A new project, Symantec Family Safety Initiative, was presented at the DEMO Conference, held in Palm Desert, Arizona. Symantec imagined a method to protect kids online: instead of offering ways to block certain Web sites or limiting access to pre-screened safe sites, it helps them in their regulation.
Gerry Egan, director of product management at Symantec Research Labs, is considering that "an education gap" is growing nowadays between kids and adults and their efforts are heading towards "building a product that requires trust and collaboration".
The parents mustn’t feel overcame by cyber-savvy kids, but glad to receive help and to involve everyone in this process of cyber safety. It represents an alternative to the severe education and "in many households the kid will be the one that installs this, in conjunction with the parents."
For now, the Symantec Family Safety Initiative, is just a project. It is developed outside the company's major business units, in the Symantec Research Labs, by Symantec Advanced Concepts. On the mentioned conference they announced their intention to do private testing and, eventually, they are expecting to be adopted by Symantec's consumer products unit.
The idea of the project is not to closely supervise the families who embraced the concept, but to protect them and their computers.The future consumer will still enjoy his/her privacy in spite the fact they’ll monitor Web, IM, social network, and e-mail usage.
It will actually stop kids from divulging phone numbers or address information to unapproved contacts, will permit parents to control and to establish time limits on the online activities and will create logs of online activities for parents to see who their kids are talking to without necessarily revealing the contents of the conversation.
Gerry Egan declared that few months will be enough for preparing and launching a public beta.
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