Parental control: is something better than nothing?

• Posted by pcwrt
• in Parental Control, Technology
• on April 24, 2015
• No Comments.

When it comes to parental control software, something is not always better than nothing. If your kids won’t actively seek to break out of your content filtering “jail” and won’t try to stay on the Internet throughout the night, then you need nothing more than the free OpenDNS service. Otherwise, you probably need something beyond that. If you decided that you need extra software or tools, it’s of great importance to make sure that the software or tools actually work.

There are several possible downsides if your software does not work properly:

• Money wasted on something that does not work.
• Time wasted on setting the thing up.
• False sense of safety.
• Security risks brought by your kid’s efforts to jail break.

One of the most common ways to bypass parental control filtering is using anonymous, open proxies. Just google “proxy server list” to find the URLs and IP addresses. If proxies are not blocked, parental control filtering can be bypassed entirely. Further, it may put your children at greater risks of identity theft and malicious activity. Because all browsing activities are routed through a proxy server, personal information may be collected by the unknown party who provided the proxy service. Man in the middle attack may also be used to trick the kids into thinking that they are on a reputable website when they are actually routed to a malicious one. In worst case, inappropriately written software might be a security risk in itself.

There are many ways to bypass parental control. If your software can be bypassed easily, something is worse than nothing. Kids try to find the ways to break out of the jail on Google or Youtube. So should you.