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CBS4.com has an excellent article on tips to help prevent online sex crimes from happening.

They talk to Nancy McBride, the national safety director for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

In addition to ‘just be a good parent’, they give a few other tips as well:

-Use online filters and software to keep your kids away from certain websites.

-Check your child’s web page every once in a while to make sure there’s nothing personal or provocative on it.

-And always check out the people who have access to your children whether online or in their day to day lives.

Remember back in January when MySpace said they had something called “Zephyr” in the works that would allow parents to monitor their child’s MySpace usage?

Well, the public beta has arrived, and they’re calling it ParentCare. Let’s just say that parents hoping for a quality product will be sorely disappointed.

The only thing you’re going to get from ParentCare is your child’s display name, location (which you would already know), and the age that they put in their profiles. That’s about it. Their Profile ID is given, but you better hope they have a public profile, ’cause if they don’t, the ID is useless.

Finally, sorry Mac users, but this software is Windows only.

I’d post a screenshot but the EULA prohibits that. In fact I probably shouldn’t even be talking about it. Brandon at IMSafer handled the Fight Club references that I wanted to make regarding this ridiculous policy.

But since it’s a PUBLIC beta, feel free to check it out for yourself. Here’s the ParentCare FAQ and the direct download link to the software.

… And any other sites their kids might be getting into as well.

This article on Canada.com does a fine job of outlining the need for parents to keep a vigilant eye on what their children do on social networking websites. Some stats from the article:

• 58% of parents know where to download parental control software, but only one-third actually use such programs
• Only 49% of parents know the online aliases their children use
• 26% of parents are unfamiliar with YouTube (Wiki Article)
• 33% of parents are unfamilar with MySpace (Wiki Article)
• 41% of parents are unfamiliar with Facebook (Wiki Article)

Article was originally discovered via JustMySpaceStuff.com

Monitoring software is an important tool for any parent.  Since it is near impossible to keep a constant look over the shoulder, software can be your “digital eye” that allows you to keep an eye on your kids even when you’re not around.  One county sheriff is spreading the word, and some free software:

 A new computer software offered to parents for free might make it easier to better monitor and possibly prevent sex crimes and cyber-bullying against children, law enforcement officials said.

ComputerCOP, a monitoring software distributed by the Suffolk County Sheriff’s office scours a computer’s hard drive — searching for every photo, e-mail, web activity, Internet chat log and more than 1,000 buzzwords, like “sex,” — every time a child logs onto the computer.

The Sheriff’s office will distribute 43,000 copies of the software, which cost about $127,000 and was paid for using money seized from drug dealers and money launderers, DeMarco said.

“It’s not enough anymore to put computers in high traffic areas,” said Laura Ahearn of Parent’s for Megans Law. “What we’re saying is violate their privacy, look over their shoulders, read their IM’s, check their Web browsers.”

Check out the full article here.