Mobile Parental Controls

Mobile Parental Controls. Mobile devices are now mainstream and the perfect size for little hands to use. What’s more is that they are all able to connect to the internet. How convenient!

Leave yours lying around and its likely to be picked up by your young one, who will quickly know how to connect to the internet. Kids love pushing buttons and learn what each button does very quickly.

Mums and dads are handing down their old iPhone, Android smart phone, iPad or tablet to their children while they themselves upgrade to the latest version.

Internet ready mobile devices have flooded the market so quickly, they have not only become affordable to most of us, we have also forgotten how dangerous an open internet connection can be to young ones.

Not only are our schools rolling out iPads in the classroom, our pre-schools are also starting to use them for educating our toddlers. Some parents are not impressed about this, as their toddlers are coming home and demanding iPads for Christmas!

Protecting these devices with parental monitoring and filtering software is so important. But many parents don’t know they exist, don’t know what it is, don’t know how it works and don’t know what is will cost them.

We’ve looked at many on the market and tested several. We have also come up with our recommendations and why.

What is Parental filtering & monitoring software?

Parental filtering & monitoring software is inexpensive, and gives parents the ability to block access to up to 50 categories that an internet site may fall into. ‘Pornography’ and ‘Social Networking’ are just two of them.

The software is very customisable, allowing parents to block a category such as ‘social networking’ but allow Facebook for a particular user between specific times.

We recommend parents install filtering software as soon as young ones start using a computer. Otherwise they are likely to stumble upon objectionable material accidentally. Female names, cartoon characters, pet names and mistyped words all return links to objectionable material in search engines.

Monitoring software is the second component. This records more than just websites visited. It records an entry for every mouse click and every enter key pushed. In other words, it will record all website links within each website.

Another feature of the monitoring software is capturing all search terms used in a single view.

Parents will quickly identify whether their children are using the internet safely by glancing at their web traffic and looking at their search terms used.

Parents are best to block categories for younger children, then, as they get older, it’s best to open up access. By making older children accountable for their internet surfing puts the onus on them. If they fall back to bad internet surfing habits you will see this from the monitoring screens. You’ll then be able to discuss it with them.

We recommend MobiCip for all ‘I’ products as well as Android. This product provides all the monitoring and filtering capabilities you will need.

If you are looking for a product to monitor and manage phone calls and text messaging on smart phones we recommend PhoneBeagle.

What will it cost?

Costs are minimal. Mobicip is about $20 per mobile device per annum.

Choose a product that suits your needs and budget. Alternatively, email us and arrange for us to install the software for you, nationwide!

Contact WebSafety NZ through their website: websafety.co.nz