How to Child-Proof Your Computer

Computers are now becoming the focal point of most households in Australia, so much so that on average Australians now spend more time in front of computers than watching TV. Household computers are used for shopping, banking and communications therefore contain very important and private date. This data used incorrectly by children can open your household and privacy to the world and could cause plenty of headache. This is why it is important to install software on the home computer to protect yourself and your kids.These applications let you take complete control of the computer to protect your youngest kids from online dangers—while also protecting your important files from your kids as they learn about computers.

Big-kid parental control systems like Net Nanny 6.0, OnlineFamily.Norton and Safe Eyes 5.0 assume yours kids have full access to the programs and data on your computer. They impose limitations on top of this full access to keep the kids out of trouble. Kids can’t visit porn sites, can’t play computer after midnight, can’t launch Quicken, can’t chat online with perverts, and so on. These products aren’t necessarily appropriate for the smallest computer users. A kid-friendly total environment like Hoopah Kidview Computer Explorer 6, KidZui 5.0, or Peanut Butter PC 3.0 protects your programs and files while allowing tech-toddlers a reasonable amount of freedom to play and learn on the computer.

KidZui lets kids visit over two million Web sites that have been checked and approved by experts. Hoopah does a better job of providing sites appropriate to each kid’s age—it even changes its interface as kids get older—but its collection is much, much smaller. Peanut Butter PC offers an online list online of kid-friendly sites but you, the parent, must pick and choose which sites your kids can visit. Kids over a certain age get content-filtered full Internet access in Hoopah; all sites are allowed except those blocked by the built-in content filter.

Parents using Peanut Butter PC or Hoopah can let kids run specific programs from outside the protected environment, but this ability comes with its own dangers. Putting a browser on the permitted list can give the kids unlimited Internet access. Also, if you add any program that uses a standard file-open dialog it’s possible (though unlikely) that the kids could completely break out of the protected environment. KidZui sidesteps this problem by including tons of games and Web sites within the protected environment but forbidding any outside programs.

In Hoopah and KidZui youngsters enjoy limited communication with friends. Hoopah users can receive e-mail from a parent-defined list of senders and can send pre-defined e-cards. KidZui users can “friend” other users, see how others have tagged content items, and send interesting sites, videos, or photos to their friends. There’s no personal information transmitted, just a pointer to the item of interest.

These products are great for parents who want to let toddlers use the computer “just like mommy and daddy”, but most kids will chafe at the restricted environment once they reach school age. At that point, consider moving up to one of the more traditional parental control solutions—Safe Eyes and Net Nanny both have significant updates coming soon.