Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Big Data simplifies monitoring of children in an era of new security concerns


Introduction

The "strange danger" hysteria of the late 1900s did more harm than good. Subsequent data found that children were hundreds of times more likely to be abducted by a family member than by a stranger. Unfortunately, this blinds people to the real issues facing children in the 21st century. The good news is that parents finally become more aware of the problems. Several child monitoring companies have used Big Data to develop new solutions to help parents keep their children safe.

Child supervision becomes more popular as larger data enhances tracking capabilities

Parents expressed growing concerns about the safety of their children. Although most parents are not as paranoid as abductees as they used to be, they are constantly afraid of the well-being of their children. They are especially concerned about the types of content their children are exposed to online and with the people with whom they are related.

Parents are turning to more technologically sophisticated child monitoring strategies. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 16% of parents use tracking tools to track their children's location and content they access online.
There are several ways in which Big Data helps parents control their children's activity more easily.

Need more data that can be stored in the long-term

Monitoring solutions for older children had much more limited data storage capabilities. This meant that it was almost impossible to store exhaustive data about your online behavior patterns, text messages, or the places you visited. They could only see small snapshots of their activities, such as a list of visited sites.

Because the newer tools rely more on big data, they can store much more detailed records. This gives parents a much clearer understanding of their children's activities, both online and offline.

Big data expanded the contextual understanding of parental control tools

When parents controlled their children's activity in the 1990s, they relied on obsolete tools like Net Nanny. The problem is that these tools were very hard hit or confusing. In general, they worked using one of two controls:

• They would correspond to domains that children tried to access online against a blacklist of inappropriate sites.
• They would activate a censoring algorithm if the user tried to access the site with certain restricted words.

There were important limitations of both approaches. The problem with the first approach was that the list of sites with inappropriate material grew exponentially every year. It was impossible for tools like Net Nanny to continue and add them to the blacklist. Even in 2013, 80% of parental controls did not block all offensive sites.

The problem with the other approach was that it often caused positive failures. There were perfectly legitimate reasons for the sites to have certain phrases that might seem controversial without any important context. A parental control solution blocked a page in breast cancer research.

Big Data helped reduce false positives and false negatives that were common to other parental control solutions. Modern parental control solutions have deep learning capabilities that allow them to understand what types of content are controversial and unsuitable for children. They get better at censoring adult content without the need for a blacklist.

Use predictive analytics to identify possible concerns that may not appear in digital records

Child monitoring applications have a lot of information. You can see what messages your child sent on social networks and what places they visited. However, you cannot always tell the whole story. A free phone tracker can help parents see that their child was in Parking A on the other side of town at 11 pm Friday night. However, he will not tell them who they were visiting.

New monitoring solutions capable of assessing possible risks, based on the activities of the child. They can look closely at the data to see if they are visiting areas that neighborhood children frequent for drugs.

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