Internet Safety: How to Watch Over Your Kids while You are Away
The most ideal way to watch over your kids is to sit beside them every time they use the internet. But this is simply impossible. So to make sure that your kids are kept from bad websites and other internet-based threats while you are away, here are the things you can do:
1. Keep your kids’ computer account “limited”. This will allow you (administrator) to limit your kids’ activity the way you want it like automatically blocking downloads;
2. Review recently visited websites from the web browser’s history. If you want to know your kids’ web visits while you were away, you can access it through the web browser’s history. Click CTRL H or open the history button of the web browser to see the recently visited webpages.
3. Open the temporary internet files from the internet options folder. This can be accessed either from your web browser or from your My Computer folder. It allows you to see images, pages visited, and files downloaded by your kids. It is important to maintain the automatic saving of temporary internet files enabled to continuously see what your kids have visited and viewed.
4. Setup firewalls. Firewalls limit the access of your kids the way you want. It blocks access to some sites and blocks entry of unwanted files from your computer.
5. Utilize web filtering services. Web filtering software enables you to block the sites you don’t want your kids to access.
6. Block the sites you don’t want your kids to access. Do this by adding the URLs of the websites you want to block in Windows’ “Hosts” file. You can find the Windows’ “Hosts” file in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc folder of your My Computer. Open it with the “notepad” and add the websites you want to by at the lowermost portion of the text, below 127.0.0.1 localhost.
Your edited portion will look like this:
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 www.blocksite.com
and so on…
Save it and the sites you have entered are automatically inaccessible.
7. Use web monitoring software. This will secretly monitor the activity from your computer while you are away. It allows you to log in to your kids’ chat conversation, opened and printed files, opened and closed application, website visits, sent and received email, and internet connections.
All these aim to either know the websites that your kids visited or keep bad internet contents inaccessible to them; and aren’t designed to act as replacements for your actual guidance.