Freely subscribe to our NEWSLETTER

"Social media sites contain a treasure trove of personal information that, in the wrong hands, can put children in jeopardy — whether through identity theft, cyber bullying or even the act of luring youngsters into threatening situations," said Ward E. Leber, CEO of the Child Safety Network. "Scrambls gives families the controls they need to make social networking safer, providing direct management of who kids communicate with and all of the content that they share — working directly on the sites they already use."

Scrambls also earned the Safe Family Seal of Approval, which lets parents and schools know that the world’s leading child advocates and child safety experts have reviewed, tested and agreed that scrambls can help protect your family.

Scrambls is a secure web browser plug-in that encodes selected content with the flip of a switch — from e-mails and tweets to posts on any website. You choose who may access (i.e. read) your information, selecting individuals or sharing with a group. Friends just need to add scrambls to their own browser and messages will look the same as usual for them. Anyone else that was not approved to read the post will see only scrambld text. Not even the providers of the social media sites can access your personal messages. With the click of a mouse, you can post messages for everyone to read, or protect it so, for example, "only Mom, Grandma and I can read." You can even retract (delete) messages, or change the permissions for who can read it after the message has been published.

Scrambls provides families with the ability to share content on their favorite sites and yet retain full control of that data. Children and young adults can now take responsibility to protect their reputation online, so messages won’t come back to haunt them in the future — particularly important when applying for college or jobs.

Scrambls is available world-wide at www.scrambls.com and is free for personal use.

"We applaud the work of the Child Safety Network and are honored to receive the National Child Safety Award," commented Steven Sprague, co-creator of scrambls and CEO of Wave Systems, the security company that developed the service. "The power of scrambls is that it can protect children online on many different levels. Even beyond the realm of child safety, there are compelling reasons why you’d want to maintain control over your personal content. Your political positions or social conversations at age seventeen may not go over well when you run for president. The communications among your classmates for projects and trips don’t need to be read by everyone on your dad’s friends list. Social media provides important new ways for collaboration, and scrambls will both protect and enable those interactions."

The award comes during the 113th California State PTA Annual Convention where CSN presents its prestigious national awards each year. A formal presentation of the award will take place at the culmination of this year’s convention. Steven Sprague, CEO of Wave Systems will receive the award on Saturday, May 12 at 11:00 a.m.