[BrandonWatson]

You are absolutely correct about the photos. Explicit photos were going both ways on chats. We were working on a solution to that, and had licensed some pretty cool tech from a small firm in DC.

re: the notion that _you_ would have known about a creep online, that's awesome. It's great that you were so self aware. Not every child can say the same. A favorite quote of mine applies here. No matter how you cut the math, and no matter how much you don't like the answer, 50% of the population is below average intelligence.

All of the content on our site explicitly suggested to parents that they should talk to their children _before_ installing our software. Talk about why they were installing it, and show them how it works. Every kid hated it. Of course they did. I would have. Unfortunately, kids have plenty of time to think about ways to circumvent protections their parents put in place. Parents have jobs, multiple kids, schedules to maintain, etc, and in general were outgunned on the technology front. They are all screaming for help, or suffering in silence, throwing up their hands because they cannot solve the problems for themselves.

When we started IMSafer, we were all in our late 20s or very early 30s. We were all hacker types. We also had young kids. One of our advisors was a police officer (personal friend) who spent a ton of time with us talking about the realities of the bad people out there. It's not Chris Hanson crazy, but there are really, really bad people out there. More often than not, related to the harmed minor.

[Zak]

I don't think it's really unfortunate that kids can circumvent technical measures. It's unfortunate that parents want a robot babysitter.

The primary danger comes from breaking the barrier between online and in-person. The best solution seems to me to be parents being understanding and supportive. Want to meet someone you talk to online in person? OK, fine. The parents come along and meet in a public place. If, instead the rule is "no meeting people from the internet ever", teenagers will do it anyway in a much less safe manner.

[mnicole]

I'd actually be really interested in reading about some of those scenarios if you have any links/blogs available.

Perhaps I was a little more aware of my online surroundings, but as children and pedophiles become increasingly technical and able to overcome these barriers I still think something like that has the potential to do more harm than good. Like you said, I had all the time in the world to figure out how to get around the rules and would have gone out of my way to find ways to bypass your software, potentially finding myself using avenues that were even shadier than the already-risky chat methods we all use and opening up my system to attacks or more in-depth tracking of my/my parents' online activities.

Although the likelihood for abuse/noise is high, the ability to report questionable conversations to support avenues rather than parents and law enforcement (who may try to take things into their own hands too soon without the appropriate amount of proof) seems like it would be the most effective at this point. Maybe something like this already exists?

Anyhow, many thanks for the response and for trying to find a solution! It will definitely be interesting to see what the future holds for online safety.