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ICU Justifies Itself

A whole six months of my time, that's how long it took me to write ICU and get it to a point where I could be happy with it. That's a big chunk of my working life, especially as how I was working for myself and I wasn't getting paid. During that time I was entirely reliant on the income generated from my other software projects, projects that were put on the back burner. Taking the time to write ICU was a risk.

Then there was the matter of should I write it? It was a personal project, it was a tool my wife and I wanted so that we could monitor our daughter when she was using the computer. But we trust our daughter to the nth degree! She has common sense in bucket loads, well beyond her years. She's actually won awards for being such a nice sensible little girl! Was there really any need to monitor her online?

Well yesterday we got the answer I was hoping we'd never get. It's made me realise why ICU is necessary, it's not just us monitoring our kids, but monitoring what other people are saying to them. I was working late last night when I got the ICU notification, I did as I always do and had a quick flick through it. Something didn't seem right. One of the Messenger conversations that had been screen grabbed didn't look like her normal chats. I didn't know the lad she was chatting too and he certainly looked a hell of a lot older than her. Just the way and what she was typing was different. So I asked? "Whose such and such?" "Oh he's just somebody who talks to xxx and xxx (her other 12 year old friends)". "Oh right, how old is he?". "18, we all think he's well fit!".

My wife's face at this point was a picture, I imagine mine was a mighty shade of angry red. No matter how many times we'd told her about only using messenger to chat to her REAL friends around her own age the lure of being "messenger contacts" with somebody that much older was just too much to resist. But should we really be angry with her? I'm more angry with the sort of 18 year old boy that feels the need to chat up 12 year old girls on Messenger. I'm sorry but that's screwed up. He should be in the pub or just generally socialising with 17,18,19 year old girls not sat at home making small talk with 12 year olds over the internet.

It seems to be a real problem where we live, why older teenagers/early twenty something’s feel the need to chat to kids I don't know? I even spoke about it during one of my early radio interviews for ICU. When I was at school the 12 and 13 year old girls always like to show interest in the 14/15 year old boys because they were "mature". Now it seems that they are looking at 18/19 and the boys/lads/young men/men are more than happy to go along with it.

We would never let our 12 year old daughter go on a date with an 18 year old boy, why the hell would we be comfortable with her being chatted up by one online? So if you're 16/17/18/19/20 and like to chat to 10/11/12 year old girls online I've got a couple of suggestions for you:-

1. Don't, get out with girls your own age 2. If you still feel the need you'd sure as hell better be sure that it's not my daughter you're chatting to because then you're on some pretty bloody thin ice.

So the next time some random stranger has a go at me for writing software that causes invasion of privacy, spying and whatever else they come up with, I shall politely tell them to stick it.