Family monitoring software recommendation?

“You agree not to willfully post any copyrighted or illegal material to Fluther.” – Fluther Terms and Conditions

I post that because, given the potential for abuse of such software, I feel an ethical duty to not answer, and advise others against answering. While this may be asked with honest good intentions, I cannot be sure that others who read this thread are also pure of heart, nor do I want to give tech advice to stalkers, “black hat” hackers, and other ne’er-do-wells.

In other words, I do not wish to risk accidentally facilitating the commission of illegal acts. Such software has been abused by others in the past means that even legitimate use of such software may run afoul of certain (vaguely written) privacy laws even if it’s a parent “monitoring” their own child. Call it bad people ruining a good thing, but that’s the way it is.

Also, most such software can be circumvented one way or another anyways once it’s presence is noticed, and the “bad sites” filter is technically impossible until we can make an AI that can approach humanity in it’s discretion. Those filters tend to be…. unreliable at best, and are more likely to block legitimate sites than pornographic ones. The best way to keep kids off of those sites is to raise them in a way that makes them not want to go there in the first place. Therefore, even without the legal encumbrances, I question how good many of the commercially available programs are.

You’re better off monitoring your kids’ computer usage yourself rather than relying on some software program to do it for you. At best the only thing you’re going to get from the software is a false sense of comfort. The kids (who, honestly, are probably more computer savvy than you) will probably be able to figure out a way around the software and it’ll just block a lot of legit sites while missing a lot of the “bad” sites anyway.

I would invest in a good router. From there you can get pretty fine grained control. Like you can block Facebook per device during certain hours or block any site that contains keywords. This isn’t ideal but it might be best.

I had to babysit my sisters twins last week and they are grounded from the phone for the month since they got dragged home by the pigs for drinking at their schools playground at 4AM.

But they needed to use the Internet and I was able to make sure they were only able to use the sites they needed for school with a computer I specifically allowed.

Ideally I wouldn’t have had to do this but them are the breaks.

@johnpowell Even my fairly basic Netgear can do the time thing. Who says the guest network and main network have to have the same settings?

As for the keywords, that is unreliable at best, and also generally not part of the router, but rather HOSTS file… but anyone who needs to ask a question like this probably shouldn’t be messing around with system files in Notepad.