Group items tagged

Parents who install a leading brand of software to monitor their kids' online activities may be unwittingly allowing the company to read their children's chat messages — and sell the marketing data gathered.

Software sold under the Sentry and FamilySafe brands can read private chats conducted through Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other services, and send back data on what kids are saying about such things as movies, music or video games. The information is then offered to businesses seeking ways to tailor their marketing messages to kids.

a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms.

But some people do care, especially when someone else has uploaded an unflattering photo or video. Los Angeles screenwriter Mike Bender, who runs AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com devoted to such photos from the past, said a woman who shared a family photo later wrote to say that she was drunk when she submitted it and that her family was upset with her. Bender removed the picture immediately, but it was already all over the Internet. What happens online can have a direct effect on someone's real life reputation, Van Der Heide said, yet people posting photos of others aren't giving them a chance to respond or control how they appear. He said unwarranted photos, videos or comments made about you could potentially "assassinate your credibility."

Today, Rea is a high school math teacher in St. Louis, having given up her modeling dreams. "It's making fun of myself, letting the world know we've all had embarrassing moments," she said. What if her students saw that photo online? "I think it would be funny," she said. "It's good for my students to know that it's OK to make mistakes."

As part of a deal announced Thursday, Google is opening up part of its index to the maker of a high-speed publishing machine that can manufacture a paperback-bound book of about 300 pages in under five minutes. The new service is an acknowledgment by the Internet search leader that not everyone wants their books served up on a computer or an electronic reader like those made by Amazon.com Inc. and Sony Inc.

What Facebook Users Share: Lower Grades By Anita Hamilton Tuesday, Apr. 14, 2009 Print var artId= "1891111"; var chn = "bizTech"; var contType = "article"; Email Reprints Digg Facebook time:http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1891111,00.html Twitter MORE Add to my: del.icio.us Technorati reddit Google Bookmarks Mixx StumbleUpon Blog this on: TypePad LiveJournal Blogger WordPress MySpace var ad = adFactory.getAd(88, 31); ad.setPosition(8) ad.write(); Forget the widely unloved redesign. Facebook has committed a greater offense. According to a new study by doctoral candidate Aryn Karpinski of Ohio State University and her co-author Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican University