NEWS

Make use of parental control tools

At the beginning of July, the SIP-Bench II project, of which COFACE is a board member, published its 4th cycle report on the benchmarking of parental control tools.

Parental control tools are key for parents and their digital parenting exercise. They can help keeping children safe online, promote a healthy life balance by restraining time spend on the computer and other devices and encourage an active dialogue between parents and children regarding their online activities and their use of ICTs in general.

The report found that little progress has been made since the last report regarding parental control tools for both computers and game consoles. The features and functionalities of the tools stays the same with changes made to the usability, layout and design of the tools to make them more (or less) user friendly.

The "revolution" right now concerns mobile phones where parental control tools are still in the early development stages.

Parental control tools have three main features: web content filtering, blocking usage and monitoring. As regards web content filtering, the effectiveness is best with adult content but filters struggle a lot when it comes to web 2.0 (social networks for instance) or blogs. Some tools score so low on web filtering that they nearly filter pages randomly.

With the blocking function, most tools can disable or limit the use of applications or the device as a whole. Still, there remain many ways to bypass blocking so parents need to beware that blocking is far from being sufficient.

Finally, as regards monitoring, most tools offer the possibility to monitor activities of children but the clarity of the reports and the customisation of the reports need further improvements. It is important for parents to cautiously select what they wish to monitor to avoid becoming a "big brother" for their child and especially for their teenager.

Finally, the global ranking list of parental control tools shows that free tools can be just as effective as commercial tools, which can reassure parents with a limited budget.

COFACE encourages all parents to make use of parental control tools, especially in order to establish a dialogue with their children about responsible use of the internet and ICTs.