A new service called Reputation Pundit from online management specialists, iPercept, aims to make the very latest business online management tools and techniques available to parents to help protect and safeguard children online.

iPercept CEO  Iqbal Sidhu said that while many parents used simple blocking techniques to prevent their children accessing sites with inappropriate content, child safety online was about much more than restricting access to X-rated material.

“It’s not just about where they go,” he said. “It’s about who they meet and what they say, see and hear?  Parental controls that block your children from seeing inappropriate content are all well and good, but they don’t offer the most important protection for young minds.”

Reputation Pundit targets sites and services such as Facebook, Twitter and You Tube, and also the wide range of instant messaging providers which include Microsoft and Google.

“In the main,” says Sidhu, “these sites and services are perfectly safe and restricting access to them for your children would unfairly limit their online experience and hinder their development in modern social communications techniques.

“But monitoring their conversations and interactions, without intruding into them or actually reading them, can help give parents peace of mind and protect children from anti-social behaviour including bullying and indeed online stalking.”

Research from WiredSafety identified that some 85 per cent of children say they have been bullied online while only five per cent say they would tell their parents.

The Reputation Pundit service works by finding material on the internet written about your children or by your children. It checks the posted content for harmful words or phrases; it monitors conversations looking for tell-tale signs of bullying, cyber stalking or inappropriate advances and suggestions.

Reputation Pundit does not stop your children engaging in normal, healthy social interaction on the net with their friends. Nor does it give unwanted intrusion into their privacy.  It simply identifies any posted content that is potentially harmful and can, where necessary, help parents remove harmful comments or content.

Sidhu emphasised that it is important to allow the children the correct degree of privacy.

“This is not about controlling or listening to their conversations,” he said.  “This is about the software detecting patterns of behaviour that warrant investigation and only providing that information to parents – or alerting parents to what other people are saying about their child.”

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reputationpundit Contact: PR Director: kevin.taylor@robertsontaylorpr.com http://www.reputationpundit.com/YourChildren