Parents: Do you worry about your kid's P2P activities?

[Stone Cold]

A court has ordered a guy to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for sharing 31 songs. There have been thousands of shakedown threats of lawsuits against P2P users, collecting thousands of dollars at a time.

Millions of kids are filesharing. It must be a scary thing for parents to wonder if their kids are one of these who is going to bring a shakedown or an actual lawsuit. And, what kind of country do we live in where parents have to worry about economically crippling consequences of something that they could easily not even know their kids are doing in the privacy of the bedroom?

Parents can take steps, but only if they're tech savvy... and even that is no guarantee.

It's bad enough worrying about some pervert trying to use the internet to hook up with your children, without having to worry about the government to.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

It's more the malware frorm the poisoned content that torrent/p2p stuff is riddled with that bothers me.

 

[scottd34]

p2p apps can be blocked at the network level and my kids computer stays in a public area so we can supervise them while they are using it. I also have the computer set up so they account they use has limited rights, although as they get a bit older there will be additional restrictions put in place for security. Like yeoldestonecat mentioned, its the malware ridden garbage that is more of a concern.

I have cleaned out way to many computers for people I know that use p2p networks. I dont even try to clean it up if they say they use p2p networks, I immediately format them and reinstall since its generally quicker to just reinstall everything from scratch.

 

[teh_chem]

I don't have kids yet, so take this with the appropriate grain of salt. While I believe in showing some amount of respect for privacy, that respect stops when it comes to potentially illegal activities. I would have no problems taking precautions to prevent file-sharing on a family computer if I suspect my kids were or might begin doing it. Both on the applications end and the network end. I don't care to watch over everything my kids might do on the computer, but I have no problem blocking their ability to do things/access specific sites.

 

[eod]

If my kids don't proxy their connections behind a VPN then I have raised them wrong.

 

[AMD T-type]

If my kids don't proxy their connections behind a VPN then I have raised them wrong.