No program is a substitute for parental supervision, but some monitoring tools help you control where your children go online.
It’s great to have a tool that complements your shrewd set of eyes, but you still need to teach your children to be cautious when surfing the internet.
Tools to enhance your children’s protection
IamBigBrother is available for both homes and business. You’ll know exactly who your kids chatted with last night and be able to read the full conversation!
Features:
- It runs in the background and remains undetected by the user. It captures chats and instant messages, email, websites…etc.
- It takes screen captures periodically.
- You can view recorded activity from any computer via a secure server.
- It monitors everything on your computer.
- Logs all visited websites.
The benefits:
You can enter in keywords and anytime they appear, they’ll be flagged as a problem. You can also click on a day in the calendar and pull up all the activity for that day.
SpectorPro has some interesting features to enhance your protection on your home computer. A Top 10 Summary Report logs a report of the most frequently used keywords, most visited websites and email and chat conversations.
Features:
- View the text of both incoming and outgoing email plus both sides of chat/IM conversations.
- The program activity records the actions of programs on your computer so you’ll know if your kids played games instead of doing homework.
- Screen captures allow you to visualize what your kids are looking at every few minutes.
The benefits:
With SpectorPro, The lists are organized for easy scanning. You can view the domains for websites visited by date. Then if you want to look at more, you can view each individual page. It also allows you to view the content of email and chat messages.
WebWatcher is simply designed to make it easy to protect your children from harmful areas of the internet. Completely invisible, it stands up to the most computer savvy of children. The best part, you don’t have to be an expert to use it.
Features:
- Blocks websites
- Records visited websites
- Screenshots
- Records Instant messages and emails
The benefits:
Once the program records what happens on your computer, it uploads the information to an account online that you can access from anywhere. You can also block websites your children visit based on the information you provide, using keywords or URLS. WebWatcher is also in real time, so you can see what your kids are doing while they are doing it.
Safe Eyes allows you to decide how much internet usage is appropriate for your child. It also allows you to specify what websites are appropriate, so when your children get distracted from homework they’ll be playing games or surfing websites that you approve of.
Features:
- Web and email blocking
- Time limits
- Program blocking
- Instant alerts
The benefits:
With Safe Eyes, you can control the amount of time your child is online, as well as when they’re granted access. You can also monitor instant messaging and categorize and flag over 35 categories of harmful websites.
Net Nanny not only made our 15 Top Software Solutions in 2008 but because of its overwhelming success and recognition it made this list as well for top monitoring tools for parents. Net Nanny provides protection on the World Wide Web, and less known dangerous parts of the Internet like the Usenet, peer to peer networks, and FTP forums. Updates happen automatically over the internet, so you’ll always have the latest version.
Features:
- Total customization
- Blur technology
- Customized restrictions
- Integration with popular search engines
The benefits:
With Net Nanny, you can implement blur technology to blur out the view of questionable material. You can hold suspicious items in quarantine until you review or delete them. The content clean up mode suggests files you may want to delete, and you can classify different warning levels to classify risks of different websites.
Minimize and be aware of dangers
Remember, it is still important to set some ground rules for your children when surfing the net so they are aware of the dangers lurking sometimes just a click away. Here are some tips to consider:
- Define a clear set of guidelines on using the computer and make sure your children know your expectations.
- Talk to your children about chat rooms and bulletin boards. Teach them to never give out personal information to people they meet online.
- Keep the computer in a central location in your home and know the other places your children may be granted access online.
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