Keeping Children Safe On the Internet (Part 1)
A good friend of mine told me a story not long ago. His 10-year-old daughter was doing a school report about baby chickens. Turning to the Internet for help with her report, she innocently typed “chicks” in the search engine. My friend was shocked when his daughter yelled, “what are all these naked ladies doing on the screen?”.
If you have kids on the Internet at your house, and especially young children, you need to know how easy it is for them to find inappropriate content & pictures. Just like my friend’s daughter, a child doesn’t even have to go looking for it, it will find them. Something as simple as an Internet search or misspelling a web address can expose your child to things even you wouldn’t look at.
I don’t believe that choosing to do nothing to protect children online is an option. The most important thing we can do as parents is to start talking and teaching our children about the good parts and the bad parts of the Internet while they’re young. Even if they’re older and know more about the computer than you, it’s never to late.
A really close second to communication is putting a web filter on your computer to filter out things like pornography, violence/hate/racism, illegal drugs, etc..
If your kids are a little older and you can afford it, I’d suggest you spend $39/yr for Net Nanny. PC Magazine awarded Net Nanny its Editors Choice Award in Feb 2008. Net Nanny can be configured differently for each user who logs into the computer. Also, besides just Internet content filtering Net Nanny includes Instant Message monitoring, time scheduling, remote management and some other neat bells and whistles.
If your kids are younger or you don’t want to spend the $39 for a yearly subscription I highly recommend a free Internet content filter called K9, which was created by BlueCoat. BlueCoat has been providing world class filtering products to fortune 500 companies for several years. They created K9 as a way to give back to the community.
I’ve been using K9 on our home computers for a couple of years and am extremely impressed with the quality of the filtering, the simplicity of the program, and that it doesn’t slow down your computer or internet searches. You can choose to block or just track up to 60 different categories of websites. And, you can set time limits on Internet use. You can’t modify the settings for different users, but as the Admin, you can easily make any necessary adjustments.
This is one area I don’t believe any parent should ignore so I’ve made a free 10-minute video that walks you step-by-step how to install and configure the free K9 web content filter.
It’s nice not having to worry if our 9-year-old daughter will see or read something inappropriate on the Internet. Don’t wait on this one. Get some “peace of mind” today!
Regards,
Bert
