Parental Controls - Helping to Keep Your Computer Safe

Parental controls are critical in situations where children need protection from exposure to adult content, either from online websites, e-mail or from any other source. Unfortunately this happens to be most households these days, because broadband Internet connections are so prevalent, and children's access to household computers is unprecedented. We are all aware the great benefits that computers can bring to a child's education, and the Internet is an incredible source of information about the kinds of topics. Therefore it is almost assumed that children have access to a computer in order to do the homework they have been assigned.

And the situation doesn't look to be changing in the near future as our dependence on the Internet grows into so many areas of life. But as parents it falls to us to ensure that a child's online experience is not contaminated by the ingress of pornographic content into their online browsing activities. Clearly parental controls in the form of software utilities can be used to supply this critical function, and I will now discuss a couple of different types of parental controls.

Firstly one of the most common parental control types is known as the 'Internet filter'; this is a program that monitors the data coming in across an Internet connection, analyses that data in real time, and filters out any content that is not suitable for youthful users. The decision about what is appropriate and what is not must be made by the software, and this is performed in a number of different ways. For example, text analysis can detect suspicious strings of text in HTML documents, video files based on keywords etc., and block them accordingly. As well, image and video files of various formats can be scanned to determine if they contain images featuring nakedness or sexuality, and various types of Meta data can be checked to sort those that are inappropriate from standard family photos, for example. These processes can run in the background, or can be run overnight, or during periods of inactivity, so as not to interfere with normal usage of the computer.

Another common class of parental controls includes products like this one, which are commonly known as a 'porn detectors', and the mandate of this type of software is to seek out materials on a hard drive that may be considered adult or sexual in nature, for example image files or video files that contain sexual activity or nudity. This type of control is very useful for cleaning up a system whose history is unknown, or which may have been used inappropriate Internet usage, and therefore may contain unsuitable files. Detected files can then be sorted and deleted by an adult and the cleanliness of that system therefore can be confirmed.