Parents, Police monitor kids cell phones

Michael Harris was watching his local news station when something came on regarding a new software that parents could use to monitor their children's cell phones. Harris works for the Jefferson County Child Sex Internet Investigations Unit as an investigator and thought that this would be a great idea and a good way to lure pedophiles. He installed the software to his phone and pretended to be an underage child using some of the social networks and was able to lure sexual preditors right away. He has made 83 arrests of alleged sexual predators and 44 of which were because of this software. Other software that can be used are My Mobile Watchdog and Mobile Spy have become more popular with parents of young school-aged children. Some parents do not tell their children they have equipped their cell phone with this device. Several parents have commented stating that this software has made it easy for them to track what their child is doing but also see how they are treating others and how they are being treated. By being able to track what was being said on their teenager's cell phone gave them a better understanding of the type of person their child is becoming and it also gave them more peace of mind knowing what was going on in their life. Some people may think that this is some form of easvesdropping on their kids but in reality we do this to employees at the work place and that is okay so why not make sure our kids are safe and be able to monitor what is going on in their life. I feel this would be more of a safety issue especially how naive some kids are when they text, talk to people they don't know on myspace or even facebook because they think they are talking to someone that is their age and not realize that the other person could be dangerous.


http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/20/monitoring.kids.cellphones/index.html

While I can see some really positive things that could come out of bugging a cell phone such as catching sexual predators because everyone but the predator would be in on the bug, but I think that is really offensive that this can be used against someone else's knowledge. If the police can just listen in on people’s conversations where is the privacy? It’s like no one is allowed to say anything without someone listening in. I would be extremely offended if my parents couldn’t trust me enough that they put a bug on my phone. I don’t think this should be so available, and if it were used, the child should know about it. It should definitely be illegal to use these methods of eavesdropping for no reason other than being curious about what your children are doing. If you are so nervous about your child making bad phone calls don’t give them a phone.

I feel that using a device to monitor your children is wrong. I think that these kinds of things should only be used for the purposes of tracking the bad people. Where is the trust anymore? My parents would never do this to me...they trusted me with everything I did. I'm not saying that they didn't want to know everything...but they trusted me to tell them on my own. I think that parents should only be allowed to use these kinds of things if something is going terribly wrong with their children.
I do think that this man catching all of those sexual predators was real good. I think he should be allowed to continue using this software.