New parental notification software developing by Members login Feedback Newsletters RSS Feeds Home News Blogs White Pape 2007-01-17
Under fire from both the U.S. government and parental organizations, MySpace.com has announced that it is creating software to give parents a window into what their children are putting on their online profiles.
Once the monitoring software is finished and distributed, parents can install it on a home computer to see what any MySpace user who logs on from that computer lists as his or her profile name, age and location. It will also track updates made to those profiles. The software doesn't give parents access to the content of the MySpace profiles in question, and the members whose profiles are being monitored will be notified that the software is keeping tabs on them.
The development of the software, which is code-named "Zephyr," was reported in The Wall Street Journal Wednesday morning. There is no word yet on a release date.
Having a profile on the News Corp.-owned MySpace has become a staple for American high school students, and the social-networking service has recently been expanding overseas with international sites in countries like France and Japan. At the same time, MySpace has come under extensive scrutiny for allegedly endangering teenagers' safety by making it easy for them to share extensive personal information over the Internet.
Numerous third-party applications that aim to give parents access to their kids' MySpace activity have emerged over the past year or so, but "Zephyr" is the first monitoring softwar
