Facebook and Tech-Savvy Parents

There's an interesting story from my wife's old neck of the woods, where a couple in suburban Hartford were busted for serving alcohol to underage friends of daughter when these same friends posted photos of their boozing on Facebook. One of the things that is emerging is the arms race between parents and children when it comes to being technology savvy, specifically in the area of privacy and the monitoring of activity that a parents deems as being unhealthy or inappropriate.

One of the things that I found interesting from the article is a quote that really sums up the generational divide:

"For parents, the question is, 'Why would you put that on the Internet?'" Van Petten said. "For teenagers it's, 'Why wouldn't I?'"

But for my generation of parents, I wonder how the game will be played. I'm on a number of social networking sites so I'm pretty familiar with most of what's out there. There's no doubt that Web life will continue to evolve over the next 10-15 years, and there's no guarantee that I'll be able or willing to keep up. Or as it notes in the article, will Daniel or Sophia accept if I "friend" them on the next-generation Facebook? Would I insist upon them accepting as a condition of them using it? Or would that just drive them (as I would probably do given my conniving mind) to create a "cover" Facebook identity for more public and parental consumption, while having a separate account which would be for privileged insiders? 

A few years ago I had talked to a friend from church who also happens to be a tenured professor in computer science at Columbia University. He's served as a government consultant in the Microsoft antitrust case, is brilliant and obviously goes far beyond the "power user who can write code" classification. I remember having a tongue-in-cheek conversation with him a few years back around how he planned to protect his young children from the dangers of the Internet, and while we talked about the usual safeguards which are available at your local Staples (this was before OpenDNS, I believe), I pretty much came to the conclusion that given the proliferation of public WiFi networks and increasing functionality of electronic gizmos that are WiFi enabled, it's pretty hard to safeguard a kid who wants to roam unfettered. The arms race of safeguards that parents install and workarounds and hacks which kids can implement marches on, and a kid who wants to roam off the reservation is usually going to be step ahead.

So what it really comes down to is not trying to compete in the arms race. That's not to say that you shouldn't use safeguards, but it's really a matter of having frank conversations with your child on why he or she needs to be careful and protected in the Internet. At the end of the day, it's not simply a matter of keeping a kid from "forbidden fruit", but a mutual agreement that it's a dangerous (cyber)world out there.