True, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I can’t imagine anything more horrible than a child being molested or worse by a child predator.

I’m sure those who have had the unfortunate experience of having one of their children abducted or molested would have done anything or paid any price to have prevented that situation.

Sure, kids need to grow up being Internet savvy to survive in today’s Internet-powered world. I love the web and thus it is my profession. However, if parents aren’t aware of the dangers, they cannot educate their children.

Ultimately, education is best form of protection. Education takes time, patience, and devotion. The ideal situation would be if parents sat down with their children and taught them appropriate use of Internet applications.

Maybe I should put more trust in good parenting.

Just because people can hack a system to get your personal information doesn’t mean they will.

“Again, nothing is bulletproof.”

No, its not. But I’m sure you don’t make your children wear bullet-proof vests to school to keep them safe. Why should you make them do so when they are online, and in no immediate physical danger?

I believe you are attempting to shield your children a bit more than is entirely appropriate. A simple email adress given to the wrong person will not necessarily result in anything entirely terrible, sure your child may end up with ads about enlarging his (or her non-existant) reproduction organ, but other than that; if your child is smart it wont be a problem.

Children are smarter than you make them out to be.

Note: I will warrent I’m prejudiced against over-protective parents because I am not one (that is, a parent); perhaps if I were a little older and had a family of my own, I’d be as worried as you are. I believe I would not be, though probably out of naivity, I like to believe in the best in people.

As long as messages going out and coming in are filtered on the client side (meaning the Club Penguin game that runs in a Flash Player), then you can rest assured that certain messages and private information will be protected.

If the filtering occurs on the server side, meaning Club Penguin’s servers that route the messages to all of the players, then it would be possible to bypass those filtering controls.

It seems that most messages would make it to the Club Penguin servers because they claim that they monitor the activity that goes on.

If you want to let your kids play Club Penguin, chances are they’ll be fine. I just hope no children get hurt.

Again, nothing is bulletproof.

If you enter your email address or any other personal information in a web form, that information goes somewhere, be it a database or text file. What is done with your information from there depends on privacy agreements and ethical behavior by site owners.

My privacy agreement states that your email address is required, but will not be published. Which is an agreement that I honor. No where on this page or anywhere will you see Jack’s email published. However, it is sitting in a database on my server so that if I wanted to contact him directly, I could do so.

I will never sell email addresses or violate privacy of anyone who participates on this blog. I have no malicious intent. In fact this blog post was meant to help individuals from a potentially dangerous situation.