Software aims to shield children from dangers of mobile phones
Putting a mobile phone in the hands of teens and preteens can yield mixed results. On the plus side, parents and children can keep in better contact. On the minus side, everyone else can, too.
As phones get smarter, parents also need to be smarter. One way to help avoid mobile technology's dark side is to use software to monitor your children's mobile-phone activities.
SMobile Systems (www.smobilesystems.com) offers software that helps reduce the cyberrisks many youngsters face, such as sexting, cyberbullying and cyberpredators.
"The technology isn't hidden on the device," SMobile Systems President and CEO Neil Book said. "It's not to be confused with spying software. The application sits on the phone and the child sees it and knows when it's running."
He said Security Shield with parental controls and monitoring software costs $30 a year to license.
"It essentially allows the parent to monitor mobile activities of the child," Book said. "The parent can decide what makes sense. They can enable everything, or just part of the features.
"With 11- or 12-year old children you may want to monitor everything," he added. "With 16- or 17-year-olds you may say 'your pictures are your pictures' but you may want to enable GPS technology to know where they are."
The software works on most smart phones, including BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Android-based handsets. It doesn't work yet on the Apple iPhone.
Security Shield features include monitoring inbound and outbound text and e-mail messages and photos, GPS location, contact lists and the ability to view and delete apps on the phone. Parents can receive text or e-mail alerts when questionable material appears on a child's phone.
Phones running the application can be remotely locked or unlocked and all content on the phone can be erased if the phone is lost or stolen. Data can be restored from the remote backup feature.
"Parents can log into a (monitoring) console from anywhere to see what's happening at all times," Book said. "We are very aware how the mobile phone has become a gateway for predators. We can notify a parent if we see someone sending inappropriate content.
"Parents can set up keyword alerts. For example, 'party.' Every time it comes up, they can be notified."
Some parents seem to like the system. Book said his call center heard from a grateful mother of a 14-year-old girl.
"(The mother) thanked us because she learned her daughter was in a relationship with a 30-year-old man," Book said. "The daughter assured her the relationship was over, but she put the software on the daughter's phone she realized they were still communicating and immediately put a stop to it."
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