If you read The Sun you’ll believe that the web is crawling with dodgy characters and every mouse-click brings your daughter closer to a horrible fate at the hands of a 40-something tattooed truck driver from Idaho called Zac. Paranoia swiftly leads to market forces and in turn mean buying a host of crapware to install which seems specifically designed to slow your machine to a crawl.

Then there is the pain of configuration. How to make it stop your children going to anywhere apart from Disney.com, still allow you full porn access, and hide the browsing history from the missus.

But you’ve finished. Everything is private now, right? Wrong, as the Associated Press worked out the other day. They found that web-monitoring software from Sentry and FamilySafe, both developed by EchoMetrix Inc., harvests data from online chats, trying to determine your opinions on games, movies, and music. The data is then sold to other companies for advertising purposes.

“In June, EchoMetrix unveiled a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms.
 
Parents who don’t want the company to share their child’s information to businesses can check a box to opt out. But that option can be found only by visiting the company’s Web site, accessible through a control panel that appears after the program has been installed. It was not in the agreement contained in the Sentry Total Home Protection program The Associated Press downloaded and installed Friday.”
 
Don’t bother reading any EULAs as they are written by lawyers for lawyers and always have a catch-all clause about being able to sell your grandmother into slavery at every full moon. Just be aware that it’s a jungle out there, and you’re likely the next meal for a passing lion. Get used to it.