With cyberbullying as prevalent as ever, the first free online app for Hispanic parents to monitor their teens’ activity on Facebook—in Spanish or in English—is now available, in sync with National Bullying Prevention Month. It’s called GoGoStat Parental Guidance Spanish Edition and it’s an update to the English language version released by Schakra in June.
The need for a tool to help Hispanic parents is clear. Almost 16% of the U.S. population is Hispanic and the typical U.S. Hispanic family has on average 2.16 children in the household under 18. Facebook estimates that 9% of the social network’s U.S. members are Latino (Sources: US Census Bureau and Hispanic Magazine).
GoGoStat Parental Guidance Spanish Edition, created by former Microsoft employees, identifies risky behavior and provides information for parents to share with their children. Parental Guidance alerts parents so they can act quickly, notifying them when pre-established ‘family ground rules’ are violated, inappropriate text is posted, new contacts are made, or photos of their children are uploaded. Parental Guidance detects if the user’s browser is set to Spanish rather than English, and then automatically displays instructions, settings and reports in Spanish.
GoGoStat Parental Guidance Spanish Edition features a list of current swear words both in Spanish and in English. Uniquely, the app will notify parents if the teen has posted a curse word even if it’s in English. The parent then has the information necessary to open up a dialogue with their teen about the situation.
“The challenge for Hispanic parents is unique if their teens are bilingual, yet they are using English online with friends,” said Bala Balabaskaran, Vice President, Products and Chief Architect at Schakra. “We’re working to help Hispanic parents keep their teens safe on social media and enabling them to monitor activity as easily as possible. They can use this tool to guide their teens on making the right decisions while posting to social networks.”
With GoGoStat Parental Guidance, parents define the rules to be monitored on Facebook. Parents and children exchange a parental security code to ensure that only parents can legitimately establish a monitoring relationship. Parents are alerted to their teens’ new ‘friending’ actions if outside a specified age/geographic range, to ensure they’re being safe and not socializing online with potentially dangerous individuals.
GoGoStat Parental Guidance alerts parents to any details in their children’s profiles that may expose private information potentially leading to unsafe situations. Parents are alerted to new status messages containing unsafe or potentially offensive comments. A ‘panic button’ feature generates a report for law enforcement agencies containing child profile information, and the most recent photographs and activity, to help them deal with emergency situations.
The GoGoStat Parental Guidance Spanish Edition beta is available for free at www.gogostat.com.