Coral Gables firm rolls out Web security product for kids

By Bridget Carey / Miami Herald

Using biometric security measures, a Coral Gables media company is launching a product for parents to protect their children from pornography, predators and cyberbullying.

Dolphin Secure sells a $60-a-year subscription service allowing parents to limit what sites the child visits and who they can talk to within a kids-only social network, called Dolphin Surf.

Unless a parent overrides the default settings, children will be blocked from sites that have risky content or offer unsupervised chats. The idea is to keep all conversations within the network, Dolphin Surf, limited only to children are talking to parent-approved age and gender groups.

"Think of it as a safe Facebook for kids,'' said Dolphin Secure CEO Bill O'Dowd.

Combining a social network with biometric scanner is what sets Dolphin Secure apart from other Internet parental controls -- many of which are free online or come with an Internet service provider. Biometric scans of fingerprints are becoming more prevalent as the next step beyond passwords in keeping online information and identities secure.

The company also has a leg up on competitors because it has gained a thumbs-up from the Miami-Dade school system, which is posting information about the product on the school's Parent Portal website.

Dolphin Secure scored a partnership with Miami-Dade schools through its connections with the United-Way of Miami Dade. Dolphin pitched the product to United Way CEO Harve Mogul, who liked the idea so much he set up a meeting with several influential community organizations, including Miami-Dade schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.

Carvalho said that the school's participation in this "pilot'' partnership is to observe how many parents end up adopting the service and how it's used, and see if biometrics could be implemented in the school system.

"This gives us as opportunity to explore academic-safe chatrooms that are controled,'' Carvalho said.

Debbie Karcher, chief information officer for Miami-Dade schools, said if this takes off, it might make for a case to use fingerprint scanners for a parent login system.

"We've been looking for this kind of technology to enter the market at a resonable price,'' Karcher said, adding that it's not easy to authenticate a parent online because a student can impersonate them by using their password. Not having this type technology has `` prevented us from doing things like online parent field trip approval.''

Dolphin Secure is giving parents of Miami-Dade schoolchildren a free 30-day test period, and then an additional 30-day money-back guarantee, hoping that will boost initial subscriptions. It also built in a system letting parents donate $3 of their subscription toward their child's school or the United Way.

O'Dowd has experience in creating products for kids. He also runs Dolphin Entertainment, which produces and distributes popular children's television shows and movies, including Zoey 101, Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide, and Roxy Hunter on Nickelodeon.

With the company's experience in children's entertainment, O'Dowd said building a social network for kids was a fitting new venture.

Here's how it works: Instead of using a password, little Johnny can go online after swiping his fingerprint in the attached scanner. (His parents have a password to turn it off, so they can surf freely.) He has to stick with whatever parental restrictions are on his account. By default, not even Wikipedia or Google are allowed. Parents can choose to add them, but are advised that it goes against the program's security intentions.

If Johnny wants to find something, there's a search bar that will hunt for answers within the approved sites. He can chat with other kids in Dolphin Surf, which is a network only open to children who use the Dolphin Secure system. Parents can see who Johnny is talking to and can limit his conversations to boys ages 7 to 10, for example.

But as the product stands now, these measures won't necessarily protect Johnny 100 percent from child predators. Anyone can pose as a child and set up an account by purchasing the tools, but Dolphin Secure hopes these extra steps and costs will deter impostors.

O'Dowd said the company's next step is to add the fingerprints of sexual predators into the system's database, so they are rejected if they try to pretend they are a kid and use the site.

A child's fingerprint log-in and settings follow them to any computer that also has Dolphin Security running. So Dolphin, of course, wants as many parents using this as possible to make its network more desirable.

An annual membership costs $59.95 -- which breaks down to about $5 a month. Additional child accounts are $29.95 a year.

O'Dowd said the software should work with other fingerprint readers, but they encourage users to buy theirs for $15, since it was tested with their model. In stores, that model sells for about $40.

Dolphin set the price based on other online services that charge monthly fees. Club Penguin -- Disney's massive virtual gaming world for kids -- costs $6, Nickelodeon games cost about $10, and the online multiplayer game World of Warcraft costs $15 a month.

"We think we have a good explanation to a mother: `Hey, if you're paying $6 to $15 a month per game, wouldn't you spend $5 or $2.50 to protect your kid?' '' O'Dowd said.

User fingerprints are encrypted before being saved in Dolphin Secure's servers. So if a hacker breaks in, O'Dowd said all they get is a string of numbers and letters -- no fingerprint image.

"We never take the fingerprint,'' O'Dowd said.

Dolphin Secure claims that the fingerprint scan fights cyberbullying because kids can only log in as themselves -- there's no password to share, so kids can't be mean by logging into a peer's account, pose as them and post negative comments or photos.

Sharing passwords is just one aspect of the cyberbullying problem kids face in social networks. It prevents impersonations, but the Dolphin Secure system doesn't stop a child from writing something mean using their own account.

Sameer Hinduja, co-director at Florida Atlantic University's Cyberbullying Research Center, says he's working on a study of 5,000 students, and found that 28 percent said they share a password with a best friend, and 18 percent with a boyfriend or girlfriend. Although sharing passwords can lead to problems, he cited research that proves today's youth are tethered to technology, using everything from televisions to cellphones for about 10 hours a day.

In short, unless every computer in that child's life has this system, it's just hard to shield them from all online harm.

"When it comes to these tech solutions, I feel they are always circumventable,'' Hinduja said.

But the problem isn't always easy to talk about, because his data shows children are afraid of going to their parents if they see cyberbullying online. Kids think their parents will just take away their Internet access.

"You can imagine that deters kids from going to their parents when there is an issue,'' Hinduja said.

Michael Kaiser, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance, said the more complicated authentication systems like biometrics are growing in popularity as a way to keep online identification more secure. But he stresses that site blocking programs aren't the only answer to protecting kids.

"Filters aren't going to always be 100 percent perfect,'' Kaiser said. "And you have to teach kids on what to do when they encounter a problem.''

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