It is quite certain nowadays that the Internet has become a very powerful tool which affects many aspects of our daily lives. Most of us probably cannot even remember the time how it was before the Internet (people had to meet and talk to each other – unthinkable!). There are many positive sides of the online world, such as common and equal access to knowledge and information. You can even say that the Internet is almost perfect instrument of democracy, because everyone there can voice their opinions about different matters. It is also a great platfom of communication, where people all around the world can interact and share their stories or pictures. But nothing is as bright as it seems at the first look. The online world is full of new kinds of criminals, like hackers or identity thieves, who learned how to use new technologies for their wrong purposes. There are also even more worrisome individuals, who should be especially terryfing for all of us who are parents and have young kids using the computer – pedophiles. They are like the spiders in the Web, and they learned perfectly how to use it to find new victims, for instance through the social media websites or chatrooms.

How can we protect ourselves?

In this moment we should raise a question – what can we do in order to keep our children safe when they are online? First of all, a good start would be to inform our kids about the dangers that might lurk in the Web. They should be aware not to talk with strangers or share their photos and private information on social media websites. We need to teach them about how to use privacy settings on such websites, so their data would be secured. Above all, it is really important to have frequent conversations with our children about their online activity. We can tell them that if they will enter websites with mature content, it will most probably download viruses on their computer and damage it. This last argument should be especially effective when our kids frequently play some video games. Furthermore to have even more control over the computer, we can place it in the common area like living room.

What else can be done?

Even if we still feel insecure after applying all measures mentioned above, we can think about installing some internet monitoring software. Programs like these offer a variety of interesting features. For instance, we are able to see entire activity, both online and offline that is going on our computer. Furthermore, we can create blacklists of suspicious websites or even filters on certain words, typing which in search engine wouldn’t produce any results. Finally, you can set time limits, during which the Internet would be accessible. The last one should be a big relieve for those parents, who are worried that their child is spending too much time before the screen, usually wasting it on online games.

Summary

As we can see, there are many positive and negative sides of the Internet, and we have plenty of options when we want to make sure that our children are safe online.

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PCWebControl is popular internet monitoring software, widely used in households along with various public institutions.