Goes to show we don’t issue warnings for nothing.

RJMetrics, an analytics firm, has done some digging on the new web phenom ChatRoulette and found that like most interesting ideas on the Internet, it’s being dominated by lonely dudes and pervs. Specifically, of the users sampled (2,883) that were alone, 89% were male, and only 11% female. Furthermore, as many as 1 in 8 ChatRoulette encounters were deemed “R-rated” or worse by the firm, which either involves nudity, requests for nudity, or lewd acts.

The one bit of good news about the site is that the U.S. has the lowest perv-rating of all the countries at 10% concentration, compared to UK’s world-beating 22%. Read the whole article.

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The decision on whether or not we will see sites with a .xxx suffix on their domain has been delayed…again.

ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) deferred the decision until June, citing the need for a proposal outlining various options. The proposal is slated to be submitted March 26 and will then have a 45-day review period before being considered in June.

Perhaps the options proposed between now and June will make this proposal a bit more worth covering. As it stands now, it won’t please proponents or opponents.

Religious groups oppose the .xxx domain because they feel it will legitimize pornography. Others are in favor of the domain designation because they say it will make it easier for parents to block out pornography and will help clean up the rather sleazy red-light district currently piped in to any home with an Internet connection.

As the current proposal stands, registering a .xxx domain would be a wholly voluntary action. Therefore, pornography sites would have very little to gain from switching from a .com to a .xxx domain other than some mildly positive PR. And if they are looking to score points with their biggest opponents and detractors, they would have to do a lot more clean-up and safety than simply switching to a .xxx domain. Without some sort of mandate that sites that feature adult content abandon their .com domains in favor of the more explicit .xxx domain, the proposal does absolutely nothing as far as making the web safer for anyone.

Worries that this domain designation will further legitimize pornography in our culture get into “drop in the bucket” territory. As the porn pastor Craig Gross tells the St. Louis paper, “Our culture has embraced pornography. Girls wear T-shirts that say ‘porn star’.” Gross runs XXXchurch.com, a web-based ministry which helps hundreds of thousands of people end their addiction to pornography, so he’s well versed on the subject.

We’ll see what comes from the June decision if indeed there is one. The way the debate is shaping up it seems as if either decision won’t go very far in making the web a safer place.

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FourSquare is a mobile/geolocation/social-network/meetup app that allows people to post their current locations to their friends—OR, it’s a great way to get into trouble.

Or both.

Ron Davis, blogger and InternetSafety.com employee, quickly found that the social app could very easily lead people to sharing more information than would be safe or sensible. After receiving a friend invite from a fellow gym-goer, Ron realizes that he has more access than to her information than he or anyone else should. Even though FourSquare does involve breaking down the privacy wall in its core functions, a few adjustments can keep the important parts of that wall intact:

• Limit foursquare friends to people you know and trust. If you wouldn’t give them a spare key to your home, you probably don’t want them to be able to locate you at will.
• Don’t check in at work. It would be really easy to figure out where someone works if they check in there at the same time every day.
• Opt out of information sharing. Foursquare will only give your phone number and email address if you tell them it’s ok to do so.  You’re opted in by default, but unchecking that box is something you really should consider.
• Don’t use foursquare. Give serious consideration to whether it’s a good idea to have your real, physical location broadcast on a regular basis.

Thanks to Ron at moreron.com for some salient Internet safety advice for us adults.

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David Schwimmer has a strong personal motivation for taking the issue of online predators to the stage and the screen.

Schwimmer has long been a champion of women’s issues and is on the board of the Rape Foundation in Santa Monica. His interest in online predators and online safety began when he noticed an increase in cases, and became a cause when he heard a victim’s father speak at a fundraiser he attended.

The name of the play brings into focus the shifting and perilous digital landscape today’s kids are forced to navigate—one with an inherent lack of trust in terms of exactly who they are interacting with and what those interactions mean.

“We, especially kids, live in a state of distrust,” said David Schwimmer, “[by] not knowing who you’re talking to on the other end, or not know what’s going to happen to the image someone just took of you.”

Schwimmer’s play “Trust” will be showing at the Looking Glass Theater in Chicago March 14 through April 25, and will be made into a feature film of the same name, which is slated for release in 2011.

Schwimmer told Medill that he was advised early on to use his celebrity and passion for women’s issues to help raise awareness among men.

“I thought I could maybe give voice and give presence and get guys to see that it is their issue and it is their responsibility,” Schwimmer said. “I realized that these are our girlfriends, our wives, our daughters, our sisters, so it’s as much a man’s issue as it is a women’s issue.”

Read more about the play here.

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ChatRoulette, a new site that randomly pairs users across the globe in audio and video chat, is getting lots of coverage as a danger to kids.

In response, the site’s creator has placed a “report abuse” button on the site, but it appears to be a button to nowhere, as the speed-dating nature of the site means that users are more likely to simply click next, especially since the site’s inception it has been unclear what actually constitutes abuse. Moreover, there appears to be no process for actually removing a reported user from the site even if someone were reported.

The site’s creator, Andrey Ternovskiy, can hardly be blamed for a lack of foresight as he is just a kid himself at 17. He originally created the site as a way to expand on he and his friends’ chatting activities, and did not bank on the site becoming the overnight success that it has.

The site’s success, and subsequent media coverage, means that people are hearing about the site and many of those will be minors. Our CTO Aaron Kenny says that his concerns with ChatRoulette go beyond just concerns of minors being exposed to indecent or pornographic content:

“Even the concept of being hooked up with a random person for a chat can be dangerous for a child, so we’ve categorized it as a blocked site,” Kenny explained. “In terms of getting something inappropriate, you can almost say the odds on ChatRoulette are even worse than playing Russian Roulette.”

Safe Eyes users will be automatically protected from exposure to the site, but parents who do not use filtering technology may want to talk to their kids about why the site is inappropriate for them, and check up frequently on their child’s computer use. Tests of the site have revealed that a user can be exposed to pornographic content in less than two minutes.

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This past weekend YouTube rolled out a rather impressive security feature, acknowledging that much of the content on the site is not exactly family-friendly.

The immensely popular video-sharing network is owned and operated by Google, and Safety Mode is similar to the “safe-search” we know from their search engine. In its blog post on the new feature, Google acknowledges that the filter is not 100% effective, but that it is a step towards a more user-controlled experience.

I tested Safety Mode when it rolled out and I have to say that Google has done a truly admirable job in making it easy and effective. Once I locked in Safety Mode it was effective in preventing me from viewing questionable content. There are two things that will trip up concerned parents, though, one small and the other fairly major: first, to lock in Safety Mode parents must have a YouTube account or Google account, something a lot of parents don’t have; and second, it only works on a per browser basis.

The account requirement is minor, as anyone can set up an account in minutes, but the browser thing is big and why a lot of parents will likely choose to stay with filtering software that can universally block harmful YouTube content across all major browsers. While it was nearly impossible for me to turn off Safety Mode in Firefox after I had locked it in using my YouTube account (even after signing out, clearing cookies, and creating a dummy test account), all I had to do was fire up Safari or any other browser to get right back to the objectionable content. This is a big deal for lots of reasons:

• Kids who are looking at things online that they don’t want their parents to know about are very likely to use a different browser
• Downloading any new browser is free and easy, so even deleting other browsers from your system is only a temporary fix
• Chances are your average ten-year-old knows a few cookie clearing tricks that I don’t

So while Google’s efforts to provide parents with one way of controlling content are a huge step forward in both acknowledging the problem and dealing with it, parents need to be aware of the inherent limitations of this kind of filtering.

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The most recent study from the Kaiser Family Foundation on teen media use presents an interesting portrait of the younger generation.

While the report shows what many of us would expect, that teen screen time is rapidly expanding and that emerging mobile technologies are keeping kids aged eight to 18 glued to rich media more than ever, it also presents a kernel of hope that this might not validate the ensuing conclusion that teen minds are being pounded into mush.

The report does show that kids in this age range are spending more time in front of screens, be they for phones, TVs, or computers, averaging just over seven and a half hours a day. This is well over the suggested limit of 2 hours per day provided by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Time spent in front of the computer has increased from just over a half-hour in 1999 and just over an hour in 2004 to one-and-a-half hours today.

However, while the study also shows a corresponding decline in the consumption of print materials like newspapers and magazines, the study shows an increase in the time spent reading books over the past ten years. The increase is not overwhelming, going from 21 minutes per day in 1999 to 25 minutes per day in 2009, but one has to take these bits of good news where we can.

If you need help limiting your kid’s time on the computer or iPhone, we can help you there, but for the TV and everything else, you’ll have to rely on just good ole fashioned parenting.

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Shane Kenny, President, COO, and Founder of InternetSafety.com, gives his thoughts on what it takes to present your company at a mammoth trade show like the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

On Preparing for the Show

Planning gets into full swing for CES in mid-October and everything has to be done and on its way to Las Vegas before Christmas. This means that you are creating booth designs and marketing materials for a product that does not fully exist yet or is evolving as you send stuff to print. The hardest part of getting ready for event like CES is getting everyone within the organization on the same page in regard to the goals of the event and the messaging.

On the Company’s Involvement in CES Over the Years

This will be our fourth year attending CES. We have been fortunate to have great product announcements each year making it pretty exciting to get there and pull the lid off of the things we have been working on.

How Does a Company Stand Out from the Crowd at CES?

Standing out at any show is hard, but with CES it’s further complicated by multiple venues, tens of thousands of exhibitors, and just Las Vegas in general. Last year we had a prime booth location right inside the doors of one of the exhibit halls. This helped with traffic along with our launch of Safe Eyes Mobile, giving us some eye catching messaging around the iPhone. This year we have some exciting new announcements that will revolutionize our industry. I am more excited than I have ever been to go to an event like this and I think CES will launch the new year at InternetSafety.com in a big way.

To get an idea of what it takes to assemble and deliver the key marketing piece for any CES exhibitor, here are some photos of our booth being assembled at our Acworth office.

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Facebook has recently rolled out more user-intensive security measures in order to guard users privacy and encourage members of the site to actively select how they want their content shared. If you’ve been to the site this week you’ve seen a screen asking you to determine or redetermine who can view your postings, photos, etc.

One thing that has not been widely shared is that part of these new security measures allow the user to choose whether or not they want their Facebook info indexed by google. For a while now, search engines have been able to access your profile photo and info. If you don’t want your profile to show up on searches, here’s how to change the setting:

1. Go to your account and click on Settings
2. Select “Privacy Settings”
3. Click on “Search”
4. Uncheck the box that says “allow” next to public search results

There are rumors circulating that Facebook was allowing indexing of all user info but Facebook is denying that at the moment.

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My first introduction to Internet safety was the story of Alicia Kozakiewicz, the girl who was abducted by an Internet predator and underwent unspeakable horrors while held in his basement for four days. (read her story here.)

Though Alicia’s story is a clear-cut warning about meeting online strangers, the topic of online predators is probably the most confusing area of all for parents that are looking to protect their kids. Just how much of a threat predators pose to children continues to be a matter of debate due to differing opinions from Internet safety experts and law enforcement.

Larry Magid, a well-known and respected Internet safety author and expert, recently called concern over online predators “panic” and was glad that the panic had largely gone away in recent years. He goes on to write:

Safety experts and law enforcement studies from the Crimes Against Children Research Center and elsewhere show that, statistically, the odds of a prepubescent child being sexually molested by an online stranger is virtually zero and the odds of it happening to a teenager are very low, especially when compared with children who are harmed by family members and others they know from the real world.

Right after reading this I ran across this news item, detailing a horrific tale of another girl, 16 years old, who was tied up and raped by a man she met online. Just today I ran across a story of a 13-year-old girl who was about to board a bus to meet a man she met playing the online game World of Warcraft. Luckily police got to her in time.

Furthermore, the study that Magid is referring to actually shows a 402% increase in the arrest of online predators from 2000 to 2006, so there is clear statistical and case-by-case evidence that the problem not only exists, but is actually getting worse. However, the same study shows that of teens that were solicited over the Internet, only 4% of those encounters actually resulted in an abduction.

So parents are left to choose what to believe: Internet safety experts who use words like “panic” and “hysteria” to describe concern about predators, and the numerous, documented cases throughout the U.S. of sexual criminals using the Internet to snare children.

While the “odds” may be low regarding online abductions of teens, using that argument is obscuring the issue for most parents who are much more concerned about what could happen to their child rather than statistics regarding what happens to the entire U.S. population. However, most researchers who cover the topic are trained to think and speak in terms of large populations and aggregate numbers, so the disconnect exists.

It is incumbent on Internet safety organizations to present a clear picture to parents of what the real risk is regarding predators, without using language that exaggerates or downplays the threat. Parents need to know not only dangers regarding worst-case scenarios involving abduction and rape, but also much more likely scenarios such as their child receiving sexual messages from a stranger that may disturb the child, or even being coerced into trading pictures that could then be used to blackmail the child into further sexual actions.

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