Ah summer: the time for cookouts and fireworks and long days at the beach trying not to check your email. It's also a time to finally use all those airline miles and hotel points you've accumulated to get a free place to stay and free transportation to get there.
Is that email really from your bank or airline? Or a hacker pretending to be?
Cell phones, texting, IM, email, Facebook, MySpace--kids are interconnected today in ways hardly imagined two decades ago. But these technology-based communication platforms also enable new forms of an age-old parenting strategy: monitoring your kids. Who are they talking to? What are they talking about? Are they going where they said they are going?