Predators, Prey and Parental Controls: How to Protect Children Online

The internet is on fire with scams and data piracy. There are also darker forms of exploitation that target the most vulnerable. With the burst of child-centered online content and presence, comes a few risks.

Letting your child navigate the dicey waters of the internet can be a bit intimidating for any parent. As well it should be. Children are more vulnerable online than you may realize. Yet, it isn’t totally out of the question to allow your child internet privileges. If you know the innovation behind parental controls, finding an option to protect your child’s safety online will be easy. Then, you can allow them to enjoy internet games and media without having to worry about them.

Who exploits children online?

The objective is to deeply understand the type of person who would prey on a child online. That way, you know what existing innovation you should choose to take the power away from this profile individual. You have to be practical and apply your budget in ways that will count. Knowing who would want to prey on your child’s internet privacy is a certain way to take back the control.

The criminal profile of child predator cybercriminals 

The profile for child exploitation in cyberspace will vary depending on the virtual-social environment. Environments include the following:

Sextortionists 

Sextortion is the act of extortion where sex and sexual blackmail is the bribe rather than ransom money. Children are more vulnerable to these types of crimes for the reason that children are more naturally trusting of people, especially older adults, and may seek online friendships with less discretion. With sextortion, there is commonly previous contact or a temporary web-based relationship before the extortion begins.

Data pirates

Data piracy is one of the most common crimes in cyberspace. Data is valuable to sell even without any financial exploitation of the victim. Young children are especially vulnerable to data attacks because they are still learning basic internet literacy and safety.

Challenges and games creators 

Cultic games often have their origins online. These challenges are created by older children or adults posing as child influencers. The rules of the game can influence children to trade credentials or sensitive information. This or these games can put the child at risk of serious injury.

Web cult evangelists 

Sometimes religions are created on the internet. These religions become part of a mythos that heavily web-active youths feel they belong to. These religions may be completely new fabrications of the following. They can also have ties to established religions such as Satanism, Wicca, New Age, etc.

Breaking it down 

No two cases of child exploitation online are the same. The changing sophistication of the technology children can access has made older cases less relevant for comparison today.

What outlets do online child predators use?

Child predators online are the same individuals who would prey on children in any other situation. They use the internet and software as a weapon. A strong parental presence on child-internet sites disables these weapons. Either through privacy controls or the increasingly sophisticated software behind parental controls, parents can take away the power of online child predators with vigilance.

Social media: This can include non-child specific social media like Facebook, Twitter or another. If your child is a teenager, they can be active on social media without violating user policies. In the case of teenagers, the risks are often similar or the same to adults.

However, some children will falsify their age to be allowed onto the platform before the age of minimum requirement. This opens young children up to certain exploit risks. These include interpersonal risks such as inappropriate relationships, chats, and data sharing. It can also include vulnerability to your child’s data and device credentials through phishing scams that are internal to social media or that may harvest emails from the “about me” information of these sites.

Virtual streaming:  A common pastime of many children and young teenagers. Virtual streaming can include live YouTube, TV streaming services like SlingTV, or video game hosting sites like Twitch.tv. Live streaming outlets attract the possibility of more interpersonal relationships. That can be an outlet for would-be child targeting criminology.

Cyber sextortionists: a look at a few cases 

The FBI has kept a record of stand-out cases for the most notorious online sextortionists and child predators. Sextortion is one of the most common and feared crimes against children on the internet. It helps to take an in-depth look at real people who pulled off these types of crimes so we know who the minds are behind the vague statistics.

Cyberbullying may then be intended to hurt and shame or emotionally control peers. It can end with images being sold to porn sites and used as part of criminal marketplaces.

Citing CPO magazine, 2020 era’s most common cyber crimes come in the form of phishing, flood attacks and Potentially Unwanted Software, or PUP.  There is also a prevalent problem with cyberstalkers as of August 2019.

Richard Finkbiner: 46, as of 2019, hails from Brazil, Indiana.  He was sentenced to 40 years in prison for producing child pornography. The FBI’s notes on the Finkbiner case state that he induced several minors to create sexually explicit material for him. Finkbiner used a series of fake social media personas and other web-based platforms to coerce these children into producing sexualized images and videos. Citing CBS News, Finkbiner met the majority of his victims on Omegle. Omegle is a site that offers random free chat sessions with strangers.

This site has a policy that children younger than 13 are not permitted and children younger than 18 are not permitted without a legal guardian’s consent. It’s important to monitor your children on such sites even when they have permission to use them.

Finkbiner exploited teens on Omegle by sending them pre-recorded videos of chat hosts who were behaving sexually. He would film the teens responding to these web camera acts. He threatened them with blackmail by posting the original sexualized films to pornography sites unless they created pornographic materials for his own use. When convicted, Finkbiner had 22k+ videos in his possession.

Tyler Daniel Emineth: 23, hails from Hamilton, Montana. Emineth was sentenced to 18 years in prison for creating child pornography. He used Facebook to exploit numerous minors.

In the Emineth case, young women and girls were targeted through Facebook and solicited for nude photos. Emineth promised payment to some of these children in exchange for the sexualized images. He would then threaten to expose them if they did not record themselves in the middle of sexual acts with other people. Emineth would solicit other people, adults, to meet with these girls at public places to later film their sexual encounters. The case was exposed when one of the solicited adults back out after learning one of Emineth’s victims was only 15.

Emineth fit with the classic profile of an extortionist. During the investigation of his crimes, he sent letters threating contributors to the investigation with death. The fact that he was able to solicit adults to meet some of his targeted children for sexual encounters proves that not only children are vulnerable to online sex crimes. It just happens that children are easier to manipulate in these cases. Children are more afraid of adult authority punishment if they are discovered.

It’s also important to note that Emineth himself was described as “physically an adult but mentally a juvenile”.  Emineth was interviewed by a psychologist during the investigation into his crimes. It was proven that he had severe immaturity for his age.

This juvenility in a convicted sextortionist reveals to us an important detail about predators online. Children may at first mistake them for other children. Dwarfed maturity in online predators may also cause parents to mistake these people for children by their text-based speech patterns. Images can be falsified and credentials forged. This is why it’s important for parents to have a firm grasp of who their child is friends with online. Take caution with any online friendship as interactions on the web between two supposed children may not be as they appear.

Lucas Michael Chansler: This man terrorized near 350 girls. His sextortion reached from the US and Canada all the way to the UK. His ploy was to pose as a teenage boy and feign romantic interest in the girls. Through manipulation, he would provoke the girls to send nude photos. After that, he would wear the girls down, threatening them with exposure if they didn’t keep sending explicit photos.

The FBI profiled Chansler to understand his motives and choices. In this case, Chansler targeted children ages 15 and posed as a child of 15 himself. When interrogated, he stated that he chose the 15-year mark for victims because “older girls wouldn’t fall for that ploy.” 

Luis Mijangos: Mijangos was a sextortion case that used wiretapping and malware to hack into the webcams of the targeted victims_many of whom were minors. Mijangos would record his victims in the act of sex, or showering, or undressing. He would then send his victims copies of the videos. He would threaten to expose his victims if they did not record pornographic material for him.

In this case, Mijangos targeted his victims randomly through a less-advanced phishing attack than those in the 2019-2020 era. The victims downloaded an email attachment entitled “Do you want to see something scary?”

The FBI in its “Sextortion” brochure encourages parents to follow basic safety cautions such as follows: 

• Be informed about child-centric online platforms
• Monitor child internet use time
• Use basic security tools on all computers to detect and avoid malware
• Do NOT open attachments from unfamiliar senders
• Turn off computers and disable or cover webcams when the device is not in use
• Update computer software
• Create strong passwords that legal guardians and parents alone have access to

Indirect sextortion/sexual exploitation through image piracy 

Teenagers often post pictures to the Cloud or share them through other means of digital exchange. The Cloud has unfortunate hack capacities. So, in more complex cases, your teen’s photos of themselves, whether sensitive/sexualized or just of their likeness, can be extracted without even their knowledge. In this case, the child had no contact or existing relationship with the perpetrator, but can still be induced into creating sexual material when they realize they have been compromised by a ghost hacker. Either that or their sensitive images can be leaked to the web without the child ever knowing it took place. This puts the safety of your child at risk even if you are not aware of it.

This is the reason why advanced parental control tools are helpful. Today’s parental control tools have greater monitoring capabilities, allowing you to have full visibility of sites your child visits. If your child is overly active on photo-sharing sites or apps, it may be a good time to give them lessons on image share and save discretion.

Statistical rise of sextortion crimes 

Just how often do sextortion crimes happen in 2019? What statistics can we predict for 2020?

CNBC cited news of a  rise in email-based sextortion cases as of June 2019.  The FBI notes that the complaints about email-based sextortion crimes have risen by as much as 242% since 2018.

In these recent cases, pornographic footage was threatened if a ransom was not paid. This suggests that trends of sextortion crime in the 2019-2020 era are likely to compromise IT systems and exploit families both sexually and financially.

With crimes against children, a home IT system can be exploited through a child’s device. The child’s web or device cam can be exploited to take images of the child or coerce the child into sexually explicit activity. Then, the parent’s credentials or the parent’s finances can be held for ransom through the threat of exposing the child.

Home IT email phishing prevention with parental controls

Some of the major email service providers for private email now provide internal email controls for parents. This keeps your children from opening emails that are phishing attacks. It also prevents them from opening emails that are sent to you that may contain phishing scripts. An example is Google’s built-in Family Link.  

Unique risks created by cyberbullying

While everyone understands the immediate risks of cyberbullying, not everyone realizes there are collateral risks involved. Children who are targeted by cyberbullies and the bullies themselves can expose their targets, themselves, and third parties of children to unique data and privacy risks.

When children are the perpetrators 

The unfortunate reality of cyberbullying is that children are often the perpetrators of these crimes. In this case, the children who instigate these crimes are likely bypassing and effectively hacking their own parents’ controls on their networks.

The children who engage in these crimes are likely to bypass the parental controls their parents install on their computers. Basic controls only provide protection to personal computers and do not protect mobiles when away from the home network.

The profile of a cyberbully 

Who are cyberbullies? What causes a child to go after a peer or classmate online? How complicated do these schemes become?

Cyberbullying among children involves students of all ages who have access to devices, social media, and other social engagement apps or streaming services. These students are as young as elementary school-aged and as old as university students.

Half of all cyberbullies are familiar with their victims. Usually, the bullies will use the modem of the internet as a means of engaging with their victims anonymously. They can use the depersonalization of the web to increase the intensity of their bullying. They also use the anonymous outlet to increase the frequent repetition of their bully attacks.

The psychological profile of a cyberbully is one of a child with unhealthy anger management.

Children engaged in cyberbullying often also are locked in a cycle of substance abuse. They are typically underachievers with low self-esteem who often feel that they are themselves victims of some real or imagined social slights. These children lack social skills and project their negative image onto the children in their networks.

Associated risks of cyberbully behaviors

The risky behavior patterns common to cyberbullies open the bully up to associated privacy risks. This can compound the risk-factors for both the cyberbully and the bullying victim.

A heavy stressor of cyberbullying is the exchange of sexually exploiting images, to cite research by Tennessee Technological University (2014).  This research examined the overlap between the victims of bullying and the bullies themselves. The more often a bullying-victim was the target of image-based abuse, the more likely they were to return that abuse.

The social forum between peers of sexually exploitative exchange can attract a third-party risk. Often, sextortionists pose as a peer of the victim. The heat of the exchange in cyberbullying can give a sextortionist the right vehicle to gain emotional control over the victim.

Again, we must remember that cyberbullies also have the basic profiles of hackers. Children who engage in cyberbullying will bypass rudimentary parental controls placed on them. They will use and download proxy servers and other software to disguise their web behaviors from parental supervision. Being young children often, the cyberbully/hacker may lack sophisticated technical knowledge to adequately hide their deep-web activity from the third-party. This means that the images used so often in cyberbully wars between teens are ripe for advanced-hacker harvests. Cyberbullying may then be intended to hurt and shame or emotionally control peers. It can end with images being sold to porn sites and used as part of criminal marketplaces.

Digital self-harm 

Another trend related to cyberbullying is cyber self-harm. Often, a teen who is already the victim of cyberbullying will use the same toxic network of anonymous peers online to vent frustrations. This becomes a form of digital self-harm. It is dangerous because of the way that cybercriminals can exploit this material to a larger network.

The psychological profile of digital self-harm 

It isn’t as commonly addressed as cyberbullying. Yet, there is a growing problem among minors for digital self-harm.  Children and teens who engage in self-harm on the web can fall into two categories:

Suicidal cyber self-harm 

This is a much more intense form of cyber self-harm. If a parent discovers suicidal ideation, material romanticizing suicide, search history about methods of death, etc., they should seek a physician for their child immediately.

The case of Hannah Smith 

Hannah Smith was a teenager living in Leicestershire, England until her death on August 2, 2013. She committed suicide by hanging. When her grieving father demanded an investigation into her death, it was discovered that she had been the victim of a prolonged case of cyberbullying. The trouble with Hannah Smith’s case was that she was both perpetrator and victim of her own cyberbullying case.

The profile of self-inflicted cyberbullying 

In the case of many children like Hannah Smith, the act of cyberbullying could be an expression of self-hate or a cry for help. These children are often experiencing a severe depressive episode anyway. They are using the web as a means of projecting their self-abuse publicly. Some children will ask hateful questions of themselves, and then answer them in public forums and social media.

Some children may set up fake profiles and then use them to attack themselves on social media. They do this to attract the attention of their friends. Either they will be seeking compliments and validation from their friends, or they will be doing this as a play of popularity. The logic behind it is that they are cool enough to harassed publicly by their peers.

There is also an issue of children using digital self-harm as a means to instigate conflict and gossip among their peers. Some children will use digital self-harm as a means of gauging gossip targeted at them. They will use the response of friends as a barometer for social loyalties. The self-obsession of these instigations is conducive to compounded self-loathing in the teen. If the child’s lashing out is not responded to in a way that satisfies them, it may feed their negative self-image. It may also inspire them to lash out and bully the other children who did not participate in the ruse.

Non-suicidal cyber self-harm

Non-suicidal cyber self-harm is not as intense as cyber suicidal ideation, but it is an urgent issue. Typically, a child who engages in cyber self-harm is using it as an attention-seeking lash out against bullying peers. Children who engage in cyber self-harm often experience corresponding cyberbullying. They are often suffering from a depressive episode at the time of these acts.

Research is evolving about non-suicidal cyber immolation. The mode of cyber self-harm will take place through chat threads, social networking, image-sharing, and search history, citing Cornell University (2012).

Pro self-harm communities 

Children and teens who engage in digital self-harm will seek out communities where they can socialize and vent with peers who do the same. Self-induced cyber self-harm communities fall into two typical groups, though others exist:

Eating disorder communities 

Often anger-inflicted, these communities incite anorexics and bulimics to a more vicious cycle of abuse. These groups are referred to as pro-ana, for anorexics, and pro-mia, for bulimics, citing Jessica Pater and Elizabeth Mynatt, Georgia Tech (2017). 

Cutting communities

Cutting communities are pro-cutting forums that assist children and teens in self-harm. These forums help train children with the right tools and secrets for the most effective cutting methods. These groups fall into two kinds of groupthink patterns. Either they will a) normalize the behavior or b) pathologize it, which means that they will mark it as an act to fuel the cutter’s self-aversion.

Parental control applied to cyberbullying 

Cyberbullying is empowered by a lack of adult supervision. Most violent rashes of cyberbullying crime could be identified, blocked, and stopped by advanced parental control innovation. The problems with cyberbullying control by school boards and parental confrontation stem from the multi-device nature of the abuse. If students are discovered on one social network or app, they will move to a new one. As of 2019, PCMag reports, many parental controls now feature whole-network solutions. These tools empower parents to monitor every device in the house by putting full-stop controls on the home router’s internet access. This is good for blocking hateful spamming content that can jeopardize your child’s mental health if they have been a victim of cyberbullying.

Modern parental control innovation also provides parents with a means for blocking contacts of their children’s social media.

This is a powerful tool for cyberbullying and the third-party risk it creates. If your child is engaged in bullying themselves, this can block them from accessing the peers they may be tormenting. Some parents may find this an easier option than confronting their child on this behavior. Also, if parental controls are in place to block suspicious social media accounts, children who engage in self-harm online lose access to their abusive alter-egos.

The security fall-out from cyberbullying

Whether directed at others or themselves, teens who fall prey to cyberbullying have left the door open to other forms of attack. The cybercriminal that cyberbullying attracts is one of a much different flavor than extortionists and financial scammers. The cybercriminals who engage in communities like an eating disorder community or cutting communities fit within violent-criminal profiles.

These criminals use cyberbullying and cyber self-harm outlets as a way to groom child suicide ideation. They do this to procure torture images and graphic violence images for specific clientele. They may also be interested in grooming children for a religious cult.

Realistic suicide challenge stressors

Cyberbullying often involves suicide ideation. Peers prompt the victims of their bullying to commit suicide in regular statistics of these cases. Often, law enforcement is overwhelmed by these challenges and games. Their origin is difficult to implicate. They spread like wildfire through large and generalized demographics of children.

Many of the target challenges directed at teens online are dangerous but nonfatal, such as the Deodorant Challenge. They are reckless endangering challenges, however, that work their way up to the most dangerous dare. The majority of these asinine challenges are created to provoke children into stunts that should get them more likes and followers.

Teen depression and Blue Whales

The Blue Whale challenge was still making headlines as of January 2019. It sparked up on Russian social media after the suicide death of Rina Palenkova. Social chat rooms lit up rapidly with the catching urban legend about Palenkova’s last days.

Palenkova’s death became a central topic of chat rooms on the Russian social network. Blue whales mystically became associated with the depression ideation culture of these forums. Soon, in the rabid way that social media plays out, children were inciting other children to a set of trials. Those who undertook the “Blue Whale” challenge would be given 50 days to perform 50 tasks. On the last day, the challenger was to take their own life.

Cyberbullying as the legitimate trigger

With cyberbullying, we have a motive to create the most harm possible. We have the double motive of children competing for their peers’ attention. These two things take dark social media rends and exacerbate them.

Phillip Budeikin’s social media cleansing

With the Blue Whale Challenge, in particular, the motive and goal were to extort and kill teenagers through coercion tactics. Budeikin was eventually linked to the suicides after so many of them transpired. Budeikin, a producer of radicalized Occult-based music admitted to his guilt as the creator of the Blue Whale Challenge. The BBC quoted him saying as follows:

There are people and then there is biodegradable waste. I was cleansing our society of such people. Sometimes I start to think that it’s wrong, but in the end, I had the feeling I was doing the right thing.” 

Phillip Budeikin fits multiple type patterns of cybercrime against children. He was 21 at the time so he was a slightly older youth peer. The children engaged in a peer forum and used it via his advanced manipulation to perform self-harm challenges that ended in their death. That pattern of behavior is similar to extortion crimes and typical cyberbullying.

Luring children to virtual cultism 

Heidelburg Journal of Religions on the Internet keeps a close check on those religions and cults that have formed over virtual forums. The research Heidelburg conducts has found that many online religious communities proselytize through games. These are digital and computerized games that target children. They use the community of the games to target children. These games are mixed with confused theological images and radicalized content.

The online games and parodic gospels of virtual religions groom children into joining violent, dangerous networks.

Immersive realities, like virtual reality, and virtual worlds to acclimate players to religious-based violence. In Spain, for example, Muslim women were targeted with games like these to provoke them to radicalized jihad. 

How can this target children? 

Observe patterns in the cyberbullying and cyber self-harm. Images of children that are violent are easily exploited for virtual radicalism. These images can be pirated from children who expose their data through their risky online behaviors in the midst of cyberbullying exchanges.

The motive behind exploiting images from eating disorder communities or cutting communities would be a relational one. Virtual religion and cultism can find some common ground with these groups. Self-harm cults online and virtual religious cults use engagement through the community as a means for emotional-engagement and thought control.

How this manifests in children directly 

Children will be easily groomed into virtual dogma or even to parodic virtual religions. The Slenderman stabbing case is a prime example of web-based proselytization. Two Wisconsin girls, then aged 12, became fanatically obsessed with the Slenderman character from Creepypasta. They believed that they could become proxies to their fictional deity by murdering a peer and classmate. They lured their classmate away from adult supervision at a public park and stabbed their classmate 19 times.

Even though the girl survived, there was a grave fall out to this scenario. The victimized classmate was left with debilitating injuries and trauma. One of the perpetrators will be institutionalized after their prison sentence for 40+ years.

In this case,  the children were not directly groomed by an adult cybercriminal to a virtual religion. Rather, exposure to adult, thematic content was so fanatically digested by these girls that they developed violent ideation and religion around it. This case reveals the ease with which virtual operations can influence children into virtual religions.

How parental controls prevent virtualized indoctrination

Parental controls sabotage the plans of virtualized cults because they take access away from the children themselves. Many bizarre religious cults online are more benign than radicalized Islam or radicalized Satanism/Paganism/Wicca. Parental controls can block certain categories of sites that the algorithm identifies as unsafe for children. Just as with the Slenderman stabbing case, children themselves are often self-proselytizing. Taking the capacity for confusion away from them is the safest way to ensure they stay unassociated with web-based cultism.

Preventing youth cybercrime ring initiation 

No parent wants to think their child might engage in illegal activity. Nevertheless, youth cybercriminal initiation has been on the rise in recent years.

How are youths introduced to cybercrime? 

Recent research into cybercrime rings, such as those who launch phishing campaigns, suggests that cybercriminals are now more like to run in packs. As early as 2016, Paladin conducted research into youth pathways to cybercrime.

The profile of a youth hacker

Youth hackers are typically highly intelligent. They are more often male than female. They are socially awkward but are often networked with peer adolescents of similar interests. They are highly-equipped and savvy about technology. They get self-fulfillment from the challenge and intrigue of complex cybercrime.

Youth hackers will often undermine the severe nature of piracy and copyright violations they engage in online. They see the internet as a place with no adults and no rules. Law is easily bypassed in this space. It’s unlikely that they will be caught committing these crimes because of the high level of anonymity the internet provides.

Where youth cyber gang initiation leads

Cybercrime initiation can be like a gateway drug to more violent, destructive crimes. Children can be manipulated into things they would not normally agree to because of the realistic disconnect on the web. Illegal drug sales, piracy, sexual exploitation, and more can be introduced to even the most mild-mannered teenager with the right exposure.

Most common outlets of 2019-2020 child target cybercrime

Understanding the nuances of online child threats is the start of preventing them. Still, these things evolved at greater speeds each day, with this up-and-coming generation of youth the most web active generation in human history. Because of the research and detection of cybercrime, hackers will often change their patterns. Child target crimes are often much more sensitive than others. That’s why the hackers will need to be more vigilant on the networks they frequent. For 2019 and moving into 2020, what are the most common outlets cybercriminals use to target children?

Cyberbullying is your child’s most common threat 

It would stand to reason that the most likely and common threat to your children comes from the social media rings their peers frequent. You understand now the risks associated with child-to-peer communities online. Still, where are these entanglements most likely to emerge in the 2019-2020 web traffic era?

Instagram

Cyber threats to children are often image extortionary. Instagram is the leading social media outlet for image status exchange. 41% of social media-centric cyberbullying happens on Instagram, citing an aggregation of cyberbully research from Broadband Search. 

Public exposure risks 

Parental controls are not just for home networks. Many public exposure risks exist through school assignments or library projects. How can parents cooperate with the outstanding internet access points their children have?

Library services use library-package parental controls

Many modern libraries are family-oriented hubs. The staff of these libraries are heavily infested in the children who enroll in their social programs. That’s why libraries provide parental control tools within their digital systems. This allows parents to monitor what their children find through the archives. This is important for young children especially.

Parents also have the use of digital filtering with library tools to protect young children from accidentally opening viruses that expose the library to pornography. While everyone has the capacity to make these mistakes, young children are the most susceptible to them. This is a win-win situation for both the library and the parents.

Trends in parental control software

Consumer Advocate has compiled a list of the highest-ranking parental control tools as of October 2019. There are some common defenses each of these tools shares. All of them block pornography. They are equipped to use algorithmic monitoring. This is important because parents will not have to comb through the child’s user data to understand their activity.

Many of these tools are also equipped with location tracking, call tracking, panic buttons, session time limits, site blocking, remote-access, data risk analysis, tamper-proofing, VPN, and automatic alerts.

The logic behind these more sophisticated tools is to keep parents constantly observant and informed even without the child’s knowledge. That way, if your child is using the internet against your rules, you still have the power to keep them safe. Sites, like Omegle, that create a particular risk for children, can be blocked altogether so they cannot explore them at all. This takes the power away from the child predator online because this takes away their means. If there is no access to your child, there is no access to influence them. Data tracking keeps your child’s activity safe from ghost-hackers who are could be fishing for sensitive material without your child’s engagement.

Sophisticated breakthroughs in parental control innovation

As the scams against child-targeted cyber crime continue to employ AI and other sophistication tools, so do parental control developers.

Advance innovations now on the markets

Agnostic to developer brands, emerging advancements appear across the parental control marketplace. As these tools get smarter, their engagement capacity gets smarter. Some common trends in parent engagement include the following:

• Co-parent control: Leading parental control features now have tools that allow parents to share controlled monitoring. Access to the parental control can even be shared with babysitters, and other legal or approved caretakers. 

Closing thoughts

The hardest truth a parent must ever accept is the scenario where they can’t protect their child. Many digital threats of these times go beyond the technical savvy of the average person. That’s why parental controls are so powerful for peace of mind.  A parent can use software and editable tools to protect their child from software and editable tools. Parental controls are at best equalizers. They allow you to keep just as much of a watchful eye on your children as the average hacker can.

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Rachel Brooks

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