In an attempt to put parents’ minds at ease throughout the Christmas period and to protect today’s youngest Internet users from online threats, Kaspersky Lab, on Thursday 7 December 2017, introduced what the company calls the next generation of its Kaspersky Safe Kids service. The new service will allow parents to block dangerous search requests on their children’s mobile devices, while kids can see how much time they have left to work on computers and ask their parents for more time remotely.
According to the company, Kaspersky Safe Kids helps to monitor the security of children in the real and virtual worlds. The solution notifies parents about the possible risky situations their children can fall into online, prevents various problems such as undesirable content from being accessed, and offers parents psychological advice if needed. Parents can decide what is safe for their children and adjust Kaspersky Safe Kids accordingly after installing the solution on their children’s smartphones and computers.
For example, without the distraction of school, parents can limit the amount of time their children can spend on devices – after this timeframe has elapsed, depending on the OS and the settings used, access to the device can be automatically blocked or the child will receive a corresponding notification. With the enhanced version of Kaspersky Safe Kids, children can see how much time allowance they have left on their computers and, if they want to, can request additional time right from the Safe Kids app. Depending on how festive they are feeling, parents can choose to either accept or reject this request through their personal cabinet in the My Kaspersky portal. With the new version of Kaspersky Safe Kids, parents can also see how much time their children have spent on devices through the “parental mode” of the Safe Kids application on their own smartphones or tablets, without having to visit the My Kaspersky portal.
According to Kaspersky Lab research, half of parents are afraid that their children will view inappropriate content online, and Kaspersky Safe Kids is able to block or warn children about potentially dangerous websites and apps. The Safe Search feature has been updated so that parents can hide certain content from their children’s search results on mobile devices, including adult websites, violent content, alcohol and tobacco-related websites and more. It means that, even if a child unwittingly enters such a request in a search engine, its results will be filtered out.
To make it easier to communicate with the solution, the new Kaspersky Safe Kids is now also armed with a tutorial feature on desktops and a trial mode in which parents can try premium features for free for a week. Among the premium features offered are “child location” (providing the ability to request a child’s location and establish location boundaries for specific times of day, including alerts if these boundaries are crossed by the child) and “social networks management” (where parents can receive detailed stats on their child’s public social media activity).
“Their inherently receptive minds mean that children are very vulnerable to threats and potentially traumatic content, which cyberspace is full of. Therefore, parental online protection today is a must and certainly shouldn’t be ignored, especially during school holidays. Kaspersky Lab’s mission is to save the world and to save everyone from online dangers, including the youngest Internet users. This is what Kaspersky Safe Kids was created for,” comments Andrei Mochola, Head of Consumer Business at Kaspersky Lab.
Edited by Dean Workman
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