This intentional targeting of children without parental consent eventually ended with Google and YouTube being fined a record $170 million.
YouTube, for instance, had a major problem with mass produced low-quality and disturbing content directed at children. While preventing kids from unintentionally stumbling into adult content on the internet is an obvious goal for any parental control software, kids today also have to contend with people actively targeting them when they get online.Īlthough there are malicious actors on the internet whose intent is to harm children, much of the disturbing content directed at kids is simply created to maximize ad revenue. It’s also hard to overstate their usefulness, especially for small children. It should be no surprise that tools for filtering and blocking inappropriate content are some of the most common types of parental controls. And if that tool can also manage social media accounts or screen time, that’s even better. Many web browsers and other apps have their own built-in parental control tools, but having one tool that can deal with all of them at once is much better than managing a dozen different programs.
#PARENTAL CONTROL AND INTERNET FILTERING SOFTWARE SOFTWARE#
Broad applicabilityĪnother important feature of parental control software is the ability to cover as many roles as possible. The best products give you the ability to blacklist or whitelist specific sites or content, while also providing more generalized tools to filter or supervise content based on keywords or categories. That’s just one example of how parental controls that have only one sliding scale are among the least useful for parents, but fortunately most modern software gives you much more customized control. In other words, the parental controls were useless. But it would block the more educational shows they liked. Unfortunately, the irritating cartoon my kids kept turning on was directed at the youngest age group, which meant that even turning on the maximum level of restrictions wouldn’t block the show. This gave parents a range of options, from blocking just adult content to only allowing content for small children. Netflix’s parental controls at the time allowed you to set an age limit to block inappropriate content. Unsurprisingly, I got tired of the screaming show pretty fast, and I decided to turn on some parental controls. When my kids started watching Netflix by themselves, they were into two shows: National Geographic documentaries and a low-budget cartoon that was basically just two irritating characters performing slapstick routines and screaming. Here’s an example of why that’s so important. Good parental controls are the ones that give the most actual control to parents. There are two things that all good parental controls have: What makes a good internet parental control?