Smart control for smart kids

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Our kids should surpass us in every way: talent, looks, happiness, intelligence. But children seem to get too smart too quick these days, and they can end up giving their parents the runaround in the most innocent yet cunning ways. Today’s fifth graders know very well what their parents are hiding from them, how to open locked doors, and where to find forbidden fruit online.

To stop inherently curious kids from venturing off the trail online, we have parental control applications, such as Kaspersky Safe Kids. In theory, these programs restrict access to apps and websites that, according to parents, are not appropriate for kids’ consumption. But in practice, children quickly learn to bypass such restrictions or even use them for their own purposes.

If you see that your child has bypassed your parental controls, your initial reaction may well be overwhelming pride — what a brain! But it’s clearly a problem, and the solution isn’t immediately obvious. Never fear: We’ve updated Kaspersky Safe Kids to tackle three typical problems that parents of overly savvy kids might face.

The buck stops at Wikipedia

Kaspersky Safe Kids has always had an option to restrict access to websites with particular types of content. It is quite typical for parents not to want their youngsters to peruse adult content, read forums about weapons, or obtain information about certain other topics. But classifying all websites on the Internet is fundamentally impossible — they appear faster than we can squeeze them into categories.

So, crafty kids have always been able to find what they wanted on some obscure sites that we had not yet managed to add to our lists. But no more. We have implemented the Block all websites feature, which (as the name suggests) blocks access to all sites except those that parents manually add to the list of exclusions. So, say, Wikipedia, NASA.gov, and other potentially useful tools can go in this list, and children’s access to all other sites is safely blocked.

The option is disabled by default. If you turn it on, all sites, except those you’ve added to the white list, are effectively blacklisted, thus preventing children from viewing them. The feature is currently available only in Windows, but will soon appear also in Kaspersky Safe Kids apps for Android and iOS.

How to keep access to your favorite applications

“Mom, I was at Tony’s house! Yes, till 10 p.m. No, I couldn’t call or text. You blocked all the apps yourself, and told me not to call ’cause you had important meetings. So I didn’t call.” To many users of Kaspersky Safe Kids, such excuses may sound familiar. The application has a function that allows you to block access to all applications except the phone – which is handy, but, as it turned out, not sufficient.

Messengers have invaded our lives to such an extent that it is often easier to use them to contact your kid than to call, for a variety of reasons. As a result, many parents requested a feature that would let them create a white list of applications that includes more than the phone itself, and to block everything else. We listened and added such a function to the new version of Kaspersky Safe Kids. Now it is possible to whitelist useful applications and block all the rest during a certain period of time (say, 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Monday to Friday). In other words, you can ban games from the classroom but allow anytime use of electronic dictionaries and the messenger you use to keep in touch.

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