Sunday, December 4, 2011

Ideas You Should Research When Purchasing Parental Controls

By Ronnie Layne


Is your kid safe from all Internet hazards? As parents we often want to ensure that our children are safe online. Lately, the University of New Hampshire conducted a study about Internet Exploitations on Children. It showed that 20% of children around the world have obtained internet sex solicitation while they are playing internet games or whenever going to chat rooms. Also, around 25% of children ages five to ten happen to be exposed to photos and videos of persons having sex while visiting a site. Adding up to the report is 5% of our children being threatened or bullied online. This is where Parental Control Software comes in helpful.

There are several Parental Control Systems that are available in the market having distinct functions. What makes an excellent parental control system, however, is not just its ability to monitor all of your children's online activities. Here are some features that you have to consider just before buying one:

Check its effectiveness and capabilities for Web Filtering. The online world is rapidly evolving and the speed of change is increasing each day. It is therefore; smart to check how fast your parental control system will filter undesirable websites. Parental controls just like KidsWatch can detect suspicious threat websites that are newly uploaded or newly hosted in the system, real-time.

Furthermore, there are a few parental controls that can only filter sites based from preset or set categories, such as drugs, porn,, violence, vices, hate, and more. What you should look for are those that may filter proxies, web contents, and web addresses. This provides a much better detailed screening of all of the sites your child visits. So, if your kid visits a video site, sings up as a grownup, and attempts to watch mature content materials, they'll only be amazed when they would not be able to watch the site. This ought to be exactly the same with downloading videos, pictures, and other internet information; a similar system should apply.

Check Predator Alert Availability - sex offenders are always on the go targeting children online. Many reports and Police cases have confirmed such threatening crimes, but only a few parental controls offer a Predator Watch feature. This feature helps in reducing the chance of your child being victimized from future sexual solicitation, by providing real time email alerts when a sexual offender attempts to communicate with a child.

Check Application Blocking Features - Make sure your parental control could read through a site content right before your child could possibly see or use them. This is called application filtering whereby all the adult programs and applications are instantly blocked based on its content and could be modified by the kid's age. It should also be ready to disable IM applications, e-mail, online games, website, and certain adult and violent programs.

Check Its Tracking Capabilities - this is by far a certain feature that a parental control must have. It should be able to track emails, chats, web site researches, and do screenshots. It should also have real-time email notifications whenever suspected terms like drugs or sex are typed, whenever very revealing sites are being watched or downloaded, and whenever registered sexual offenders are talking with a child.

Check Management Capacities - this is one of the things that should never be taken for granted. Your parental control must be able to perform remote management and monitoring. This would allow busy parents who are often away for a business trip or those always in the office to check closely their kids' on-line activities. Remote monitoring features, nevertheless; needs to include real time screenshots, real time alterations of management tool and rules, and must include realtime e-mail notifications or text messages when a suspected activity is being held.




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