Chapter 15. Parental Controls

We have seen how easy it is for a hacker, a company, or a government to invade your privacy. You can take many steps to protect your information and your computer. What about protecting others in your household? If you are running a home network or even just have one machine that everyone shares, you really need to be concerned about who is using the Internet. If others in your house can compromise your information by modifying your computer and protection methods, you might as well have no protections in place. Your kids can be particularly dangerous to your home connectivity through inadvertent changes they make or threats to themselves by how they use the Internet.

Kids use the Internet for various reasons, including doing homework, e-mailing friends, chatting with friends and teachers, and playing games. With all this Internet activity, you should know by now that a danger to children exists. Their Internet usage is valuable to marketing companies, they can be targets of hackers, and more importantly, they can be targets of cyber stalkers. The Internet has brought forth new challenges for parents in protecting their children.

In many cases, children know more about computer usage than their parents. How are you going to protect them when they probably understand Internet surfing better than you do? You do not know everything about drugs and alcohol, but you know that your children need protection from them. The same holds true for the online environment.

Although the benefits of being online are numerous, all the features we described in protecting your privacy and being anonymous can be used for evil purposes. If someone in a chat room is trying to lure a child into meeting him, the anonymous mechanisms we discussed can be used to hide the stalker's identity and make it hard to track him down. Online access can be used in many inappropriate ways when it comes to children. You must understand that different levels of protection might be needed to protect your child's Internet access.

We have discussed all the threats you face in the online world. Your kids face the same threats plus another—you! Yes, you, too, can become a threat to your children's privacy. A fine line exists between protecting their access and invading their privacy. How much privacy you think your children need is completely subjective. We will not attempt to tell you how much control over them you should have. The security measures we will talk about are subjective. The final decisions are yours.

The following are what you should hope to accomplish as a parent when it comes to the online security of your children:

• Understand how to prevent access to inappropriate materials.

• Define online guidelines for your kids to follow.

• Know who your kids are communicating with online.

• Know how your kids are using the Internet.

• Understand what kind of parental controls are available to you.

• Know how and when to let your kids use the Internet at home.

• Monitor online usage.

• Educate children in the dangers of various tools available in the online world.