As personal computers become widespread among households, the Internet (or the World Wide Web) has become a powerful household tool as well. Each day, millions of people use the Internet to shop, to research, to receive education, etc. The Internet has also become a forum for adults and minors alike to meet people. Through emails, chat rooms, and instant messaging, people all over the world use this new means of communication to meet new friends, to converse with friends and relatives, and to explore a wide range of social functions.
Even though electronic communication through the Internet has become a convenient social tool, nonetheless it is potentially very dangerous for users of the Internet, especially for minors. An estimated 70 million minors under the age of 18 use the Internet. Minors use the Internet extensively to communicate with friends and increasingly with classmates and teachers to perform school assignments. However, Internet usage by minors also opens the door for minors to receive an electronic communication relating to an unsafe or undesired behavior. The Internet may provide a false sense of privacy and security. Minors are likely to trust unsafe or predatory individuals on the Internet and thus become targets of a criminal or abusive behavior. Additionally, parents usually have little or no knowledge of minors' communication on the Internet and are not able to remedy an unsafe or undesired behavior. As such, allowing minors access to the Internet has increasingly become a difficult parenting situation.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation released a statistic that each day, at least one adult intends to meet personally with a minor that they have met on the Internet. These unsafe and potentially dangerous individuals stroll through chat rooms or instant messaging sessions looking for potential victims. They use sophisticated manipulation techniques to pretend to be innocuous in order to expose minors to an inappropriate or offensive language, to engage minors to a prurient or sexual conversation, to solicit personal information, characteristics or pictures from minors, and in the worst case, to arrange a physical meeting with minors. Adding to the large amount of intrusive and inappropriate materials on the Internet (e.g., materials with pornographic, hate, or mature content), such a predatory behavior targeted against minors has become a major barrier for parents who want to protect their children from online dangers while still wishing to realize the many benefits of the Internet.
One additional concern for Internet usage by minors involves cyber-bullying. In general, cyber-bullying represents a class of behaviors where electronic communications are used to abuse, exert power on, or deceive minors. Particularly, cyber-bullies engage in an abusive behavior on the Internet intending to scare minors or to harm minors' interactions on the Internet. Cyber-bullying is increasingly becoming a common threat that minors have to face when using the Internet.
Studies of family Internet usage indicate that parents are extremely concerned with their children's safety when the children are on the Internet. Specifically, parents fear that their children may be communicating with or targeted by unsafe or predatory individuals or that their children may be revealing personal information or characteristics to strangers. As discussed, fear of such an unsafe or undesired behavior is a major barrier for families to get online. Removing or reducing this barrier may translate into increased customer base for Internet service providers.
Some known systems and methods try to prevent certain communications by employing filtering programs to block certain keywords and key phrases (e.g., home address, phone number, credit card numbers, etc.) out of emails, chat sessions, or instant messaging sessions. However, such phrase or keyword blocking capabilities are often crude. Furthermore, these known systems and methods often do not offer an effective solution to detect an electronic communication relating to an unsafe or undesired behavior. The keyword matching techniques employed by these known systems and methods usually cannot effectively identify patterns of a communication indicative of an unsafe or undesired behavior.
Accordingly, a solution that detects an electronic communication relating to an unsafe or undesired behavior is desired to address one or more of these and other disadvantages.