This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Review • If you have kids with their own cell phones, then you must know there are downsides to letting them have one.
Keeping in touch with our kids — especially in emergencies — certainly is a reason we give them a phone. But smartphones have web browsers, and parents know that the web is a portal to things that kids are not prepared to see.
Yet policing what your children view on their phone through the web can be difficult. But a Salt Lake County company, Content Watch, has an answer.
They are the makers of Net Nanny, filtering software for desktop computers that blocks unwanted graphic content while surfing the web. The company has now introduced that same software for mobile phones. The Net Nanny app, which is now only available for Android handsets (an iPhone version is coming), can be purchased through the product's website at www.netnanny.com for $19.99 per year. That price seems steep for a mobile phone app, but you can download a 14-day free trial to see if it works for you.
You install the app through the website, not the Android Market. It also asks you to register with the site and set up a login and password, which you use to access the settings for the app.
That means to adjust Net Nanny the way you want it to work, you have to access the preferences through the web, not the app, which can be annoying if you're using Nett Nanny for yourself and can't make adjustments directly from the phone. It makes sense, though, if you're using it for someone else and you don't want them to tinker with the settings.
The app is, in fact, a web browser that locks out the phone's current browser. The only downside with using it as a browser was that it seemed to be a bit slower than the phone's regular browser (for this review, I was using it on a Samsung Galaxy S II phone).
Net Nanny is deep with customization options — and in fact, it can be somewhat daunting. You can first choose settings based on ages, from adult to children, and you then can go into more detailed options in which you have 18 categories of content to block. Unfortunately, the app sets the options to "adult" by default, which means if a parent is getting this for his or her child, the settings will initially have to be changed.
The customizable categories range from pornography and "provocative" images to violence, gore and profanity. But the list of categories also includes a couple of odd additions, namely "anime," or Japanese animation, and "abortion," the blocking of "information, for or against, the abortion of a pregnancy."
There's plenty of children's anime that shouldn't be blocked, and the inclusion of abortion information seems more like a political decision than a content-based one. Why, for example, did they not include information about capitol punishment?
The app seemed to work well, blocking out images and websites based on the categories. When you try to access a site that's blocked, a message comes up with a description why it was stopped. But there was a nude picture or two through Google images that got through, namely because those pictures were not tagged with words that accurately described them.
Perhaps best of all, the app also logs the phone's web activity and can give you a report of how many times it has blocked a site and for what reason. It also lists the sites that the user tried to go to but was blocked.
Net Nanny certainly isn't the ultimate solution to police your kids from accessing objectionable material through their phones — talking with them and building a level of trust is better in the long term — but as a tool to help parents, it might be worth a download despite its heavy price.
vince@sltrib.com
Twitter: @ohmytech
Google+: +Vincent Horiuchi —
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