Some really creative thinking has gone into kid online monitoring products lately, and the category is segmenting in interesting ways. More on that in a minute, but what they have in common, thankfully, is that at least the leaders in this space all seem to be acknowledging the importance of baking parent-child communication into product design and allowing parents to calibrate how much privacy … [Read more...] about 3 new products for monitoring online kids
parental controls
Latest trends in Web filtering
GetParentalControls.org has not only done parents a service in testing and ranking 9 top filtering products, they noticed some key trends in the process. First, the winners of their three categories for effective filtering are NetNanny in both the Editor's Choice and Most Secure categories and K9 Web Protection in the Most Accurate category. They invited the 20 companies in their product guide to … [Read more...] about Latest trends in Web filtering
AOL’s two new, easy-to-use safety tools
Not many Internet companies know more about parental controls than AOL, which has been providing a range of them longer than I've been writing about youth and tech (since '97!). So I was interested to hear that AOL was releasing two very Web 2.0 tools, one free, the other $9.99/month. First the free one: 1. Safety Toolbar This light little software app, which AOL says takes about a minute to … [Read more...] about AOL’s two new, easy-to-use safety tools
Videogaming: Parents can be workarounds too
It's a great headline in Kotaku.com – "Confessions of a failed gaming parent" – and what he's confessing to is that the loophole his all-too-smart son Tristan found was ... his parents! "My wife and I set up parental locks on the [Xbox] console and on Tristan's Xbox Live gold account," so Tristan found "human error" workaround. Among other measures, his parents didn't allow Tristan to play Halo … [Read more...] about Videogaming: Parents can be workarounds too
Moms’ tech concerns & countermeasures: Survey
To me, the most interesting slide in the BlogHer/Parenting magazine national survey of moms is the one about the difference between their fears vs. their kids' experience of what they fear: Mothers' biggest concern, quite naturally, is inappropriate communications with an adult online (62% share this concern), but only 1% of moms surveyed said their kids had experienced such communication. Next … [Read more...] about Moms’ tech concerns & countermeasures: Survey