As I looked over my daughter’s shoulder one day as she was playing on her laptop, I noticed a banner ad for a mature game. It wasn’t an adult website, but it wasn’t for kids, either. What if she had clicked it? Where would it have taken her. Worse yet, what if she wanted to go there. The ad promised that you could play an online game “discreetly” and showed a woman dressed in a costume that enhanced her top.
I asked her what she was doing, and she said “looking for cheats for my game”. I was horrified.
How many children and teens are being exposed to “mature” (or worse, adult) content while simply “looking for cheats”. What if they were looking for the mature content in the first place? This might be the case, as well.
There are various programs out there that promise to shield your children from known sites, but what about the sites that are added daily? How can these programs keep up? In short, they can’t.
So what’s the solution? Spying. That’s right, I said spying.
When I was a kid, we didn’t have access to an Internet, but we did have access to an online BBS system(See Content and Access). Even then there was adult content to be found. I never knew how to get it, as it was over my head at the time, but had I been just a few years older, I would have definitely gone for it. My parents would have had no idea.
But parents today do have an idea, and if they don’t, they can get one.
For our house, we use Microsoft’s new Windows Live Family Safety. It provides website filtering, contact management, and best of all, Activity Reporting.
Website Filtering – This provides basic filtering for adult and inappropriate websites. The list of sites is updated regularly and is accessed through the web so it is mostly up-to-date.
Contact Management – This one is also very important. It allows you to decide who your child interacts with on Instant Messenger. That means they can only chat with people you have authorized. If they get a friend request from a stranger, it is denied until you have the opportunity to approve or decline the request.
And, my personal favorite…
Activity Reporting – This provides a report of every website accessed from your child’s computer. It allows you to view the sites visited for a certain date range. It also allows you to see which blocked sites that were attempted access. In other words, if a site is blocked and there are multiple attempts to access the site, it might be time for a little discussion.
“But my kid is smart, he’ll figure out a way around this”. This is not a good idea for your kid. You see, in order to get your activity report, you’ll have to use the system to log into your parent account. If they’ve somehow uninstalled it, then you won’t be able to access it. Does that make any sense?
Give it a try.
If you don’t like it, you can always uninstall it (make sure you’re a member of the administrators group before trying to uninstall). And one more thing, never let your child be a member of the administrators group.Make them a “Standard Account”. See “Creating User Accounts in Windows Vista” A similar process is used to create users in Windows XP, but you’ll likely only need to access the Family Safety site as a parent account.
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