File-sharing realities for families

There's no question about it: file-sharing comes with risks. Beyond the lawsuits (the RIAA this week announced its latest round of nearly 500, bringing the total to about 3,000 sued among the 100 million+ file-swappers worldwide, Reuters reports)...

Here are the risks the average family is more likely to encounter:

Porn. The P2P services allow for sharing photos and videos, as well as music and text docs. Some of those images are pornography, including illegal child pornography. A study done in the US a year ago found that porn is being widely shared on these networks - even more than music on one called Gnutella (see Slyck's Guide to Gnutella), and kids can download porn by mistake because it's often not labeled as such.

Viruses. Unless properly protected with a firewall, anti-virus measures, and the latest security patches, file-sharers' PCs are vulnerable to the worms and viruses on other machines on the P2P networks.

Privacy. There are two very common risks in this category: 1) People are making a lot more than music available on their home PCs. The P2P services don't do a good job of telling users that they have to be careful about what folders on their hard drive they open up to the file-sharing public. Emails, medical records, and family financial information have inadvertently been shared on P2P networks, so - if used - the software needs to be configured carefully. The P2P services are also known to have a lot of spyware on them.

A family discussion about file-sharing could touch on: these risks, what P2P software people are using (here's one list of 54 titles), a kid's demo of how the software was configured, and what rules everybody should agree on. For more on family file-sharing (including the latest news and resources), see this week's issue of SafeKids/NetFamilyNews), and for one dad's views on kids' file-sharing, see "A tech-literate dad on file-sharing."