“Parental control” – 2 words most kids would rather not hear. Many parents face this dilemma: trust vs. protection. To many kids parental control means parents do not trust them to make good decisions online. To parents the issue has little to do with trust and a lot to do with protection. No parent would allow a young child to wander loose in a dangerous section of town. The reality of the Web is that it is a very large town with some very seedy elements. Therefore step one in protecting children from online threats is open communication. The Federal Bureau of Investigation suggests, “Communicate, and talk to your child about sexual victimization and potential on-line danger. Spend time with your children on-line. Have them teach you about their favorite on-line destinations.” If a family decides to have Internet access in their home this conversation is a must. When speaking with your children express your concerns for their safety due to the very real dangers that exist on the Internet. You may have to first educate yourself on this subject. Ask your children why they want Internet access and listen to what they plan to be doing online. You should make clear to them your first concern is for their safety and for that reason you will be instituting a family program to make sure they are protected. What might be involved in such a “program?” The FBI provides the following suggestions:
- Keep the computer in a common room in the house, not in your child’s bedroom. It is much more difficult for a computer-sex offender to communicate with a child when the computer screen is visible to a parent or another member of the household.
- Utilize parental controls provided by your service provider and/or blocking software. While electronic chat can be a great place for children to make new friends and discuss various topics of interest, it is also prowled by computer-sex offenders. Use of chat rooms, in particular, should be heavily monitored. While parents should utilize these mechanisms, they should not totally rely on them.
- Always maintain access to your child’s on-line account and randomly check his/her e-mail. Be aware that your child could be contacted through the U.S. Mail. Be up front with your child about your access and reasons why.
- Teach your child the responsible use of the resources on-line. There is much more to the on-line experience than chat rooms.
- Find out what computer safeguards are utilized by your child’s school, the public library, and at the homes of your child’s friends. These are all places, outside your normal supervision, where your child could encounter an on-line predator.
- Understand, even if your child was a willing participant in any form of sexual exploitation, that he/she is not at fault and is the victim. The offender always bears the complete responsibility for his or her actions.
- Instruct your children:
- to never arrange a face-to-face meeting with someone they met on- line;
- to never upload (post) pictures of themselves onto the Internet or on-line service to people they do not personally know;
- to never give out identifying information such as their name, home address, school name, or telephone number;
- to never download pictures from an unknown source, as there is a good chance there could be sexually explicit images;
- to never respond to messages or bulletin board postings that are suggestive, obscene, belligerent, or harassing;
- that whatever they are told on-line may or may not be true.
Tools to Keep Kids Safe Online
An important part of the family’s online protection program will be to utilize technologies designed to assist parents to block unwanted content, protect personal information, and to monitor online activity. There is a bevy of software programs and the hunt for an effective solution can be exhausting. Since our kids are likely more tech-savvy then we are we want to make sure the software we choose is smarter than they are. In an effort to help parents find the right tools to protect their children PC magazine published the following suggestions:
Different Needs for Different Users
Look first for per-user configuration options, especially if you share a computer with the kids. You don’t want the software to monitor or control your own computer use, and the restrictions you’d choose for a 6-year-old are naturally different from those for a 16-year-old. Some products, like Webroot Parental Controls and PC Pandora, tie their configuration settings to Windows user accounts, which is fine if you use separate accounts for each user. Others, like Safe Eyes and NoodleNet, define program-specific accounts. This is better if the whole family uses one Windows account, but it does require a separate log-on to the parental-control system. Also, it’s possible that the kids may wind up using your grown-up no-restrictions account if you forget to log out. The most flexible products, like Net Nanny and Bsafe Online, define program-specific accounts that you can optionally tie to Windows user accounts.
Categorical Imperative
One common rationale for installing parental-control software is to keep preschoolers from happening upon “adult” sites and to keep teens from visiting them deliberately. Virtually every parental-control product includes some kind of category-based Web site blocking. The number of categories varies wildly-Sentry At Home has just one (adult/porn) while PC Pandora, Web Parental Controls, and KidsWatch let you allow or block 60 different categories. NoodleNet goes further and denies access to any site not on its lists of age-appropriate approved sites. Most products use an online or local database that matches Web sites they’ve analyzed with one or more categories, with an option to block sites that haven’t yet been categorized. Some actually analyze the page content in real time.
Real-time analysis has pluses and minuses. When the parental product actually processes each page, it can catch a brand-new porn site or a normally safe site that’s been hacked to display inappropriate content, but it can be fooled by sites that put all their content in the form of images. In addition, simple-minded keyword-based blocking (as opposed to full textual analysis) will often block pages inappropriately. Some will block PC Magazine reviews that call a product “sexy.” Others may find “bad” words embedded in URLs, like WintersExpress.com or GraciasPorNada.com. Net Nanny takes a very effective combined approach. For most sites, it uses an online category database. If the site hasn’t been analyzed or if the database indicates that it changes often, Net Nanny resorts to full textual analysis.
To be effective, a parental-control product must filter the incoming HTTP data stream, below the level of the browser. Otherwise it has no chance of controlling what sites a smart teen or preteen can access. Some products install in specific browsers but claim to prevent the kids from using unsupported browsers; don’t believe them. There’s always a browser obscure enough that it’s not blocked. Only protocol-level filtering like that used by Net Nanny and Safe Eyes is effective.
Unlike the rest of the field, iShield and iShield Pro offer to block pornographic images. Using a proprietary analysis algorithm, they check every image on every Web page visited and cover up those that seem to be porn. The Web-based image blocking works only for supported browsers, but the Pro edition scans every image displayed on the screen from whatever source and covers up those it thinks are porn. That’s an interesting approach. -next: Time’s Up! >
Time’s Up!
Besides controlling where your kids can go on the Internet, most parental-control products help you limit times when they can get online. Some offer simplistic controls, like setting a single time-span for Internet access every day, or defining a maximum for daily online time. I prefer the flexibility of products like iShield Plus, SnoopStick, Net Nanny, and others, which offer a week-long schedule defining when Internet access is and isn’t available. Most can set a daily or weekly maximum as well. As with category-based site blocking, this feature must control Internet access regardless of what browser is used, or it’s not much use.
Sentry At Home lets you schedule overall computer use rather than just Internet use specifically. I used it for a while when I had trouble with my preteen son sneaking down to play games in the middle of the night. Webroot Parental Controls and KidsWatch offer maximum flexibility: They let you independently schedule computer user, Internet use, and use of individual programs. You have to decide how much scheduling ability you actually need.
If I’m a tech-savvy teen and the computer tells me I’m not allowed on the Internet at this time, I’m not likely to roll over and accept it. I’ll try to change the system time, or the time zone, or the date–whatever it takes to get out from under the oppressive scheduler, fight the power, stick it to the man, and so forth. An effective parental-control product must resist this kind of tampering in whatever way possible. Net Nanny gets its time information from the Internet and therefore isn’t affected by tweaking the local time; KidsWatch simply prevents changes to the system clock.
Instant Messaging Control
Your kids can chat with anybody at all on the computer, and that’s a big worry for some parents. Instant messaging is ubiquitous and hard to track. The new friend who’s commiserating with your daughter’s gripes about her boring, restrictive parents just may be a pedophile. What’s a parent to do?
Some products block access to instant messaging. To be effective, this draconian measure has to take effect at the protocol level–for example, blocking all use of the AIM service rather than just the specific standard AIM client program. Otherwise a smart child can get around it by switching to a third-party IM client like Trillian or Pidgin. PC Pandora and Net Nanny work at the protocol level; most others don’t. Even that measure won’t stop kids from using a totally Web-based client like Yahoo! Messenger for the Web, Meebo.com, or Imhaha.com. Of course, the category-based site-blocking feature might include an option to block Web-based chat.
A very few products, including Bsafe Online and Safe Chat, attempt to limit your children’s IM conversations to “buddies” that you, the parent, have preapproved. It’s a nice idea, but you may find it difficult to determine which buddies should be approved based on their screen names. Is bilbo_ferret a friend from school? How about blonde_sk8r: child molester or child down the street? Configuring this kind of product will require cooperation from your child. And the same limitations apply; the product must do its magic at the protocol level, and it must manage to prevent Web-based IM.
Time for a reality check, though. Even if your parental-control product’s IM blocking is properly implemented at the protocol level, kids can still chat using a less-common protocol. Pidgin supports 15 distinct IM services! If you’re truly worried about your kids making unsafe contacts, sit them down and explain just what could happen if they hook up with the wrong “friend.” Who knows? They might even listen.
Remote Notification and Management
You can’t always be around when the kids are using the computer; that’s one of the main reasons to get parental-control software. They may be home from school long before you’re home from work, for example. So the best parental-control systems build in remote notifications and remote configuration management.
Many products can be configured to send an e-mail any time the kids try to access a blocked site. Safe Eyes refines this feature with an option to set a threshold and warn you only if they make multiple attempts in a fixed time period. Safe Eyes also permits notification by text message or phone as well as e-mail. Net Nanny lets the kids actively send you an override request if the product blocks a site they feel it shouldn’t.
Of course, there’s not a lot you can do about a violation notification unless you also have the ability to configure the parental-control system remotely. Remote configuration should give you full access to all the program’s settings, and any changes you make should take effect right away. SnoopStick and Safe Eyes, among others, manage both the full configuration and the immediate effect. Net Nanny offers complete access to configuration settings, but the changes take effect only when a user logs on or explicitly chooses to refresh settings. -next: Spying on Your Kids >
Spying on Your Kids
The flip side of parental control is parental monitoring-software that records what your kids do on the computer, with or without notifying them that they’re under observation. Rather than block access to certain sites, you can get a report of every site they’ve visited, possibly organized by content category. Rather than limit their time to a specified schedule, you can find out exactly when they’ve been logged on to the computer and what programs they used. And instead of controlling their use of instant messaging you can record every conversation; some products flag problematic words and phrases in the recording.
A few products in this field focus strongly on monitoring rather than control, in particular SnoopStick and PC Pandora. These two record the names of all e-mail correspondents; PC Pandora goes further and records the contents of all e-mail messages. SnoopStick snaps screenshots; PC Pandora functions as a keylogger, recording every password and other private data entered on the computer. And both can install in undetectable “stealth mode.”
Monitoring and control aren’t mutually exclusive: You can have parental control along with reporting of attempted violations, or various combinations of the two. If you do feel the need to keep tabs on the kids you’ll have to decide whether or not to tell them that Big Brother is watching. And you’ll need software that keeps them from getting out from under the monitoring. Web activity monitoring must be browser independent, and IM recording must be client independent. The kids shouldn’t be able to delete or modify the logs, naturally. Safe Eyes and Bsafe Online ensure log integrity by storing the logs online, completely out of reach.
Not So Suite
But wait, you say, I have a suite that takes care of all my security, and parental control is built in. Do I really need a separate product? Unfortunately, you do. Parental control is the weakest feature in top-rated suites such as ZoneAlarm Internet Security 7 and Norton Internet Security 2008. Even the best parentalcontrol modules within suites don’t come up to the capabilities of the standalone products. BitDefender offers browser-independent content filtering, a full weekly Internet time scheduler, and a hack-proof option to block access to specific programs. F-Secure’s content filtering is also browser-independent, and it can limit Web access to a single specified time range every day. But that’s about as far as it goes: None of the suites come close to offering the parental-control features found in the best standalone products.
Now that you’ve got a clear idea of the variations in parental-control software, consider what your needs are. Then take a look at these 12 products and see which best fits your family …
Bsafe Online
Bsafe Online is a tough, effective, and comprehensive parental-control solution. It has a few rough edges, but the company is already working on improvements. The current version is a worthy product; the next version could be a knockout.
iShield
With iShield you and your little ones can avoid accidentally viewing porn images online. The software also serves as a browser-independent Internet time scheduler. Its porn detection is mostly accurate, but it won’t stop a teen (or spouse) from surfing for prurient pix.
iShield Plus
This product will keep your littler ones from accidentally visiting inappropriate sites or viewing naughty pictures, but it won’t stand up to a determined teenager. Teens will also easily evade its limited IM monitoring. The image-recognition feature is very clever, but the program as a whole needs work.
Kidswatch Parental Computer Control
KidsWatch shares ancestry with Webroot Parental Controls (see below), but it has additional features like real-time alerts and IM monitoring. It suffers the same lame remote-access feature and several of the same bugs as WPC.
Net Nanny
Net Nanny is powerful and flexible. Its content filtering, IM monitoring, and time scheduler are hardened, so kids can’t circumvent them, and the flash-based activity reports are outstanding. Net Nanny offers full remote management, though remote changes may not take effect immediately.
NoodleNet
With NoodleNet your children can visit predefined age-appropriate sites and run kid-safe searches-and that’s all. It’s probably too restrictive for all but tiny tots. And letting kids run local games and programs can knock a hole in its protection.
PC Pandora
If you want to control the way your kids use the computer, this isn’t the product for you. But if you want to secretly monitor every little thing they do on the computer, PC Pandora will definitely do the job.
Safe Chat Universal Messenger with Parental Controls
Safe Chat is an instant-messaging aggregator with parental-control features added. Its free competitors do better at managing multiple IM accounts. Worse still, the parental-control elements are limited in scope and can be easily avoided by smart kids. You can do better.
Safe Eyes
Safe Eyes does everything you’d expect a parental-control utility to do and more. Its Web-based protection covers up to three computers (PC or Mac) and allows remote management from a browser. And this is one tough cookie: The kids won’t break its protection.
Sentry At Home
Sentry At Home can keep the kids off porn sites and stop bad chat or just report any violations to Mom and Dad. Remote monitoring and management is effective, with changes active in near real time. Unfortunately, the product’s protection is easily subverted.
SnoopStick
You can use SnoopStick from any computer to monitor your children’s Internet use, IM conversations, and e-mail correspondence. It includes a modicum of parental control (time scheduling, blocked sites) and lets you shut down your kids’ system remotely. If you’re okay with snooping on your kids, SnoopStick will do the job.
Webroot Parental Controls
Webroot Parental Controls blocks bad Web sites and offers comprehensive scheduling of your children’s computer use. Kids can’t get around its site blocking or program control. There’s no real-time notification or Web-based management, though, and the local-network-only remote client is disappointing.
References: FBI, A Parent’s Guide to Internet Security; PC Magazine, 12 Tools to Keep Kids Safe Online.