Net Nanny Review
NetNanny is one of the older parental controls still on the market. They made their debut back in 2001 when the web was still a Dotcom paradise. The fact that they’ve survived in the parent controls market for almost 20 years speaks Encyclopedia volumes about Net Nanny’s value. Maybe it’s time to do a double-take? Let’s see what has given NetNanny value above its peers for all this time. It’s time to review NetNanny for 2019.
What makes NetNanny great?
NetNanny has a lot of great qualities. Yet, none of them come close to real-time location tracking.
When you log in to the NetNanny dashboard, you have the Family Overview Map at your fingertips. This blows all other parental controls that we’ve ever tried out of the water in this department. You can see in real-time every member of your family’s exact location. It moves in real-time to show you if your child has changed location. If they go to an area you’re unfamiliar with, you know in real-time to check in on them. Every parent who has learned this breathed a massive sigh of relief in unison.
It doesn’t stop there, though. NetNanny will also provide you with a location history report. Not only can you see where your child is, but you can also see where he or she was. This gives you a clear picture of every place your child frequents. You never need to wonder where their familiar haunts are. If something was to go wrong, you would have this location guide at your immediate disposal to start tracking your child down instantly.
Parents also love the Net Nanny remote access dashboard because it can help locate a child’s misplaced device.
The location tracking feature is available for both Android and Apple iOS devices.
Resources
Among all the parental control services, NetNanny has one of the most robust resource blogs. There is a ton of information on there that one could not have anticipated. On this blog, the NetNanny developers make their case for why screentime apps are good. They also breakdown for you the secret vaults and hidden places where a child’s phone system can hide things from parental supervision.
Probably the best available resource on the blog is the gut-level breakdown it gives. They let parents know what child predator behavior looks like and how their tools can combat it.
Yet, they don’t stop by pointing out the dark evils of the interwebs. NetNanny also helps give you tips for working with your child on healthy internet lives. Posts such as “Does Your Child Have Social Media Fomo?” come to mind first. This post was written by a family psychotherapist, Charlene Underhill Miller, Ph.D. In this post, she broke down the reasons why children become social media addictive and obsessed. It helps parents to empathize with their children while setting healthy boundaries.
For example, Dr. Miller shows us in her post that many children struggle with impulse control and establishing moderate habits. Setting social media time limits is a good way to train an instinctive moderation for their internet lives.
In today’s web craze, this is imperative to the life of a healthy child. Children as young as primary school-aged are bullied online. By monitoring their access to social media, parents are taking back the deciding vote in what kind of exposure their children can have from the world outside. The family should be their sanctuary. Bringing home the pain of cyberbullying and never being free from it or able to talk about it can be extremely psychologically damaging to a child.
Features and interface
NetNanny has the same basic layout as most parental controls. It can block pornography, profanity, and other sensitive content you wouldn’t want a young child to see.
Time limits
NetNanny comes with a feature that allows you to pause the internet for the whole family. Unplugging is good for forming interpersonal relationships between children and parents.
Alerts and reporting
The Net Nanny alerts and reporting are a bit unique to other apps. Net Nanny offers the Family Feed service. Family Feed keeps a complete record of your family’s web searches. It gives you an informed insight into what kinds of searches, conversations, or content your children are coming across. The system immediately alert flags things like suicidal, explicit, violent, and other inappropriate content.
Block apps/track apps
NetNanny will block apps from being used that you or the system deem harmful to the child. It will also offer you a full report of what apps are used by your children and when.
App Advisor
This one is unique to Net Nanny. App Advisor is a council service that matches parents within the NetNanny online community to apps that are child-friendly and recommended. It will also blacklist apps that are known to be harmful to children. Take a look.
In the above image, we see a recent “Dangerous apps for kids” report. At the top of that list is the VooVoo video call. Video call apps are hotspots for expositionary child predators. Others included are Down dating app, OmeTV, a chat app, Red Onion, which is a deep web browser, Omega Random Video Chat, which came from Omegle and connects the user to a random stranger for video call.
It doesn’t stop with a mere list ranking the dangerous apps though. No, hover over and click on any given one of these and the App Advisor gives you an in-depth breakdown of exactly why it deemed that app unfit for children.
In the above image, note the big red “Not Safe for Kids” button? This app didn’t even merit parental rating on a scale of 1-5 in child-friendliness. That’s because it’s safety was in the negative zone. Down was designed to connect local people looking for a date. This app is extremely dangerous for young children because it prompts Facebook and other outside source connections. It prompts for pictures and profiles and is overtly sexual. The app has a feature “Get Down” that allows the user to submit to causal hookups and “Get Date” that has the user searching for something more serious. This is a predator’s ballpark. AppAdvisor flags it instantly.
Net Nanny challenges you to be a better parent
You wouldn’t think a software application could do this, but it can. You’d best bet it can. Net Nanny will coach you through modeling exemplary online behavior to your child. The resource banks will help you through some of the most awkward and difficult conversations of parenthood, such as explaining to children what sexting is and how a child’s privacy could be permanently damaged if they engage in it. The Ph.D. consultants at Net Nanny help you break these things down into bite-sized packages that young children will listen to and take to heart. Their resources even coach you through schooling anxiety.
For these reasons alone, the app is useful. When you couple it with the profound, cultivated technology of a parental control service that’s been on the market since the web kicked off though? Stellar, to say the least.
Price points
Here is where we run into some downsides. As far as we could tell, Net Nanny doesn’t have a free trial period. This is more than made up for with the massive amount of free resources you can access from the home page.
You can buy a yearly NetNanny plan for PC and Mac for $39.99. The more common plan allows you to host 5 devices, spanning iOS, macOS, even Kindle Fire. It is $11 per year to add a new device to this plan. For a plan spanning 20 PC, Mac, and Mobile devices it’s $89.99/year. It is $5 to add another device to this plan. This plan is good for schools and businesses.
The Takeaway
We really can’t say enough good things about NetNanny. We could say more nice things, but then, we would be here all day. Above all, it is highly recommended.
