TopChoiceReviews Blog

One of the newest ways child predators are targeting kids is through online gaming. Online computer gaming is very popular amongst children and teens. Most popular game consoles such as XBOX and Playstation also offer a way to connect to the internet and play various games online with other gamers. Playstation 3 also has integrated text and voice chat as well as the ability to download photos. Child predators are now taking advantage of the online gaming community by posing as a child in an online chat room where children look for gaming teammates. Once they gain trust of the child, they will typically attempt to communicate with them through another method such as email or though instant messaging programs such as MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger and try take the relationship further. There have already been several investigations with online gaming predators.

If your child participates in online gaming, the best thing you as a parent can do  is to educate your children to watch out for strangers online asking them about things other than gaming, especially personal things such as where they live, etc… to tell them to go away and stop communicating with them. We also recommend that you take a proactive approach and consider installing parental control or parental monitoring software which will allow you to monitor and control your child’s email activity, chat activity, websites visited, etc…

If you would like more information about parental control and parental monitoring software, see our parental control software review site where we gather, compare, and review the most popular parental control and parental monitoring software available.

Myspace recently announced that they will now allow parents to submit their child’s email address so when they attempt to create an account using the email address, it will prevent them from creating the account. I really don’t understand the logic behind this. A new email can be created in less than 5 minutes and most teenagers are aware of this. It’s great that they are trying to do something, but I don’t see it being very effective. Any thoughts…?

Let’s face it, children love to play around on computers. They are curious, energetic little creatures. However, there are some things that they just shouldn’t be getting into such as: email, chat programs, personal finances, business related programs, etc… Fortunately there is software our there which allow you to disable various programs on your family computer. You can even take it a step further and disable various programs during various times, for various users. There are a few good ones out there which give you this control, of which you can find at our parental control software site. Whether it’s protecting important email from being deleted, or preventing your kids from chatting with strangers, be comforted knowing that there is a way to control this.

I have actually heard a horror story from a friend who allowed her 11 year old  access to her home office computer, in which she stored important business data.  He  ended up  deleting some Quickbooks data as well as thoroughly messing up various other things. Of course, she probably shouldnt have given him access to her home office PC, but if she used some sort of parental control software with program management capabilities, it would have never happened. Lesson learned.