Last Thursday, I was accidentally invited to go to Seth Joyner’s house to hear about a new company called WebSafety.com. I say “accidentally” because someone got an email who got an email, who sent it to me, so I went. I was impressed by Mr. Joyner’s passion for this product. He believes in it and it shows. His co-presenter was Father Damian. I regret that I didn’t get his full name, nor did I write down his religious affiliation, but I do recall hearing that it was “orthodox”.
WebSafety.com states their cause “to keep our children safe.” They showed a number of slides with statistics outlining the depth of the problem. The most striking to me was that according to the FBI, there is a 100 percent chance of a child meeting a predator in a chat room. Chat room? Who uses “chat rooms” any more? That statistic is from 2000. Almost 10 years ago. In fact, all of the statistics used during this portion were of similar vintage. Their assertion was that things have gotten worse over time, not better. I am not so sure. I would like to see the current statistics.
The product uses text matching to trigger alerts to parents. This is very similar to the filtering that is done by Club Penguin to keep kids safe in that massively multiplayer online game. I asked about the schedule of updates, because “textspeak” changes so quickly and kids jargon morphs more quickly than their parents can spell www.urbandictionary.com The presenter, Father Damian, had no knowledge of a set schedule, but referred to Erin Jansen, an expert in online communication who is on the board of WebSafety.com. But how often does she update the database? There was no clear answer. At Club Penguin, more than half their workforce is devoted to rooting out new twists of phrase and lingo that suddenly mean something nasty. Mr. Joyner said that there was no substitute for taking your kids out for pizza and talking to them. Listen to them, he said. I couldn’t agree more.
On the issue of sexting, in which a teen, usually a younger teen girl, sends indecent pictures of herself to another via text message, WebSafety.com says it can stop it and prevent your kids from getting a felony. Sexting is a felony and I don’t think many kids understand what that means or how bad it can be. It means they will need to register as a sex offender and have a felony on their record. According to Father Damien, sexting is stopped by WebSafety.com because they recognize the type of chat that leads up to the sexting and will alert the parent. That’s a little bit like your alarm company calling you while you are at work and telling you there is a break-in at your house. You might be lucky enough to get the police there before all your valuables are gone, but maybe not. Mr. Joyner implored us to keep the computer in a public place – not the child’s bedroom. We should also use parental controls or blocking software. I thought of the free parental tools that come with the Macintosh computers. Mr. Joyner had obviously given this a lot of thought. He knows this is a problem. He knows we need a solution.
But this was only the beginning. WebSafety.com understands that the computer at home is only one part of the digital equation. Virtually every teenager in America has a cell phone these days and texting while driving is a huge problem. Teens call it driving while “intexticated” and it kills two times as many teenagers as driving drunk. Just last week I had heard a story on NPR and watched one on PBS on the very same topic. Were those boys who blew through a stop sign at 90 miles per hour and right into a school bus last week texting? I don’t know, but what a tragedy for their friends and family. According to WebSafety.com, they can stop speeding, too. How do they stop it? By sending a text message to the parent, who can then enable or disable the texting on the phone. How do they stop the kid from going so fast? There are speed alerts available, but the parent can’t make the car go slower. They can just react after the fact. Or call the police.
The product doesn’t work on all phones. It will only work on “smart” phones and not on the iPhone. Father Damian said this was because the iPhone wouldn’t allow background processes. This is true, but with 30 million phones sold, one would think WebSafety.com would be hot on the trail to figure it out. It works on Google phones and the popular new “My Touch”. Mr. Joyner eloquently stated that for something this important, switch your cell service. He has a point. This is a problem. As the number one killer of teens, I don’t need convincing it is important. But there are other ways to help. The Zombak Personal Locator is one option to solve the location problem. Google Latitude is another. The features aren’t as slick, but I don’t need to get my kids different phones. My cell phone provider offers parental tools to block the texting. I would be surprised if all cell phone providers didn’t have similar tools.
Now the price. For a single license, the annual fee is $249. That’s for one device. It was unclear if this is the child or the parent, but not both. For $499 per year, you can have up to 7 devices covered by WebSafety.com. Given that I can do for free or for a nominal charge from my cell phone provider much of what they are purporting to do, it did not sound like a good deal.
Father Damian said he wanted to reach all those “mad moms” out there who would be passionate about this problem. Because he was offering us an opportunity to get in at the ground floor. For only $49, all we had to do was sell the product to two friends who would sell it to two friends who would… Father Damian told us a funny story about a vitamin shake that tasted awful but had an amazing compensation schedule, so who cared if it didn’t taste good? I wasn’t laughing. I was getting sick.
