Online activity can be a scary proposition for parents. What are your kids seeing? What are they hearing? Who or what are they interacting with? With the ability to open up browser windows that never save data or history, your child’s online activity can be a frightening thing indeed.
What if you know very little about social media, or computers? Maybe you have no real clue how to check Snapchat or Instagram Stories to view what they are sharing and doing. Don’t worry, this post is intended to help. There are ways to help keep tabs on your child’s web surfing.
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Monitoring Online Activity for Safety
There’s no end to the scariness of the internet if you have children. Between online porn sites, message boards, chat rooms, and other ways to interact with other people and less than savoury content, the internet is a minefield. That’s why it’s so important to track your child’s online activity. It’s a way to help keep them safe in a world where everyone – including predators – is technologically savvy.
Web Watcher
Web Watcher is a program that allows you to track your child’s activity on the PC, MAC, AND Android and Blackberry. In addition, it has a filtering app for iOS. That’s an impressive array of device monitoring. One of the best features of Web Watcher is that is allows you to monitor your child’s online activity without their knowledge. While this may feel sneaky, it’s the only true way to get a sense of what the kids are doing on their devices. Let’s face it, even the best kid is going to keep secrets, and the internet is not the place for that.
uKnowKids
Available for Windows, iOS, Android, and Blackberry, uKnowKids lets you monitor your child’s online activity, and it also has the ability to monitor location and text messages. I love that, because in this day and age of internet savvy online predators, the ability to monitor online activity, texts, and location is a huge deal. You never know where your child might come into contact with a sexual predator.
KidsWatch
KidsWatch seems to have the best of all worlds. It allows you to manage your child’s time online with custom schedules for limiting online activity. You can monitor chat sessions and receive alerts regarding inappropriate content. KidsWatch also has an interesting block feature that goes beyond blocking objectionable websites. It also blocks inappropriate banner ads and pop ups. One of the best parts of this program, in my opinion, is its sexual predator notification system. Not only does it immediately block many potential predator threats, but it also alerts you if a sexual predator moves to your area.
Net Nanny
Net Nanny is an excellent program, because it combines online internet activity tracking with internet filtering and even profanity masking. You can set filtering for 18 categories to either block, warn, or allow for view. Of course, you can also block pornography. It features a time management feature for limiting your child’s online activity as well as the ability to filter vulgar language out of pages that you deem otherwise okay for viewing. You can also monitor your child’s social media, receive alerts on your child’s internet activity, and create user profiles for each child. In addition to all of that, Net Nanny has a remote admin feature which allows you to do all of this from any computer with an internet connection.
SniperSpy
SniperSpy is one of those programs that pretty much does it all. It has all the standard filtering, activity, and monitoring features of other online activity monitoring services, but it has more, as well. It features an HTTPS secured connection – the only one in the remote software industry. In addition, it blocks task manager, registry editor, and system configuration access to prevent tampering with your system. It also features a Top Ten Graph which shows your the most visited URLs, applications, web searches, and more along with searchable logs and a user filter.
Online Activity Monitoring is the Way to Go
Some of these programs may seem like overkill, but in an age where porn sites are around every corner, no matter what you search for, it’s important to know what they are seeing. Online predators find new ways to contact kids daily. Online activity monitoring is vital to keep kids safe.