WORTH IT?
Monitoring Kids' Cellphone Activity
By JONNELLE MARTE and LAUREN GOODE MARCH 26, 2010
Does your child or teenager's cellphone appear to be an extra appendage? Do his or her thumbs fly over the qwerty keypad or touchscreen the way a concert pianist's fingers fly over keys? Is her language now filled with text acronyms gleaned from text messaging? OMG, you're not alone.
According to a recent report from the Kaiser Family Foundation, two-thirds of all kids ages 8 to 18 have their own cell phone. But few of those youngsters' parents have imposed rules on their cellphone usage, according to the same study.
As ever more children and teens carry cellphones, some parents may opt for mobile monitoring software. But as Jonnelle Marte and Lauren Goode find, one provider, Net Nanny Mobile, has some changes to make before parents can sleep a little easier at night.
So, something like Net Nanny Mobile, a tracking service that aims to help parents remotely monitor their kids' mobile phone activity, might have broad appeal.
Users must download a software application directly onto their child's phone, and it tracks texts, emails, photos and phone calls, reporting that activity to an online dashboard at Net Nanny's Web site. Net Nanny Mobile also allows mom and dad to remotely lock handsets, wipe out data and track a phone's GPS location - all for a $29 annual subscription fee.
Net Nanny Mobile currently doesn't work on the iPhone but it is compatible with a large variety of smart-phones and operating systems, including BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian (Series 60) and Google Android.
The service sends alerts to an online dashboard where parents can log in and view emails, texts, photos and a record of calls sent and received by the phone. They can also use the dashboard to view the phone's contacts, GPS updates and to send commands, such as locking the phone in case it gets stolen.
Parents who don't want to see every last text can instead set up keyword alerts for terms like "beer," and the software filters out messages with only those terms. (Net Nanny Mobile also emails parents when one of those terms appears in their kids' communications.)
We decided that for testing purposes, Jonnelle would play the protective parent; Lauren, acting as turbulent teenager, gamely agreed to have her BlackBerry activities monitored for a week or so.
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