Now that my boys are five and (almost) seven and are regular users of the computer and the Internet, I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about online safety. Conveniently, I’ve also been offered a couple of blog tours lately that touch on the same subject. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about NetSmartz efforts to keep kids safe online, including a list of tips for safe surfing. This week, I’m looking at a new tool called Norton Online Family, designed to help parents monitor and modify their kids’ online behaviour. (Disclosure: I’ll receive a $20 gift card from Amazon for being a part of the MomCentral blog tour supporting the launch of Norton Online Family.)
I wanted to be a part of this tour because I’ve been curious for some time about the “net nanny” tools that are available. Symantec’s Norton Online Family lets you set up a personalized family account with information about each member of your family, and offers the following services:
- Check a child’s activity or modify a child’s profile, preferences, or time allotment anytime and anywhere using any Internet-connected device.
- All online activities are reported in chronological order and only show the Web sites a child intended to visit – eliminating all the extra URLs, like ads, from Web sites.
- Easily view what words and phrases a child uses to search and where those searches lead online.
- Control the Web content that flows into the home by prohibiting more than 40 topic categories.
- Track, report and prevent personal information that a child may purposely or accidentally try to send via e-mail, IM or social networking site.
- Monitor activity on social networks like Facebook and MySpace with the ability to see how kids represent themselves, when they login and how often.
- Built-in messaging allows parents to have real-time discussions with children about activities and better understand their intentions when visiting a Web site.
- Children are able to view the “house rules” they established with parents at any time and are notified when Norton Online Family is active, so there is no “stealth” mode.
- Parents can customize e-mail alerts to address urgent events so they know immediately when a child has reached a time limit or visited a blocked site, etc.
- An easy-to-use time management feature that – if parents find it necessary – gives each child a “curfew” that will limit computer usage.
I have to be totally honest here: when I first signed up, I liked the idea of having some sort of filter to keep the scariest parts of the Internet at bay (we’ve been caught off guard with searches as simple as “Star Wars Lego”) but I stopped about half way into the process of setting up an account for this service. It’s a great service if you want this kind of monitoring and control — but I don’t think it’s right for us, at least not right now. I’d much rather set the kids up with a few favourites, and help them find new sites when they are looking for something. Maybe in a few years, we’ll need this kind of scrutiny and monitoring, but this seems a little bit too extensive for our needs right now.
If I had a little more time in the day, I’d’ve likely gone ahead and played around with the service a little bit more anyway, and with a sponsored review I would have liked to be more thorough. It’s not that I don’t think this is a good tool — I just question whether it’s the right tool for our family at this moment in time.
On other hand, I was totally impressed yesterday when I stumbled across this: Kid Rex, a safe-search engine from the people at Google. From their “info for parents” page:
KidRex is a fun and safe search for kids, by kids! KidRex searches emphasize kid-related webpages from across the entire web and are powered by Google Custom Search and use Google SafeSearch technology.
Google’s SafeSearch screens for sites that contain explicit sexual content and deletes them from your child’s search results. Google’s filter uses advanced technology to check keywords, phrases, and URLs. No filter is 100 percent accurate, but SafeSearch should eliminate most inappropriate material.
In addition to Google SafeSearch, KidRex maintains its own database of inappropriate websites and keywords. KidRex researchers test KidRex daily to insure that you and your child have the best web experience possible.
This is the tool that we need right now for our family. Love the idea, love the interface. If you want to keep a closer eye on what your kids are doing online when you aren’t able to be there, the Norton Family Online service looks like an excellent choice. But if you just want a kid-friendly search engine, I’m highly impressed with KidRex.
What do you think? Beloved and I have been debating our need for parental control software. He thinks the Norton Family Online service is an excellent and necessary tool. I think it’s our role as parents to provide this kind of filter, especially while the kids are very young. Then, again, he also says they’ll ‘never’ be allowed to have a Facebook or MySpace page, an argument I suspect he’ll lose sooner rather than later.
How do you balance trust, autonomy, and teaching your kids to make the right choices against the possibility of exposure to some of the undoubtedly ghastly stuff out there on the Interwebs?
The filtering software sounds great, Rex does too. Our two aren’t on the Internet unsupervised a whole lot, but I’m sure that day is coming!
I think the best thing parents can do is make sure the computer is in a high-traffic area (like yours!) and make sure the kids know never give out their names and addresses to strangers. Have you heard of the CyberPigs? It’s an online game that teaches kids some basic rules about being on the Internet. Yours might be a little young for it yet, but it’s a neat little resource. (I am totally biased because I worked for the organization that created it and helped test the first version.)
I am going to look at the KidRex engine. Thanks for the info.
We’re still just about able to monitor the 11yr old on line, but the next stage is in view already. Going to try KidRex.
Have sat down to evaluate various monitors a couple of times, but they are complex; even got half way through installing Cyber Patrol before time and energy ran out.
A friend has also recommended ‘SafeEyes’. Others have said ‘talk, talk , talk’. I’m inclined to think that in the long-term you cannot protect children by shielding them from the real world, only by teaching them to manage it. Then again, some days I would like the internet and news to be a little more filtered for me!
Wendy
I agree that there is no substitute for parental supervision. The tools really only work well if the parents are regularly following up with checking where their kids visited. Especially with pre-teen kids there isn’t actually a whole lot of reason why they *have* to be on the internet, anyway.
Placing the computer in a high-traffic area is the way to go. A colleague who recently found their family needed a second family computer decided NOT to connect the second computer (in the basement) to the internet, because it just wasn’t going to offer enough transparency. It can be used for computer games, word processing, etc. but if the kids want internet time, it has to be done in their wide-open family room upstairs.
This is very helpful. Although my children are still too young, I am sure we will be needing to look into this in the coming years. So far we don’t stray far from Treehouse and PBS Kids online, but that surely won’t last forever.
Our kids’ pc is in the family room for the same reasons everyone noted. Like you, I’m not thrilled with the idea of having the kids skulking through the internet on their own. We have had discussions with both of them about preferred usage but we don’t block sites and we don’t limit their access. We do however do some monitoring to see where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing.
Check out Spector Pro for very intense monitoring software if you ever need to go into that much detail. It’s not free. It is frightening though to see how much monitoring it provides for the price. It knows more than Santa Clause does about who’s naughty and who’s nice. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that…
Andrea,
Thank you for the CyberPigs suggestion. (And everyone else, check it out if you haven’t.) My eight year old loved it, thought it was a hoot, and claims she gets the point. Though immediately afterward she showed me two new online kids’ communities she wanted to sign up for. So who knows if it worked.