Best Parental Control

Here’s an article from the San Diego Union Tribune, that suggests among other things parents look to parental controls:

By now you’ve probably heard all about the recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which found that kids between 8 and 18 years old spend as much as seven hours and 38 minutes a day — yes, a day — using some form of electronic media, whether it be watching television or using other devices like computers or cell phones. Because so many kids multitask and use more than one medium at a time, the Kaiser study found that today’s children are actually able to cram 10 hours and 45 minutes of media content in each day — yes, each day. The bad news is that all this media consumption might have some negative effects. The study found that nearly half of all heavy media users reported subpar grades of mostly C’s or lower. Only 23 percent of light media users said their grades were in the mostly-C’s-or-lower range.

Most Internet parental control products offer a time-management feature, as do the operating systems of Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X.  Many mobile phones, including those offered by ATT, T-Mobile, and Verizon offer this feature, but X-Box 360 is the only gaming console that does.  Not all of these controls are created equal, though as some can be fooled by simply resetting the system clock.  Others time management controls are not very flexible and only allow you block whole hours, not smaller increments.

Earlier this month, the UK publication Daily Mirror reported on the growing issue of the large amount of easily-accessible pornography found in Yahoo’s popular photo sharing site Flickr:

Flickr is renowned as one of the best photo sharing sites on the web. But there’s a less wholesome side to what can be found on its service too, seemingly in direct breach of its parent company Yahoo!’s terms of service. We’ve been alerted to a number of public Flickr galleries containing adult material, which can easily be accessed by Flickr’s search tool, either by searching for specific content or by innocently looking for images by device. A reader tipped us off after he searched innocent-sounding body parts to create a home-made birthday card, and was surprised when innocuous searches, such as “feet” and “mouth”, brought back full frontal nudity and graphic close ups of genitalia, even with Flickr’s SafeSearch feature enabled. Yahoo!’s terms state that it “has no obligation to monitor Content”. And while we’re not coming over all prudish, or were surprised at adult content being shared, we were surprised at just how easy it was to find, especially with SafeSearch on our side.vThe photos we stumbled across were certainly vulgar and, we considered, obscene, which should put them in Flickr’s bad books. Some even appear to have been taken without the subject’s knowledge. That raises questions of whether they are also invasive of another’s privacy. Only two of the groups groups we saw were hidden behind an age check.

 A follow-up story by the Mirror describes some of the filtering options, none of which are very good.  There are hundreds of photo and video sharing sites available on the Internet, but the most popular sites, such as YouTube and Flickr draw large numbers of children, especially teens.  While these sites all offer a great deal of fun and useful content appropriate for children, many of them also openly host inappropriate content, including pornography.  Unfortunately, parental control options for video and photo sharing sites are poor.  Few of these sites offer any meaningful controls over access to content, and stand-alone Internet parental control products such as Cyber Patrol or Net Nanny typically only offer the same “block everything on these sites are allowing everything” choices as they do for social networks.    If you are concerned about children accessing these sites, you should purchase either a filtering or monitoring parental control product, depending on if you want to manage these sites by filtering or by monitoring.

A new survey by the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital and the University of Michigan Child Health Evaluation and Research finds that about half of US parents use Internet parental control software.  A June, 2009 survey found 55% use them, and 2005 Pew survey recorded 55%.  What’s new is the rise in the use of monitoring software, which I think is largely a response to social networking use.  Because filters are “blunt instrument” for social networking – they either block everything from a social network or allow everything, parents seem to be turning to monitors instead:

 Parents were asked if they take specific actions to protect or monitor their children’s use of the Internet. Overall, parents report the following actions:

• • 65% disable pop-ups
• • 62% monitor social networking sites
• • 61% check history of websites
• • 49% block websites they don’t want kids to use
• • 32% use child-safe software

68% of parents report taking 1 to 4 of the above actions, while 19% take all 5 the of the actions listed. However, 13% of parents whose children access the Internet report not taking any of these actions to protect or monitor that use.  

Also interesting is what parents expressed the most concern about, “Predators, Privacy, and Porn:”