The temptation is too great for some worried parents: they dip into a son or daughter's diary and trawl for names and dates and times of secret liaisons. They steal a look at the call register of a mobile phone, read text messages, peruse snaps sent and received. It's furtive, it's an invasion of privacy, it's unconscionable, but it's done for the best of intentions: trying to keep a child safe from nasty children and even nastier adults.
There's a better way, said Geoff Sondergeld, the managing director of Device Connections, the Australian distributor of My Mobile Watchdog, a US-developed software programme that lets parents eavesdrop on mobile telephone traffic without resorting to subterfuge. "The child is notified every time they power their device that their phone is being monitored and they must accept that notification before they can move on to use the phone in any normal use," he explained.
"The screen will say 'your phone is being monitored by mobile watchdog, press any key to continue.'" It's essentially the child agreeing to be spied on by parents. The programme allows parents to monitor phone traffic - but with express permission to do so. "The product is only one instrument in the parental tool kit and is not offered as a complete solution to cyber-safety," Sondergeld said.
He insisted the monitoring did not fall foul of guidelines recommended by the Australian Privacy Commission. The child could opt out simply by not using the phone. The surveillance is for younger children. The level of oversight a 10-year-old would agree to is not the same as that an older brother or sister would countenance. Not everybody is happy about the arrival of My Mobile Watchdog in Australia.
"If this technology allows a parent at any time to in effect go and read any communication that is going to or from their child's mobile phone, that is simply not acceptable," Civil Liberties Council head Terry O'Gorman said. "Children have certain rights of privacy, including certain rights of privacy in their communications, that their parents should not know about."
It's hard to argue, though, that children have greater rights than adults. Millions of employees have their Internet and phone traffic monitored - sometimes just "for training purposes." Researcher Marilyn Campbell, an educational psychologist at Queensland University of Technology, takes a different tack. She sees technological intervention to record traffic and block callers as second best to a negotiated settlement.
She would sooner see the child taking personal responsibility and the parents in a mentoring rather than a monitoring role. "Are parents really going to, or need to, spy on their children like this?" she asked. Some are. After all, parents put filters on home computers rather than trusting little ones not to access Internet sites they deem bad for them. That's intervention - and 40 percent of Australian parents do it.