Child Monitoring and Security Information Archive 2019 - 5.14.40
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Norton Child Monitoring Software
When you get beyond the basics, parental control systems start to diverge, with many advanced features to help them stand out from the crowd. Among these standout features are the ability to track your child's YouTube and Hulu viewing history, check your child's location, or even remotely lock down a device to force them to divert their attention. You'll also find advanced versions of standard features. For example, the best content filters don't just use a database of categories. They analyze page content in real time so that, for example, they can allow access to a short-story site but block the erotica.
Long gone are the days when a single parental control utility on the family PC was sufficient for keeping your kids safe and productive. Modern kids use all kinds of internet-connected devices, and modern parental control systems must keep up.
Bottom Line: FamilyTime Premium does a decent job of keeping track of your kids' locations on Android and iOS, but it's a mobile-only parental control solution, and its lack of web filtering and inconsistent performance are serious shortcomings.
Child Gps Bracelet
A mobile parental control app should at the very least be able to keep track of a child's current location and some historical location data, too. It's also important for them to offer some level of control over notifications and the frequency of location reporting, to avoid bombarding the parent with useless data. Both Qustodio and Norton Family offer these features.
Some services, including Locategy, Boomerang, and FamilyTime, go one step further, letting you construct geofences around a location. For the uninitiated, geofences are digital boundaries around a physical location that help parents keep track of when a child arrives at or leaves a given location. Kaspersky Safe Kids even lets you add a dimension of time to a geofence, so you can easily make sure a child stays where they are supposed to be throughout the day. Boomerang offers a unique feature, in that you can draw custom geofences on a map; others just create a circular radius around a point you define.
Pros: Filters Web content for all devices on the network. All essential features found in free edition, including dynamic IP handling. Report on sites visited and blocked. Can block or allow domains from within stats report.
Child Tracking Device Implant
Cons: Does not work on Macs. No Free version anymore. Does not block HTTPS sites on unsupported browsers. Web extension is easily disabled. Platform-dependent features. Lackluster social media tracking.
Time restriction is another major feature of parental control apps. Some services, like Norton and FamilyTime, let you specify how many total hours (or minutes) a day your child can spend on any given device as well as a schedule for when it is ok to use it. Net Nanny takes a slightly different approach and applies these time limits to internet usage. Still others, such as Qustodio, offers a mix; you can set up usage schedules for specific apps and device usage, as well as specifying a total time allotment for your child that applies across every piece of hardware they use to access the internet.