Back in the 1980s it was easier for parents to monitor what their kids were up to upon arriving from school. More often than not, they'd be on the sofa watching TV, or fiddling around with handheld consoles attached to big TV screens you can actually monitor (totally different from today’s portable video games).
With today's tech-savvy kids, the chances of you finding your children locked in their bedrooms spending hours online Googling heaven knows what is a reality you have to accept as Gospel truth: you can’t tell what today’s kids are up to on the net unless you keep them under tight surveillance. Now, pray tell, what parent has the time, money, or inclination to do that?
An inexhaustible source of both useful and throw-away information, the Internet has become many a parent's nightmare. Underage kids have never as easy an access to pornography as they do now, and protecting your children should be top priority every time they log on to the world wide web. Sure, homework requires research, but how to prevent them from veering away from school work straight into a porn star’s lair? The answer will fit right into the whole scheme of tech-savvy things: installing tailor-made software into your kids’ personal computers.
A newfangled software that aims to detect pornography promises to scan images as well as text, so you’re sure that not even the most lewd accounts of written porn can escape you. Integrating filtering and security technology, this spanking new software is actually derived from NASA projects that examine the flesh and curve tones of .GIFs or .JPEGs to determine if they are indeed unsuitable for minors.
For easier use, it’s made to be a plug-in device that guarantees a “90-95% accuracy” when it comes to safeguarding your kids’ online activities from contents with nudity, profanity, drugs, violence, hate crimes, and more. Given that kind of number, I think most parents would be willing to shell out a pretty penny once this beta-tested software comes out in the market, don’t you?
Also, and while you might find this hard to believe, plenty of adult sites and those of a violent nature actually team up with Internet groups that aim to protect children from accessing questionable contents online. Parents can merely click on the buttons on the splash pages of these sites, and further access to them will be blocked in the future.
Barring that (because your porn vocabulary might not be proficient enough to cover all the bases in this battle), you can always invest in a porn blocker. There are some models that cannot be tampered with, and actually necessitate a call to the manufacturer’s office to have the blocker removed. Some software go as far as recording chat room conversations (that hotbed of child predatory possibilities), and even installing password-protected time limits!
Whatever your choice of tool for the battle against inappropriate material online for your kids might be, bear in mind that you are not alone and that millions of parents and guardians seek the same goal. While there’s no real Holy Grail of Internet protection, growing awareness of the necessary “weapons” might just spell out all the difference of having a healthy online life for your kids.
