Do Mobiles Need Parental Controls?
In writing for another blog, I came across an article about how South Koreans are concerned their kids are spending too much time on the Internet via their phone. They are looking to buy phones without Internet access to curb this. Apparently, in South Korea, this is hard.
I’d say it’s hard in most developed countries. As more and more of our handsets get more and more powerful–and more and more connected–the issue of what happens when these devices are in the hands of children is very relevant.
How does the handset know it’s in the hands of a child? How does the handset restrict or prevent access to material that you as the parent find objectionable? Who decides what’s objectionable in the first place? Content issues aside, what about preventing the device from being overused for phone calls or text messages?
I don’t have any answers as to what the best approach is here. You can be certain I will be watching these developments closely as I have a couple of kids of my own that will be toting mobile phones soon enough. If you have any thoughts on this, share them in the comments!
Personally I think they do need parental controls. My 2 boys are both very young so they won’t be having phones for a while but I think we need…
1. The ability to limit the number of SMS’s / Phone calls (But also not have limits on some like calling the parents, emergency services, etc)
2. Have an option to have a white list of who can be called, SMS and a black list if you just want to block a few numbers.
3. Internet white and black lists.
The phone would require a PIN number each time something that was blocked was attempted so it isn’t completely impossible.
I don’t think this would be too hard to implement.
Then in the longer term maybe phones might have multiple users so you can login and get your own SMS box, contacts, e-mail, parental control settings, etc. Sure phones are normally for one person but on occasions I’m sure they get handed over or shared for a short while. Have a service like Apple do (.Mac) to store contacts, bookmarks, parental controls, etc on the Internet which can then be downloaded to other phones that you logon. (S60 of course).
Finally once you have that, have the ability for the parents to either logon to a website or do it on their phone to modify the kids parental controls, monitor their call useage, etc remotely. So you’d need to setup a secure link between any phones before this would be possible so you couldn’t just monitor random phones.
As phones become more computer like, they’ll need more complex computer like features like these. I don’t expect to see them anytime soon but I also think it’s only a matter of time until we do.
Maybe this is one for the ‘application wishlis’! It seems it would be simple to do, a bit like having different users on on a PC. The admin user could set feature sets available to different users and the user would enter their password when the phone starts.
It might also be one for the network operators, Virgin in Australia has a service where you can bar numbers to call at certain times. The example Virgin gives: if i’m going out on the booze for the night i can call Virgin and ban the ex girlfriends number so i cant call her and make the mistakes again! By 7am or so the number is available to call again.
There are certainly some opportunities all around here. This will be an interesting space to watch over the next few years. Keep the ideas coming, and I like the idea of adding this to the Wishlist.
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