[This is part three of The Tech Battle for Your Teen’s Heart series. Be sure read part one and part two.]
New technology, websites, apps, and gadgets are released every day where undiscerning teens might get themselves into trouble. In recognition that it often seems like an endless battle to stay current with the technology that your teens are probably using, here are some of the most effective ways to set up parental controls for your family.
Before we get too far, if you read the last article on parental controls, you’ll remember that I explained why I use Open DNS (gatekeeper) and Norton Family (filter/accountability) in my own home. Essentially, both are platform neutral, quick to update, and tamper resistant; and both of them offer free products as well as premium options. Because I’m recommending specific products here, I need to specifically mention that I have no financial stake in whether or not you choose to use these products. I’m simply saying that these are the ones that I use in my own home, and suggesting ways to use them effectively.
A determined teen who really wants to get around these products can still do it, but by using two products instead of just one or the other, you’ll make that a lot more difficult. Both of them offer detailed step-by-step instructions to set them up once you have signed up for them, so I won’t duplicate that information here. Instead, I’ll explain in detail why you need both products and how to make them “play nice” together. One thing you need to know, is that Open DNS lives on the router, and Norton Family lives on the devices connected to the router (see diagram).
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Recommended Settings for Open DNS
Open DNS, your gatekeeper, will live on your router at home. This is basically the front door between the internet and your home. All of your devices that connect to the internet connect through the router. The settings that you apply here will affect every person and every device in your home. Once you’ve signed up, Open DNS will offer you a list of categories of web content to automatically block from coming into your home at all. You can use either a custom selection of categories, or one of their predefined categories (low, medium, or high filtering). You can also use a “whitelist only” option that means only the specific websites that you add to the “whitelist” are allowed to be visited. I don’t recommend using the whitelist only option here because it effects everyone in the house, and it is a very heavy time demand to maintain a good whitelist.
Instead, I would recommend using a custom setting and blocking only those categories of web content that you don’t want anyone in your house exposed to. The categories that will keep sexual content out of your home are mostly obvious, but a there are a few that you wouldn’t necessarily know to include unless you were familiar with the terms. In addition to keeping sexual content out of your house, there are other categories labeled that will help to protect you from viruses and malware. The categories that I would recommend blocking altogether are: Academic Fraud, Adware, Adult Themes, Nudity, Parked Domains, Dating, Lingerie/Bikini, P2P/File sharing, Pornography, Portals, Proxy/Anonymizer, Sexuality, Typo Squatting, Visual Search Engines, and Web Spam. These are all of the categories that I would consider “black and white” as far as whether I want such content coming into my home.
A couple of counter-intuitive categories in Open DNS that I would specifically recommend not blocking are: Hate/Discrimination, and Tasteless. The reason is that even biblical Christian content is sometimes called hateful or tasteless because it promotes values contrary to popular culture. Christians should certainly be loving, tasteful people. Unfortunately, even when we are, the world may still see us as hateful or tasteless. Sadly, this means that a lot of Church content is blocked under these labels.
In my time trying to pick what software to use in my home, part of what made Open DNS appealing for me is that it was very hard to defeat. I have some pretty considerable techy skills, and even I couldn’t get around it without having the specific password to turn it off. So on that note, because it lives on your router, make sure that you change your router password from the factory default. Make sure that you don’t use a password that will be easily guessed by your kids.
As an additional option, Open DNS will keep a running log of all of the web domains accessed through your router. I recommend turning this option on, but this isn’t necessarily the first place you’ll look later to monitor the web content coming into your home. This product will work for gaming consoles (Xbox, PlayStation, Wii, etc.), it will also work for smart TV’s. But unfortunately the traffic logs don’t tell you which device accessed which websites.
Recommended Settings for Norton Family
Unfortunately, this product is not presently available for gaming consoles or smart TV’s, and I am unaware if Symantec has any plans to develop versions of the software for those devices. However, it does support Mac OS, Windows, smart phones and tablets. Before setting up this product, you’ll want to set up a unique user account on your main computer for each person in the family, unless everyone has their own computer.
One of the most powerful features (in my opinion) of this product is that it allows you to make specific settings for each supported device and person in the house. Norton offers you a similar list of categories to Open DNS to block or not to block for each person. However, you have more options here. You don’t have to block or not block categories. You have the option to allow with a warning, block, or monitor only. Personally, I recommend allow with a warning. While your teens are in your home, Open DNS is already doing the blocking work for you. So here you can check the option to allow with a warning on more categories than Open DNS is blocking. Alternatively, you can chose to block sites from particular categories and then allow specific sites with a warning, but then you run into the whitelist problem mentioned above. The software will email you a report either weekly or monthly with all of the warnings that were given.
You also have the option to “force” the “safe search” option to be used on all search engines. The intent behind this option is to allow your teens to search for what might be mature content for school or other valid purposes, but without the concern of pornographic or other offensive content showing up in the results. However, I found that this option causes some unexplainable bugs that prevent some perfectly fine websites from loading (like my bank). So I recommend leaving it turned off.
Last, you can turn on “time monitoring” for each teen. Unfortunately, this option is limited to computers, and does not apply to smartphones or tablets. This means that you still need to police the use of those devices in person. But I would still recommend turning this option on for the computers for a number of reasons that I’ll talk about in the next article.
Norton Family is the tool (much more so than Open DNS) that will allow you to start conversations with your teens about the ways that they use technology. In the next article I’ll offer some guideposts both for how to start those conversations, and how to keep them constructive.
[Image via Concept Draw and Andrew W. Rennie]
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