Back in 1917, the editor of Girls’ Own Annual bewailed the loss of privacy. The telegraph operator knows what we say and what is said to us, she lamented. Then television was just a wild idea. Windows and Yahoo meant different things and Google was still to be invented. Surveillance cameras and closed circuit TV were in the realms of science fiction. The butler usually took care of things now can be handled by a computer system like Bsecure CloudCare.
The benefits of living in our new world are legion. We can hear heartbeats across the oceans, access information from world class libraries in the comfort of our homes, trade in international markets from a mountain top. Yet, as is so often the case in revolutions, the best things are balanced by the worst things.
Pornography intrudes and the shadow of organized crime looms behind it. Pedophiles, fraudsters and hustlers bend over computer keyboards intent on new forms of theft, fraud and embezzlement. Their endeavors are aimed into the heart of society and into the family.
In our global village, the line between private and public has been all but obliterated. Social networking sites, like so many other seminal aspects of the internet world, encompass good and bad things. On the positive side they have created a new dimension in society, enabling us to share our lives with each other in a way never before experienced by human beings. On the negative side there are the well publicized concerns about invasion of privacy.
Young people are beneficiaries of the internet revolution but also vulnerable to its threats. They become the prime targets of criminals and perverts. A middle aged man in a darkened cubicle in Muscat can chat to a fourteen year-old girl in Nebraska. His age and experience put him at an immense advantage over the teenager. Understandably, responsible parents are concerned to protect their children from direct links between the family home and the international underworld.
Identity and data theft is ripe, bullies roam the corridors of the Internet and pornography and inappropriate images can pop up accidentally. The Bsecure Cloud Care system is designed to protect children in multi-computer families. The system will filter data, protect and lighten the loads on individual computers and record who has been watching what, when and how much within the family network.
Yet the very efficacy of the program raises a problem of educational ethics. As children grow and change within the family, the balance of authority alters. What was protection may become interference. This seems to come to the heart of the dilemma facing users of family surveillance systems. How to decide the point at which protection becomes meddling or worse, a lack of trust, is perhaps the question.
However, the Bsecure CloudCare parental control software has a feature that offers a solution. It is called the ‘Adult Accountability Option’ and allows the owner to monitor his own usage. From the perspective of educational ethics this is a way out. Parents can confer democratically within the family, subjecting themselves as well as their children to restrictions, and aiming for consensus. Handled in this way the Bsecure CloudCare system can protect the family without compromising the trust between parents and children.
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