Child Safety on the Internet

The internet is a dangerous place...we know that. We have all seen the fear mongering media show us the child predators that they catch in stings in different places. The sad part is, as much as I detest the media and it's motives and tactics, this is true. There are lots of predators there that don't get caught as well.

They sit in chat rooms of all sorts of web sites, and the explosion of social networking sites like MySpace and the various MySpace clones have made it that much easier for people to get in contact with your kids. Kids are, by nature trusting people. They can easily be talked in to giving out personal information that could easily put them, and their whole family, at risk.

Fortunately, there are also a lot of companies out there looking to make the internet a safer place for children, as well as putting more control in the hands of parents to see what their children are doing online. A lot of this software just logs activity of chatrooms, instant messengers, email, surfing and anything else your kid can do online.

There are lots of options out there for parents to use. Net Nanny and Cybersitter are two of the biggest names in the business for commercial software vendors. Their applications have steadily grown to be incredibly robust as the technology of global communication has grown. They monitor many types of activity on the computer and parents can look through the logs at will, or in some cases stop the activity altogether on the spot if the filters pick up potentially sensitive information being given.

I have actually personally known a couple of parents that have used these, in addition to all the reviews I have seen, and the parents I know that have used them say they are spectacular. The information they log and the activity they can detect, the power of filtering and more. Some will actually limit specified accounts on the computer to only be able to get on the internet in certain times of the day as well, which is very cool.

Give them a try, and one thing to keep in mind, it's not your kids that may be looking for trouble, even the best kid can make a mistake, kids are supposed to make mistakes, that's how they learn, but trouble is looking for them. In today's world, you just can't be too safe.

Face it, it sometimes just isn't realistic to watch 100% of a kids activities as hard as we may try, so services like this help.