As Windows has matured over the years it has taken parental controls, privacy, child safety, and son on quite seriously. With the help of the Windows Settings menu, a user can now set up a child’s account and create a safe environment for their kids on the computer. For a very long time this involved third-party software and programs that had to be separately purchased.
In short, Windows 10 has parental controls and it is easy to implement/enable. At the same time, it has been mentioned in several forums that the in-built parental controls in Windows 10 has significant deficiencies and offer incomplete protection. This means, in other words, that there are relatively better options out there.
Apps for Your Child’s Online Safety
The most dangerous place for your kid is when they are connected online. So, it would be natural that parents want to find out the best parental apps in 2020. Using a parental control app for monitoring your kids means that you’re being a little more responsible and can sleep peacefully. It is not just about what sites your kids are visiting but also about what apps they are using, safety on social media is a big concern for today’s parents. Below are a few factors that must be considered when choosing the right app. And, you can check if Windows 10’s inbuilt parental controls offer better or worse.
- Web Filtering
This is the first and the most important factor to take into a conversation. If you are providing Wi-Fi or internet connection of any kind on the kind’s computer, you have to have something that monitors their online activity. It is manually not possible to sit beside them 24×7. Any decent web filtering will prevent the kids from accessing websites that can be dangerous or inappropriate for kids. Anything with obscene content like hate speech can be a big problem. Web filtering also tracks their history of sites visited, links clicked, searches made on Google, redirections, and so on.
- App Blocking
There are apps that prevent kids from installing and removing apps, enabling or disabling apps when the child lock is enabled. This is an important aspect such that kids do not try to malfunction the monitoring activities in the background or try to sneak in. For example, key-loggers can tell what sites they are visiting even if they route through proxies and VPNs which is a big thing for parents.
- In-App Purchases
When it comes to talking about app controls, digital currency is a big thing. Many parents enable games and apps on their phones and online playing platforms where purchasing items are possible. If they do not remove their billing activities or information, or if the child gets this information somehow, they can make in-app purchases and unknowingly or knowingly cause a lot of trouble for the parents. To prevent your kids from doing so, you can use such apps.
- Location Tracking
If you need something badly for your little kids knows where they are. With technology, it is possible to keep track and monitor your kids’ location at all times. Not all parents are equivalent to big business magnets of govt. officials where they can get a bodyguard or security surveillance round the clock. Just like tracking a missing phone, you can track the location of your kid accurately and in real-time. It is not about not trusting your kids but being responsible parents.
Thus, enabling parental controls means a lot of peace in the chaotic world where danger is lurking around incessantly. With the digital age, cyber crimes have increased which often turns into physical crimes as well. In the case of kids, this can be a big problem as it is easy to influence them for financial advantages and otherwise. For the best parental control apps, you can visit this (https://parentalcontrolnow.org/best-parental-control/apps/) site and learn more.
How to Enable Windows 10 Parental Controls?
Parental controls can be dealt with separately with the help of software to monitor usage on computer and web-monitoring which monitors activities online. Then, parental controls can also be enabled on individual apps, separately.
- Website controls and filtering rules can be set in the Microsoft’s browser only and do not work with other browsers like Firefox or Chrome.
- Because the “Block” setting can only be toggled ON or OFF, it cannot be customized for kids, of different ages and parents or adults.
- In web filtering, this method works only for a catalog of previously known websites and not the actual content. This is quite difficult even for proxies online and in colleges, so we can cut some slack.
NetNanny, for example, is a wonderful software that does a lot more than this. It offers accurate web filtering, device-wide protection, enhanced screen time controls, for apps specific limits as well, and protection across all devices from smartphones to computers. Once they are enabled in one, it works in all.
Protection Across Devices and Accounts
One poor thing that is left unmanaged by many programs is enabling protection on one device that doesn’t work on another. Sometimes, enabling protection on one account has to be replicated into other accounts. For creating a separate child’s account on a platform, you can set permissions. This is possible on Windows 10 too by creating a child’s account and then enabling or disabling permissions. In Linux, it is possible by creating a new account and enabling or disabling permissions to do stuff, even save content in the hard disk or download things.
In Windows 10, one parent has to have at least a single Microsoft Account. Then, they need to create an individual Microsoft Account for each child. Access to the device can be monitored using this account. The child’s email account will be used in this case. And, then administrator privileges are revoked. Third-party apps like NetNanny also work pretty much the same way except it does things a little better. Some web-filtering apps or plug-ins for browsers are simply superb and have no match.