What ages need parental controls?

(* data taken from personal observation)

iPhone browsing via McAfee

We here at Safernets have taken a giant step into the void.

My eldest has an iPhone.

This is a challenge on many, many levels. The first being location. The number one rule in keeping your internet safe is to have a public location where the computers are located. The lack of privacy can in itself help to police the content coming into your home. However, the ability to have the entire internet in your pocket changes this dynamic completely. Rules must be set. My wife and I are still working on these rules.

The second, more technical challenge, is how to regulate the parental controls on the iPhone (or iPod Touch).

iOS has some rudimentary controls built in. Basically, you can turn off some things about the device.



This allows the parent to make sure YouTube and Safari are not used. Once "Install Apps" is turned off, the device becomes very locked down. However, it also becomes much less useful.

The reason my children want an iOS device is to use the internet and apps. Enter the world of secondary browsers. A number of developers have stepped up to fill this void - creating a replacement for Safari that will allow some measure of parental controls. Some are whitelists, some are blacklists.


Recently, McAfee released their version of an iPhone internet browser called McAfee Family Protection [iTunes link]. At $19.99 one would expect this to be a suitable and usable option.

The good part, is that a complete history of the device's web browsing history is kept online for parents to look at. A nice bonus is that the location of the phone is stored with each page access. This is a bit of an overkill, and may cause some unnecessary battery drain. But it is nice. Google searches are also defaulted to Google's safe search.

As for the software itself, it is close to unusable. There is no back button. Web browsing with no back button. This is such a crippling limitation that it is hard to move past it.

There are several other major bugs. Most of the time, when I googled for information - part of the google results would stay in front of the screen. I had to restart the app to clear it.

I have been hoping some of these things would be cleared up in a future release, but it has been months. If any of my readers want to suggest another solution, I'm all ears.

Linux

I have been remiss. The truth is, I don't know any parents with Linux. I apologize, because I know you are out there. And I know you are going to have to deal with the same kind of issues. Today, I was pointed to this article from TechRadar.com detailing the pros and cons of six different parental control solutions for the Linux platform. The bottom line is that the author prefers the free tool Privoxy [www.privoxy.org] for an easy out of the box experience.

Internet filtering in Black and White

There are basically two options when it comes to Internet filtering. Whitelist and Blacklist.

Whitelist is a list of approved sites. It is great for younger children. You find a list of websites that you think are approved and only allow those sites. However, as kids grow, this approach becomes less and less ideal. They hear about great sites from friends and you spend more and more time approving sites. Eventually this becomes a chore for the parent.

Blacklist is a list of sites that are not allowed. This list is much more complex to determine and is the basis for most commercial parental control software. Companies spend their time scouring the internet to determine where the filth is, so you don't have to. Blacklisting allows your children a certain freedom to roam more of the magical interwebs while still being somewhat protected.

We here at Safernets have, until now, used whitelist. Some of the frustrations I had figuring out whitelisting are why I started this blog. With such a wide range of ages in this house, whitelisting is a good solution, but for my older kids, it is becoming more and more apparent that a whitelist is no longer good enough. I have several friends who use OpenDNS as their blacklisting solution, in fact, Will wrote a great piece on his blog today outlining some of the other benefits of OpenDNS.

The obvious benefit of OpenDNS is that it resides at the router. This means that any computer connected to your router will not be able to access sites in the blacklist. This also means that devices that do not go through your router are not subject to your blacklist (iPhones, Androids, etc). Having the blacklist at the router saves loads of time for the parent as you are not required to make sure all the computers are up to date. Currently, when I want to add something to the whitelist for my children, I have to add it to three different machines. Consequently, there are sometimes some machines that can access more sites than others.

Triple X

Yesterday, some big news happened in the world of Parental Controls. There was a new domain suffix approved for .xxx

This means that pornography sites can now choose to use porn.xxx instead of porn.com. This sounds like great news for parental control software because parents can easily block *.xxx and be safe, right?

However, the key problem with this solution is that there is no legislation to enforce this. Businesses which have an established business will keep their .com addresses (Playboy will still be Playboy.com)

The second, and bigger problem with this is that it gives a false sense of security for parents. Because even if a parent were to block all .xxx domains, it is trivial to discover what the actual address of a domain is. So even if a parent were to block playboy.com, their child could still visit 216.163.137.68

In the end, the new .xxx domain means very little for parental controls.

Rules

This week I heard Rosalind Wiseman detail her family's Family Internet Policy.

Technology can be really fun to use, and it gives us incredible access to the world, but it is a privilege not a right, and because it is a privilege, you have the responsibility to use it ethically. What using technology ethically looks like to me is that you never use it to humiliate, embarrass ... or misrepresent yourself or someone else, never use a password without the person's permission, never share embarrassing information or photos of others, put someone down, or compromise yourself by sending pictures of yourself naked, half-naked or in your underwear. Remember that it is so easy for things to get out of control. You know it, I know it. So I reserve the right to check your online life, from texting to your Facebook page, and if I see that you're violating the terms of our agreement, I'll take your technology away until you can earn my trust back. This is my unbreakable, unshakeable law."

~ Rosalind Wiseman

How about your family? Do you have a Family Internet Policy?

The iPod Touch

This week marked a monumental move by Apple. They banned over 5,000 "overtly sexual" apps from the app store. These apps were making money for Apple and developers and this decision was not based on finances.

However, dear reader, there is something you should know about the iPod Touch. This machine is more than an iPod. It can play music, but you need to know that when it is in the vicinity of any wi-fi hotspot, this machine is as powerful as most laptop computers. It can browse any part of the internet. It can connect to youtube, facebook, twitter, myspace, instant messaging clients, etc.

The iPod Touch can even act as a cell phone with apps such as Skype and Fring. This is a powerful computer.

There are parental controls which are built into the iPhone and iPod Touch operating system. These are accessed by going to Settings | General | Restrictions. Until I write my own version, I would like to point you to this easy guide by Suren Ramasubbu