Karen Lawrence Öqvist is the author of Virtual Shadows: Your Privacy in the Information Society.
Did you know that software can be installed on a PC to restrict access to websites and chatrooms, blocking any pages that the parents consider as inappropriate for their children?
Did you also know that if you have Microsoft’s Vista or Windows 7 as your operating system, that these controls are included?
Did you know that these controls are called ‘parental controls’?
What do parental controls do exactly?
Parental controls normally allow parents to apply limits to the way their children can use the computer, and includes tools that allow parents to keep track of what their children are doing on the computer. Products should include restriction settings, where can your children go, and activity monitoring, and what they have done online.
The Internet Content Resource Association (ICRA) has provided labels that are used to represent information about things that can be identified on the web and their suitability for children.
Parental controls use these labels which allow the parent to determine which rating services they want to use and, for each rating service, which ratings are acceptable and which are unacceptable. It is similar to ratings applied on films at the cinema. For example you might choose a rating service that rates documents according to their sexual content. The rating service might have a low rating for romance, a higher rating for passionate kissing and yet higher ratings for more explicit sexual activity. You might decide that documents containing romance are the highest acceptable rating for your household. You would then configure your browser to reject all documents that are unrated or contain a higher rating from this rating service.
What’s more, if you have young children you may consider activating the tracking functionality that is included in parental control products. This will store a log of all of their online activities. This is quite invasive, but most parents have no qualms doing this with very young children.
Best practices on using tracking functionality in parental controls
If you feel you need to track your child’s activities, it is good practice to show them what you are doing so that there are no secrets and one day they will probably ask that you remove the tracking, in which case you should do so.
Where to find parental controls?
- On how to use parental controls on Vista or Windows 7, check out the following url: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/parental-controls.aspx.
- On other operating systems you can check out this url (http://www.consumersearch.com/parental-control-software) that gives a comparison of different products available. Here you can make up your own mind which best suits your situation.
Are there drawbacks of activating parental controls?
Apart from the obvious, i.e. the risk that your child feels you are invading their space (privacy), from a technical standpoint the main issue with parental controls is that when the settings are set too high, too many dialogs popup causing the child to just ignore them automatically. Feedback from some parents has been ‘what a waste of time’.
What else can you do?
If you don’t have tracking enabled and you want to have an idea of where your children have been online without them feeling that you are being invasive, you can occasionally check their browsing history and check the source of any cookies that may have been downloaded onto the computer. Again, let your children see what you are doing, so there are no secrets.
4 Comments
Even with parental control I find the problem is with the parents! Once controls are set they do not check that the child has not ‘discovered’ the password and/or has disabled the parental controls. Once set, these control systems need checking and monitoring, and passwords to the controls or user profile that allows administering them needs to be changed regularlry and not set to something the child can guess (they are clevver and cunning little devils). In the end it’s the parents’ responsibility, and there can lie the problem.
I agree Trevor, the parents need to be proactive in their children’s online activities. Not just believe that they have installed a product and that is where their responsibiility ends!
In fact it is the same with the implementation of any security technology, the weakest link is normally the people unfortunately
Actually one of the best defences against inappropriate use of the internet by your children is to sit down with them and have a good old fashioned conversation about it. Don’t be patronising – you may well find to your surprise that your kids are considerably more net savvy than you (and many others in society) give them credit for, but that level of on line maturity can obviously vary considerably. It’s important that you make an effort as a parent to understand the topic and how to put the risks in context. Web sites like get safe on line and initiatives by many local councils and schools can be a good source of information. I’m no fan of privacy controls and other such filtering software. If you have a broadband router – you can easily log on to this and block sites that are a problem – make sure you set a strong password though. I make it clear to my kids that I will occasionally ‘audit’ household PCs jsut to get a sense of what they have been doing and if I find an offensive site, we sit down, we discuss it and we agree what we are going to do (which may result in the URL being blocked on the router), I ask them to tell me if something they see is offensive, worrying or upsetting and I know that this is approach is working to some extent because we have had some of these discussions. I also teach them to log off sites like Facebook, MySpace and other similar sites, not to post anything about any person or organisation they would be unhappy to see posted about themselves or their families and to remember that their digital footprint is not easily erased once posted; so to think about what they share on line before doing so. I should add that I am NOT on their Facebook friends list. What they get up to in the privacy of their on line world is their business and I have no wish to intrude any more than I would eavesdrop outside their bedroom door or bug their school bag!
In summary, yes you need to know what the risks are, you need your children to know that you know and you need to agree what the limits are. You also need to revisit things every once in a while to ensure that things are working as everyone intended. However, most of all you need to try and remember what it was like to be a teenager again and what you got up to at that age – and you turned out OK – didn’t you?
Exactly Andrew… and this is what is recommended in the book “Virtual Shadows”