Parental Controls - Overview

Overview

Several techniques exist aimed at creating parental controls for blocking websites. Add-on parental control software may monitor API in order to observe applications such as a web browser or Internet chat application and to intervene according to certain criteria, such as a match in a database of banned words. Virtually all parental control software includes a password or other form of authentication to prevent unauthorised users from disabling it.

Techniques involving a proxy server are also used. A web browser is set to send requests for web content to the proxy server rather than directly to the web server intended. The proxy server then fetches the web page from the web server on the web browser's behalf and passes on the content to the browser. Proxy servers can inspect the data being sent and received and intervene depending on various criteria relating to content of the page or the URL being requested, for example, using a database of banned words or banned URLs. The proxy method's major disadvantage is that it requires that the client application to be configured to utilize the proxy, and if it is possible for the user to reconfigure applications to access the Internet directly rather than going through the proxy then this control is easily bypassed. Proxy servers themselves may be used to circumvent parental controls. There are other techniques used to bypass parental controls.

Computer usage management method, unlike content filters, is focused on empowering the parents to balance the computing environment for children by regulating gaming. The main idea of these applications is to allow parents to enforce learning component into the computing time of children, where children must earn gaming time while working through educational contents.