Monitoring kids, monitoring workers

If you have online teenagers at your house, you may've received privacy complaints where blogging's concerned. What the complainers sometimes forget is just how public the Internet is. What privacy, we might ask, are we invading? This is just one parent's opinion, but parents have a right, if not a duty, to see what a child's posting, certainly if anyone else can. Now it looks like parental monitoring of kids' online activities is good practice for future employment. A study released this week found that about half of all US employers have fired workers for misuse of the Internet, which means, of course, that they're monitoring Net use. The study, by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute, found that about 75% of companies monitor workers' Web site connections, 65% use filtering software, and 5% use GPS technology to monitor cell phones, CNET reports.