Ebay and Me

 Every day I receive Google Alerts on shopping addictions. The weird thing is that most of them act as though this is cute. This morning I saw an article about a celebrity talking about her Ebay shopping addiction and then shared her favorite Ebay shops.

A close friend of ours had an Ebay addiction but it wasn't cute. Whenever she was bored or mad or felt depressed she'd ease on over to Ebay and shop. A little here, a amazing deal there and soon she was in deep credit card trouble.

Not only in credit card trouble but in real family trouble. Seems that her husband didn't know about the maxed out $10,000 card...or the other cards that she opened to pay to keep up with the minimum payments on the big card. Of course she then found discovered that she could buy stuff with the new cards....how do you spell divorce? How do you spell personal bankruptcy. All from a little Ebay addiction.

I know I am speaking to folks this morning who share this little problem. Did you know that Internet filtering like www.wisechoice.net can help. Filters are not just about porn. They can block categories for shopping or if Ebay is your only problem site you can block just ebay. Wisechoice costs about 14 cents a day. Did I says 14 cents?  You will be able to get all your usual places except where you have trouble.

It might save your marriage, your family, your finances....take a look and see..

eleven year old raped...received porn emails from accused rapist

Nine out of 10 children aged between eight and 16 have viewed pornography on the Internet. In most cases, the sex sites were accessed unintentionally when a child, often in the process of doing homework, used a seemingly innocent sounding word to search for information or pictures. (London School of Economics

In the case of the eleven year old girl it appears that the alleged rapist was a friend of the family, trusted by the child  and that he had been sending her porn on emails, showing her child porn on his computer and finally molesting her on hikes and other places..

What are we doing to protect our kids from this kind of thing. Do we as parents know who our kids are interacting with  on email, Facebook and chat rooms? Did you know that filtering programs like Wisechoice have features that will allow you to view online conversations of kids? Is this an invasion of their privacy? Absolutely! Are we giving privacy rights for eleven year old to interact with predators? If we are then we are misguided.

It is our job as parents to protect our kids whether they think they need it or not. I don't know of any kid worth his or her salt who doesn't think they are grown up enough to make their own decisions.

Tools such as Wisechoice can allow you to have password protected times in which kids can use the computer but make the computer out of bounds at other times. You can track their messaging and restrict the types of websites they go to. In the case of the children who have accessed porn by mistake while searching for things regarding homework-that cannot happen with a good filter. If they inadvertently click on a porn site the filter will block access.

Filters for the most part cost about $50 per years and protect as many as three computers per household. Some will work on both Macs and Windows based computers. To paraphrase a hospital advertisement- of you don't get help from Wisechoice...then get help somewhere.