Helping Parents Monitor Their Kids’ Facebook Friends
Helping Parents Monitor Their Kids’ Facebook Friends
July 18, 2012
Fox News, Charlotte — Experts say about 80 percent of online predators target kids as young as 14.
To combat this problem, a group of students at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev developed the Social Privacy Protector application (app) for Facebook.
“Children want to be more popular, so they try to collect friends. Bad people take advantage of this, become their friend and take their information,” says one of the app’s creators Michael Fire, a Ph.D. candidate in BGU’s Department of Information Systems Engineering.
Using this app, parents can weed out fake or dangerous Facebook profiles in just one click.
It analyzes each friend and gives a score based on mutual friends, profile information and pictures. It flags the lowest scores as suspicious and recommends deleting or restricting them.
The free software is available as a Facebook app for all browsers, and as an add-on for Firefox.