The results of the survey were shocking in our opinion.
The obtained survey results are as follows. Six hundred
and twenty students said they owned at least one account
on a social networking site, while five hundred and fifty
of them were aged between six and twelve. The worst
thing we have found is that most of the parents
participating in the survey said that they did not even
know their children had an account on a social
networking site.
Further in the survey, we asked what people shared on
their social network public profile that was true about
themselves. The result was still surprising. 85% of them
said that they shared their real name. 52.5% shared their
mobile phone number, and the most shocking answer was
that 35% of them shared their real home address on their
public profile page.
Moreover, it was found that 14% out of 35% of those
who shared their home address were actually primary
school students all of whom did not know that their
posted images or photographs were automatically geotagged.
In addition, these primary school students
admitted to always accepting strangers into their friend
list.
After the analyses of the survey results, we conducted
an interview with Mr. Suppadej Suthipongkanasai, a
special lecturer at Thai Webmaster Association. He
showed his concern and commented “Nowadays,
children never know the threat of over-sharing private
information. Moreover, without a proper understanding
75
of social network, those children might become a victim
from over-sharing information like in the States.” [3]
What these students are doing is very risky and can
lead to several threats. First of all, by sharing so much
private information, an adversary can use it to
impersonate that particular user. Secondly, geo-tagging
photographs can have a consequence of the user being
followed, i.e., stalking is possible. Thirdly, due to the fact
that these children are under thirteen years of age, it can
lead to pedophilic cases.
The objective of this research is, therefore, to design
and develop an application on smartphones that allows
parents to monitor their children’s activity on social
networks. With this application, it is possible to monitor
their children’s profile and newsfeed as well as to adjust
the children’s privacy settings. This application will be
developed in such a way that it does not interfere or
change the way they use the social networking site. By
developing this parental monitoring application, it is
believed that the risks mentioned in the previous
paragraph can be reduced to generate a safer place for the
children, especially the ones who are underage.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2
discusses the existing research and monitoring
applications and why we think they do not satisfy our
requirements. Section 3 provides background knowledge
on the platform used for the social network in this
research. Section 4 explains the design of the application
with the experiments and results being shown in Section
5. Section 6 concludes the paper.