Parental controls

From Saferpedia

Parental control software gives parents automatic tools to help them in protecting their children and to establish restrictions while using certain device and services. This tools may include: alerting parents when the child lives the school building, limiting car speed, checking online content viewed by the child trough devices with internet connection or limiting the time to use these devices.

Parental control have various options often included in digital television services, PC, video games, mobiles, and software. Parental control options are usually divided in four categories:

inadequate content filtering options;
limiting time of use the device according to types of age options;
limiting the use of certain controls or software options;
monitoring activities options.

Filtering software were the first popular software regarding limiting access to a certain type of online content. Also television started to introduce the V-Chip technology to limit access to certain TV channels. Controls are applied today to all kinds of content, from explicit songs to illegal movies. The parental control methods advance technologically, they being increasingly used in the present. Examples:

device programmed to close after a certain time;
limiting the music volume in the car (introduced by Ford);
detecting children's location trough GPS (Global Positioning System)

General presentation

Add-on parental control programs can monitor software interface working on the computer to observe the way of use. As an example it can be monitored the internet browser and chat applications. The intervention over these application will be realized after criteria established by the administrator in the control panel of parental control software. All parental control software are protected by a password or any other form of authentication to prevent access from unauthorized users.

There are used techniques that implies the use of a proxy server. A web browser is set to send requests of web content to proxy server. The proxy server takes the web page from the hosting server and sends it to the web browser. The proxy server scan the page content and intervene according the criteria set by the admin regarding content, using a words database or a blacklist of web addresses.

Besides the filtering content technique there is the using the computer administration technique. This method is focused on the admin rights the parents have and; these can set the time slot the children will access the computer and the software tha children may use.