Parents using Facebook to spy on children

If your parents have a sudden notion to create a Facebook account and add you as a friend, it can be quite freaky. It may not have occurred to you yet, but chances are that they could be using the account to spy on you. Maybe not all the time, but surely part of the time.
Several studies and research show that more than half of parents on Facebook admit to checking out their children’s activities, the type of friends they have, and where they go. They do this by keeping an eye on their check-ins and relationship updates.
Apparently many parents have confessed that they use social networking sites to spy on their kids, largely out of a need to keep them safe from predators.
This is exactly what Layla Mohammed, a tech-savvy mother of two, does. “Facebook is a good way to keep track of what our children are doing from time to time,” she says. “I live miles away from my 22-year-old daughter, who is in Malaysia for higher studies, but with Facebook I monitor her daily check-ins and status updates, which keeps me aware of what she's doing.”
Kawaher says that children usually have adjusted privacy settings on their Facebook timelines so that parents and other older relatives are not able to see certain posts. “My second daughter’s timeline makes me well aware of the kind of friends she chooses to move with. It is not very hard to tell how much influence friends can have on a person, through her posts.”
Not all parents are technically proficient and there are a curious few who wish they could stalk their children on social networking sites if they knew how to use them.
Mabrook Abu Hasan has no interest in social networking sites. “Facebook is always the topic of conversation at the dining table and in the living room among both my teenage children,” says Abu Hasan. “I’m not very familiar with these social networking sites and I'm not interested in signing up. For me it’s a waste of time. I personally think that teenagers and young people use it only as a source of entertainment and parents interfering can be a bit too much. I’m sure children already have enough of parents supervising their everyday activities at home and at school.”