Parental Control & How to Use It with Your Children

 

Parental Control & How to Use It with Your Children?

 

We live in an era in which access to the internet is in everyone's day to day , from the smallest in the house when they watch their children's series on Netflix, YouTube, or Disney +, to the largest who use the web for our professional and leisure activities, and in some cases for each and every one of our activities.

Since the internet has become omnipresent in our lives, and as more and more people add their digital presence, it has become necessary to have regulatory bodies that put order to the universe that represents the world www. After the scandals perpetrated by Facebook with the Cambridge Analytics case in 2018 , the European Union issued the first regulatory framework on how websites use and manage the information we provide and track, thus mounting the first privacy control decree with the RGPD (General Data Protection Regulation) or GDPR for its acronym in English.

These advances have allowed for the first time there to be some kind of control in the handling and use of our information by third parties in the internet world, but not everything depends on the international regulations put in place. We ourselves can also regulate the level of navigation, protection of information, passwords, and data that we grant to other sites, as well as the access allowed to each user at home and office. In this post we will talk about one of the most important security controls on the internet: parental control.

Digital natives par excellence, today's children know how to use computers, smartphones, and tablets backwards and forwards better than adults, so it is necessary to protect them from the dangers of the web. According to an investigation by the International Internet Observatory for Minors, in minors between 11 and 13 years old, eight out of ten children regularly surf the Internet and in 57% of cases they do so without parental control. The risks of finding inappropriate, violent, illegal and dangerous content for your health (for example, sites that promote eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia) increase considerably.

WHAT ARE PARENTAL CONTROL SYSTEMS?

Internet parental control is the system that allows parents to monitor or block access to certain websites by minors (pornographic sites, violent images or pages with certain keywords), as well as to establish a daily time limit on the use of the computer, TV, smartphone, tablet, and other devices that have access to a Wifi network. Through parental control it is possible to monitor the digital behavior of your children by creating a personal user profile from which minor household members can connect. It represents a valuable aid to contain the eminent risks of the web and also to evaluate the online activity of children. However, it is important to remember that parental control is an aid to adult supervision, but not a substitute for it.

The familiar parental control filters can be applied on any device, from PC / Mac to a tablet, smartphones and even smart TVs. In fact, all operating systems, such as Windows, macOS, and Linux, respond without problem to the need to protect minors from the dangers of the web.

The main telecommunications lines (Claro and Movistar), video games (Nintendo and Play station), and search engines (Google Safe Search) offer filters and restrictions that are increasingly available to parents. Let's review the most famous operating systems, such as macOS (Apple) and Windows PC:

As for Apple , each macOS operating system provides parental control functions, which can be accessed from the Settings item in the "Control Panel" or "System Preferences" which can be found immediately from the search engine.

For PC systems, Windows has also made available the Windows Live Family Safety program, a kind of antivirus that extends control to the web and provides a report of every action performed by the person accessing the computer under these credentials.

SEVEN TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE PARENTAL CONTROL

·         IN THE BROWSER: For the safety of the little ones, you can install special browsers for children that are not based on lists of prohibited sites, but on lists of sites that can be visited, also known as White lists or "White Lists" translating the term into Spanish.

·         REPORTS: In addition to checking online activity through the browser history, which can be easily eliminated by the most technological children, you can choose Qustodio reporting system that will allow you to be informed in real time and periodically about browsing website of the minors of the home.

·         VIDEOS: One of the most visited sites by the youngest is YouTube: to prevent access to videos with certain keywords, you can configure the "Protection Mode" through YouTube Kids, the section of YouTube dedicated to parental control and content available for children.

·         CHAT: If chats are your biggest concern, the only solution is to prevent your computer from accessing certain sites, with the help of a program like “Binary Switch Eclipse ", in Windows, valid for both Chrome and Firefox. On Mac, the same result is obtained by configuring access for individual users.

·         DOWNLOADS: In addition to using parental controls, it is also important to block sites and downloads that can compromise the protection and confidentiality of the data stored on your child's device.

·         SMARTPHONE AND TABLET: Protection filters can be configured on smartphones and tablets not only through the Settings item but also with the help of specific applications. My Niño, for example, can be downloaded for free from the AppStore and Google Play; it is suitable for remote monitoring of websites, games, position via GPS, text messages and calls made by minors in the household.

·         ON THE ROUTER: One of the easiest ways to configure parental controls is by configuring them from the router, since the router is the device from which all web traffic flows. The parental control settings from here will allow you to perform a general filter for all connected hardware: computers, smartphones, tablets, and even game consoles. Some routers have built-in parental controls. If your router has this feature, it will often be announced on the box and usually explained in the manual. Many routers do not include parental controls, but you can use OpenDNS to configure parental controls on any router. To do this, you will only need to change the DNS server configuration of your router to use OpenDNS, and thus select different categories of websites to be blocked. Websites you block will be redirected to a "This site is blocked" message when visited.