How To Keep Your Tech Secure For Kids
Let’s face it, tech has made our lives much easier and more entertaining. Kids these days don’t realize how good they have it with all of the fantastic entertainment and gadgets available to them.
But when you have kids in the home, you need to think about when they are able to use tech in order to keep them safe, improve their lives and ensure that they aren’t accessing anything that they shouldn’t be.
Safety
If your kids have tablets, phones, laptops or access to streaming services, then unless you’re monitoring them all of the time, you may not know which sites they are visiting and which content they are watching.
Activate Parental Controls On Streaming Services
All of the major streaming platforms allow you to create profiles where you can indicate if a child will be watching so that they don’t show content that isn’t suitable for that child. You don’t want them accidentally watching horror movies or serial killer documentaries when you left them sitting happily watching cartoons.
If you know how to change region on Netflix to get a greater selection of content, be sure to enable the child settings for the account.
As well as creating separate logins for children’s content, lock down the other accounts with a pin, which means that they can’t accidentally stumble into your profile while pressing buttons.
Use Child Trackers Cautiously
Knowing where your child is gives you peace of mind. When they’re a little older, they’ll probably have a phone that you can use to contact them or track them if you need to. But some parents want the ability to be able to find younger kids if they wander off. For this reason, there are a lot of child trackers on the market. They are usually things that can be placed in children’s clothing or a type of watch or bracelet.
When using these, be sure that you’re buying a model from a reputable company that has good security in place. Secure the app with a strong password and also make sure the phone that the app is on is secured too. This means that other people won’t be able to access the location of your child.
Lockdown Internet Access
The internet can be an amazing place to learn, catch up with friends and be entertained. But it is also filled with content you would never want your children to see.
There are a number of ways to make sure that kids aren’t accessing web pages that they shouldn’t. You can do this from the browser level, where you tell the browser what type of content and websites you want to block. These are good first steps but aren’t foolproof.
Install a third-party program that can control all aspects of your child’s computer activity. Some of the more sophisticated ones even have an AI component that can alert you to potential activity it thinks might be unsuitable.
Secure Your Financial Data
Kids cost you money, but you don’t want them accessing your card details through tech, either accidentally or otherwise. The internet is filled with stories of kids who have managed to spend thousands of dollars by pressing buttons on a streaming service to buy movies, or purchasing additional content in ‘free games’.
In the quest to make buying things much easier, you can purchase things at the click of a button. Though it might mean adding a few more clicks to the process, protect your bank balance by adding pin confirmation or two-factor authentication to your accounts. This means that you will get a text or email that you will need to confirm your purchase.
Secure Your Child’s Data On Your Own Devices
Most families have a lot of sensitive data on their phones and laptops. It might include videos and pictures of your kids and schedules of where they will be and when. Basically, it’s full of info that you don’t want other people to have. That’s why you need to take steps to protect it.
On a basic level, you should be using good passwords that are hard to guess and aren’t used anywhere else. Make sure phones and laptops are protected with pins and passwords.
Back up any data, you need on a regular basis and if your phone or laptop is lost or stolen, have the ability to wipe the data remotely so that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.
Like anything in your child’s life, you need to make sure that you make it as safe and secure as possible for them, so they can enjoy using it without any ill effects.
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