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Cyber safety: EyeGuardian provides parents, companies way to monitor social media
Courtesy of EyeGuardian – An EyeGuardian screen shot shows the main dashboard for a user being monitored via the software that flags words and images with cyberbullying, suicidal or otherwise harmful potential. The software, launched in late 2011, is being used by about 5,000 parents from all over.
By Chris Beattie, cbeattie@starlocalnews.com
In an Internet age, lasting footprints are made with every keystroke and Facebook “Like.” With so many feet, across so many paths, keeping up with them is an unenviable – yet often crucial – challenge.
Cyberbullying is now a fact of every teen’s life – particularly that life which may hang in its balance.
“Our research shows that if a teenager already has certain risk factors or diagnosed depression, they have a four times higher percentage of thinking about or completing suicide (if exposed to cyberbullying),” said Missy Wall, director of Teen CONTACT, a division of CONTACT, a local agency that operates a 24-hour crisis line.
An influx of images, messages and posts – some harmless, others threatening – make it difficult for the sites to monitor them. The Texas Legislature passed House Bill 1942, anti-bullying legislation, in early 2011 to better address all forms of bullying, including cyberbullying, and to mandate anti-bullying measures in schools and communities – ways to help prevent and respond to the influx.
Later that year, Image Vision launched EyeGuardian, a free application for parents who’d like to keep a closer, more attainable eye on their kids’ Facebook activity. By registering those accounts with the software, parents have access to daily, weekly or monthly alerts to certain “flagged” activity – images and words that could be connected to cyberbullying, suicide and the potential for harm to their kids or others.
“We’re giving them alerts to help them in this world of digital media onslaught – how to process all this content,” said Mitch Butler, co-founder of Image Vision, based in Anna. “Parents just can’t see it all, so we’re developing automated tools to help them.”
EyeGuardian, now used by close to 5,000 parents around the country, Butler said, is also used by social media sites that wish to more efficiently monitor their own content.
And it has proved helpful close to home for Butler and Stephy Ochoa, Image Vision’s social media manager. Both immediately implemented the software for their children.
Ochoa’s younger son at first took issue to the “invasion of privacy,” she said, but soon realized no EyeGuardian, no Facebook. “If you have somebody under age 18 living in your house, if the parent can’t get the Facebook account password, shut them off the site by cutting off the Internet,” Butler said. “There’s a little bit of leverage.”
Worthwhile leverage, he came to find out. His daughter became a player in online “girlfriend fighting,” he said, when she joined in on insulting Facebook posts toward another girl at school. His daughter faced possible suspension when the insults blew up and the school resource officer began an investigation into the matter. Because EyeGuardian lets users set a desired time range for monitoring, Butler was able to go back to the root of the cyberbullying and show his daughter was neither the initiator nor the main culprit.
“I was able to go back and pull every post that was made, whereas the officer was able to see just some of them…and within context, he saw what my daughter did was not as bad as what the mother of this other girl was saying it was,” Butler said. “It’s really a tool I use to keep her from getting into trouble.”
Social media users can be the perpetrators and victims of cyberbullying, and EyeGuardian helps users notice that potential before or immediately after it’s realized. “Suspect-only” options filter Facebook activity to only those images and words that could be part of that potential, sending alerts to parents via email.
It opens them up to a world that’s otherwise too overwhelming, and potentially long-lasting. Coaches, principals, prospective colleges and others have fairly open access to teenagers’ social media past, and Butler said employers have a legal right to go back seven years in their search of applicants’ social media activity when considering them for hire.
“People online tend to feel they have this anonymous status, that they’re untouchable just because they’re digital,” Ochoa said. “It’s a footprint – every time you’re on there, every page has its own little footprint; you can delete it, but it’s always going to be there.”
Teen CONTACT travels to schools in five area counties, including Collin County, to train teachers, students and parents how to handle cyberbullying before its effects are manifested. House Bill 1386, also passed by the Texas Legislature in 2011, mandated schools to implement rules and procedures related to suicide prevention.
Wall said doctors with whom Teen CONTACT works recently said 30 percent of Dallas-area teens are diagnosed with depression, not accounting for those undiagnosed. Classroom presentations and workshops teach students to immediately report such online activity and “take it offline,” she said.
“With racial slurs, pictures and even songs…kids don’t realize how it’s all going to be used,” Wall said. “EyeGuardian really gives parents the tools to be a part of what their kids are doing and saying online.”
In light of the school shooting in Newtown, Conn., and the ongoing gun debate, the software also flags images of guns. EyeGuardian is constantly updating its databases to account for evolving trends in cyberbullying and social media dangers.
After all, keeping up with the footprints is less a challenge, and increasingly more a necessity.
“What’s going on in kids’ Internet world is brought into the normal conversation of a family environment,” Butler said. “So when they’re living on their own, they don’t do dumb stuff online because they know it can come back to haunt them and impact their life.”
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