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Harlen Coben The Undercover Parent

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Spyware, it’s debatable! People are either for or against spyware, but the spyware in question is spyware used to monitor your children on the internet. Harlen Coben, a writer for the New York Times, has some pretty good reasoning on why people should be pro-spyware in his online article, “The Undercover Parent.” I do agree with Coben on his views on how spyware can help keep your children safe and protect them from the dangers of the internet. Before getting into Coben’s reasoning behind being pro-spyware, let me explain why I am pro-spyware. In my personal experience, the internet is a dangerous place. My parents didn’t monitor my internet use and because of it I knew how to call people a rude name in more than twenty ways before I was in the fourth grade. I was exposed to explicit content very early in my life because of the internet. Although I don’t think it …show more content…

Coben also has had experiences with spyware. He states in his article how his friend found out that his daughter was using drugs and was sleeping with her dealer using spyware. He was able to avoid a problem escalating further by using spyware to figure out what his daughter was up to. He also talks about how today’s parents, “ fight kid’s battles on the playground, berate coaches about playing time and fill out college applications- yet when it comes to chatting with pedophiles or watching beheadings or gambling away their entire life savings, then… then their children deserve independence?” He is basically saying how today’s parents are so overprotective in the real world, but yet they don’t care at all what their kids do online. Also, Coben gives examples of the girl who was cyber bullied to the point where she committed suicide and of the boy who unknowingly was conversing with a pedophile online. He believes a watchful eye would have helped. If the parents of that girl would have kept an eye on their child’s internet use maybe they could have saved their daughters

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