You state concern about our privacy strategy. We take very seriously the privacy of our customer and the children on the account. As a company built on security and safety, we have a team devoted to auditing all of our systems to ensure the highest levels of security are upheld. All personal information is kept completely separate from the monitoring and reporting functionalities of OnlineFamily.Norton and we do not share OnlineFamily.Norton customers’ data with third-parties.

In your article, you describe our service as “sterile” and “spyware.” Our intention was to create a service that children would recognize as helpful and something that would allow their parents to relax about their web activity. Towards that goal, the service is never in a “stealth” mode – the child always sees the reminder that their web surfing is guided by OnlineFamily.Norton when they turn on the computer and the icon remains in the tool tray at all times. Anytime the child interacts with the service, by visiting a blocked site or by staying online past the agreed upon hours, the message is child-friendly and flexible. The child can even type a message to the parent and request permission or explain what happened. And during the initial setup we encourage parents to discuss the purpose of the service and the House Rules with their children. Additionally, the reporting is very simple for the parents. They can log in from anywhere (work, home, travel) and quickly respond to their child’s changing needs.

With regards to recording search, we find this helpful because it shows intent. Too often we parents overreact to any evidence our child visited a blocked or forbidden site, without figuring out how they arrived there. By seeing the terms entered into search, parents can separate innocent online mistakes, which we all make, from intentional and risky behaviors requiring parental intervention.

OnlineFamily.Norton was created with the help of an Advisory Council of experts in the fields of parenting, media research and internet safety. Our members include: Dr. David Bickham of Children’s Hospital Boston, Anne Collier of ConnectSafely, Marsali Hancock of IkeepSafe Coalition, Robin Raskin of Living in Digital Times, Tim Sullivan of School Family Media and Vanessa Van Petten of Radical Parenting. I’m the head of the Advisory Council, the editor of our Norton.com/familyresource website, the author of our Family Online Safety Guide, and a parent of three children.

Symantec also conducts our own primary research in 12 countries around the world to better understand what people are doing with technology and on the internet and what concerns they have. Some of our findings helped to solidify the planning of the OnlineFamily.Norton service.

For example, through our research we know that parents continue to worry about the issue of online predation or that their children spend too much time on the Internet. Or they worry their children are visiting websites they would not approve of. It’s not a value judgment, this is what parents report in our research. For this reason, we are able to state that parents “are concerned about what your kids are doing on the internet.”

In addition to providing this service, Symantec participates in several key conferences and research efforts to bring balance and greater understanding to issues of safety on the internet. For example, we attended and presented at the Internet Safety Technical Task Force’s Berkman Center study of children’s online risk. We were pleased with the findings that showed risk of online predation is far lower than previously believed and peer-to-peer risks such as cyberbullying and identity theft were more day to day issues to contend with. We are supporters and on the board of the Family Online Safety Institute, the National Cyber Security Alliance and many others. Through our corporate philanthropy arm, we provide support to organizations that educate the public about online safety issues while striking the balance of reducing hype and validating their programs with research.

In summary, we are always grateful for feedback on our products and services. I hope I’ve shown the depth and breadth of our work to create a family safety service that encourages communication and fosters trust. It’s research-based, supported by the external guidance of experts and as a web service, we can continually update it to best serve the needs of our customers.

Marian Merritt
Symantec/Norton Internet Safety Advocate

Parents who would use this are selling out their children’s privacy to a corporation that will take their child’s surfing habit data and gladly sell it to other corporations so that they can better brainwash them with targeted ads. Brilliant!