To a teen-ager, watchful parents can seem an awful lot like Big Brother. Now the analogy is just a little more apt, at least on the Internet, because of new software that lets parents track their children through cyberspace.

The software, called NetSnitch, is being pitched as a tool for parents who don’t want to censor their kids.

Unlike other ‘net minders, which block children (and their parents as well) from visiting sites deemed too racy or violent, NetSnitch just records where they’ve been and how long they’ve been there.

“Sounds to me like Orwellian parenting,” said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “You might as well drop a video camera in your kid’s bedroom.”

With NetSnitch, parents call up a screen display that shows each Web site visited by a previous user during an Internet session, and how much time was spent at each site. If NetSnitch is disabled, it leaves notice that it was bypassed.