One of my colleagues, Forrest Collier, over at InternetSafety.com, has just released a sweet new app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that helps parents protect their children from objectionable and problematic content on their mobile device. The program is called “Safe Eyes Mobile” and works just like the built-in iPhone browser with pinch and tap zoom, bookmarks, built-in Google search and multiple pages, and has no noticeable effect on iPhone performance. It is the first browser application to control iPhone content, and checks requested web sites against a massive blacklist of potentially objectionable web addresses that is updated on a daily basis. As you might imagine, it prevents iPhone and iPod Touch access to pages in the pornography, nudity, sex and tasteless/gross categories by default…and parents can configure the software to filter sites in 31 other categories. What is also cool is that parents can force the Safe Eyes browser to be the only one usable for surfing the Web by disabling the Apple Safari browser and the installation of any others. My concern was that the proprietary browser would, for lack of a better word, suck. But it doesn’t – it has bookmarking capabilities, tabbed browsing, and pan and zoom features – much like Safari. It is also pretty neat that Safe Eyes Mobile filtering works on both the AT&T cellular network and individual Wi-Fi networks to which the iPhone automatically connects when in range. I personally like what it does, and think it is very useful for parents to install on the iPhones of their younger kids.
When it comes down to safety and welfare of the children, I don’t think any parent would sacrifice anything to make sure nothing happens to their children. There are areas of cyberspace which may contain materials that are not appropriate for children. I think that the parents must implement a system that permit them filter and block all the inadequate material. These tools allow them to take the control of the content when they are making decision about what is right for their own children. There are several software’s that can be bought in the market specially designed to be easy to use for parents who may not be as computer savvy as their children. Yes, I know sometimes $80 or $100 for a software to allow you to control some inappropriate words you don’t want your child to say, sounds a little bit expensive, but necessary.
Every day you hear another sad story that could be prevent if the parent would know what their son was doing. According to the news, parents have started hacking into their children’s Face book accounts. They are using a spyware software that allows parents to see their children’s’ Facebook passwords. They can also check their children’s Internet history.
I never checked my son and daughter’s room’s, cells or computers. I did not wanted to “invade their privacy” but today, I truly recommended to my younger’s sisters in law to do it .I think that it worth the risk of checking into their children’s Face book account.
In New Jersey, and maybe in many places more, a police detective thought that parents should hack into Face book accounts. He thought that this was the only way to keep tabs on what the children are doing. I agree 100%.