Page 218 - Resources and Support for the Online Educator

Tools for Parents • Chapter 8

Tracking and Spying Programs

In addition to filters that extend out of the home like Circle Go, there is a
growing trend in services that allow you to track and monitor your kids’
accounts and devices. These tracking programs walk a fine line between giving
your kids some of their own space to learn and grow and spying on their every
move. Key logger programs do much of the same things on computers where
you can see transcripts of every keystroke made on a laptop or desktop. This
could be useful to prompt a conversation, but you also run a risk as a parent of
losing trust and communication with your child.

The filter market is flooded with many different options, and some now extend
to mobile devices. As these change so frequently, I won’t spend a lot of time
going over them, but what follows are a few that I’ve discovered or that fami-
lies have used in the past that seem to do a fair job of protecting kids from
inappropriate content.

Of the multitude of tracking programs out there, TeenSafe (www.teensafe.
com) seems to be the most popular, with already over a half a million users
as of summer of 2016. TeenSafe allows parents to monitor kids’ social media
accounts, their text messages, and who they are on the phone with, and also
track their location. All of this comes at a cost of $14.95 per month and the
additional risk that your child may feel there is a lack of trust between you.

Other Paid Services
Net Nanny, McAfee, and K9 web protection each offer different feature sets at
a yearly or monthly price. Net Nanny (netnanny.com) seems to be the favorite
of communities and ratings systems, as it’s specifically geared toward parental
controls and filtering on children’s devices. Combining the services of Net
Nanny or OpenDNS with the built-in website restrictions of iOS, and you’d
have a pretty powerful combination protecting your kids.

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