• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, September 16, 2010

Last year, the Electronic Privacy Information Center alleged in a Federal Trade Commission complaint that the company EchoMetrix, which sells Web monitoring software to parents, was also collecting and selling data about the children being monitored.

Now news comes that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo also has been investigating the Syosset-based EchoMetrix and has reached a settlement with the company. The deal calls for EchoMetrix to pay $100,000 and to refrain from analyzing or sharing any of the private messages, clickstream data or other communications that it has access to.

The allegations against EchoMetrix stemmed from its launch of "Pulse" last June, a data-mining service that garnered marketing intelligence by examining teens' content. "Every single minute, Pulse is aggregating the Web's social media outlets such as chat and chat rooms, blogs, forums, instant messaging, and Web sites to extract meaningful user generated content from your target audience, the teens," the company boasted last year.

EchoMetrix no longer offers Pulse. When the company marketed the product, it said on its site that Pulse doesn't identify individuals, and that parents could opt out.

Still, it didn't seem likely that too many parents had read that fine print. It's debatable whether buying or selling software that allows one party to surreptitiously monitor another's communications is a good idea. Regardless, it's hard to imagine that parents who thought they should have a window into their children's online communications would have agreed that marketers should also have access to that information.