Parental control on the internet

By: Chamil Kulatunga

Most parents worry that their children might be exposed to inappropriate information when they use the Internet and indeed many delay getting an Internet connection for this reason.

Sometimes children may be more Internet-savvy than their parents and whilst their parents may be able to prevent them from watching an objectionable TV program they may be unable to guide them when surfing the Internet. This is compounded by the fact that with the development of multimedia streaming such as web broadcasting and distributed gaming children are even more attracted to the Internet.

Day by day the number of children and teens who are going online and the amount of information and services they can access through the Internet is increasing. So keeping them away from the information superhighway may not be the best way around this problem.

So how can parents know where the dangers lie in the Internet? These may be found in newsgroups with the risk increasing when it is an un-moderated group, in an interactive chat room, a web page or e-mail. And thousands of new websites appear every day.

This is where a convenient and tamper-proof method of monitoring the use of the Internet comes in handy. Such a method exists in the form of Third Party Parental Control, which controls the communication between the content provider (the author of the web page) and the consumer, in this case the children.

This involves a trusted third party, which is an entity that is trusted by parents and that can identify the objectionable material on the Internet and rate it. The trusted third party rates all the web sites on the Internet as suitable or unsuitable for children and installs a database of lists on the computer that the children use to access the Internet. Then a software program reads every website the children access and matches them with a list of objectionable sites in the database.

Since new web pages are added to the Internet every minute the database that contains the lists of objectionable sites must be updated. It can be done automatically when the computer is online or parents can download it from the trusted third party's web site. Parents should be willing to update the database as often as possible. Most parental control services charge a monthly subscription from parents for their updating service.

Some parental controls provide parents the option to filter out sites, for example, that include violence, sex, nudity or drugs into a 'black-list'. Age-based selections can be used or the access time per day or total time spent online per day, week or month can be limited.
This sort of facility is not only very helpful for parents but for educators, employers, or legislators. School management bodies can use it to guide their students on the Internet.

Employers can install it on their web proxy server instead of installing the software on all computers in the company to prevent employees surfing unnecessary web sites during the working hours. As well as the online control of access some parental controls make a report of all the accessed sites so that parents can view it later and add some sites to the black-list if they don't feel their children should be allowed to view it. Cyber Patrol web filter is a fine example among the hundreds of parental controls available today.
Parents who are interested in parental control software can consult www.netparents.com for more information.