’s probably your best programming.
