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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25 million American households watch online TV and movies every week, and that number is growing. With tech growing increasingly mobile (and all indications at CES 2010 are that it is) TV and movie viewing through the Internet is going to grow as a concern for parents right along with it.

Safe Eyes 6 Family Internet Manager, which will be available for download later this month, gives parents the ability to filter according to standard FCC ratings like TV-MA and R.

This is important because the advent of online TV and movies has created a loophole in terms of filtering out objectionable content for kids. While it remains as important as ever to be vigilant about content created specifically for the web such as your standard video on YouTube, shows like Nip/Tuck, CSI, and Sons of Anarchy are bringing increasingly graphic sexual and violent content to the web. And of course there is no “late night” when it comes to the Internet: these shows are available for viewing on their network sites and sites like Hulu.com.

Safe Eyes 6 gives parents the ability to close this loophole by choosing what ratings are appropriate for their child. This feature works on Hulu.com, iTunes, and all major network sites like NBC.com. Safe Eyes 6 is currently the only product of its kind with this ability, representing another industry first. For more on Safe Eyes 6 and its features, check out our preview page.

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In a recent explorative survey of three hundred Internet users, a significant relationship was found between online exposure to sexualized content and sexual obsession, deviation and perversion (in both online and offline behavior).¹ Given this and other findings that have repeatedly shown sexually explicit material to influence moral values and sexual activity among children and youth (including sexually aggressive behavior)², many parents are understandably concerned about what content their children are gaining access to online.

Conducting an image search for an innocuous subject like ‘MasterCard’ can have children confronted with sexually explicit images in a matter of seconds. Clearly, sexually explicit material is observed not only by those who actively seek it out; rather, exposure to sexually explicit content is often unintentional.³ However, what may start out as ‘accidental’ may paradoxically encourage future sexually oriented surfing habits. One study indicates 25 per cent of adolescent males and five per cent of girls go on to consume sexual content at least once a week.⁴

Internet filter and accountability software are great tools for parents to safeguard children from both accidental and intentional access to sexually explicit content. However, parents also need to foster healthy communication with their child about ethical online behavior. Becoming aware of juvenile surfing habits is the first step for their protection. Do you know about your children’s online activities? How are you safeguarding your kids?

Sources
D Dèttore & A Giannelli, ‘Explorative survey on the level of online sexual activities and sexual paraphilias’, Abstracts of the 9th Conference of the European Federation of Sexology, vol. 17, no. 1, 2008, p. 15
P Greenfield, ‘Inadvertent exposure to pornography on the Internet: Implications of peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and child development and families’, Applied Developmental Psychology, vol. 25, 2004, pp. 741-50.
K Cameron, L Salazar, J Bernhardt, N Burgess-Whitman, G Wingwood, & R DiClemente, ‘Adolescents’ experience with sex on the web: Results from online focus groups’, Journal of Adolescents, vol. 28, 2005, pp. 535-40.
Peter & Valkenburg, pp. 178-204.

On the second Friday of every month, the InternetSafety.com Blog will be posting guest video posts from Dr. Robi Sonderegger, clinical psychologist and founding director of Family Challenge Australia, and consultant and policy adviser on the rehabilitation of trauma associated with war, sexual exploitation (human trafficking) and natural disaster worldwide.

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The improved reporting system in Safe Eyes 6 Family Internet Manager makes staying informed about your kids’ online activity easier than ever.

One of our primary goals in revamping the Safe Eyes reporting system was to make the information presented in the reports easier to read and digest quickly, as most parents do not have tons of time to pour over online activity reports. To accomplish this we have categorized the data according to the corresponding activity, and prioritized the data so that parents can instantly see the most relevant information to their child’s online activities.

As you can see above, the information regarding this user’s web site activity is displayed according to times of day and visually displays what time period has the most frequent Internet use. Thus, parents can easily see what time their kids are getting online the most, and regulate that through our time controls if necessary. The report also shows top searches and top sites visited.

The videos pane of the Activity Report shows what videos have been watched, what videos have been blocked, and if they have a rating, what rating the show falls under. The visual display quickly alerts parents to what type of video content their child is accessing and attempting to access, providing opportunities for teachable moments.

In addition to viewing the Activity Reports through the Safe Eyes interface, parents can elect to receive either daily or weekly Activity Summaries through email, which provide a condensed version of the full Activity Reports.

These improvements empower parents with the information they need to be responsible digital parents and help their children discover the Internet safely.

Safe Eyes 6 is currently available at InternetSafety.com.

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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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Heart-throbs John Mayer and Robert Pattinson both recently gave interviews to big magazines, and in the process revealed interesting perspectives on pornography.

While Mayer’s interview is likely to be noted for some other things said which Mayer will likely regret, we found his points on the impact of pornography on his generation to be rather salient:

Internet pornography has absolutely changed my generation’s expectations. How does (porn) not affect the psychology of having a relationship with somebody? It’s got to.
John Mayer

Mayer added that his pornography consumption has made sex less satisfying for him and has made it harder to connect to the woman that he is with and less likely to seek out meaningful relationships with women.

Robert Pattinson of the wildly successful Twilight saga, who apparently objected to having to appear with several near-naked models for a Details cover shoot, also wondered about the impact of the prevalence and availability of porn on his generation.

Pattinson in describing his aversion to the shoot lamented that today, as opposed to the eighties, that porn is “everything” and “everywhere,” and that it has lost aspects he described as “quaint” and even respectful.

Many groups, from the feminist left to the Christian right, have connected constant pornography consumption to sexual crimes or deviant behavior, but what Mayer and Pattinson both inherently realize as members of younger generations is that the effect of pornography goes far beyond such worst-case scenarios. The increasingly apparent and felt impact is that the ubiquitous nature of online pornography is changing the face of sex and relationships in much the same way that social networking and media are changing interpersonal interaction: substituting endlessness for intimacy.

What do you think? Will the availability and ubiquity of pornography in the digital age substantially alter human relationships and behavior?

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