Want to keep track on what your kids do on the computer?

There are great discussions these days about parents having no clue on what their kids do on the computer and the Internet; there is the hype about social websites like my space.com, hi5.com facebook.com etc. where basically any person of any age can create a webpage to interact with others, making it easier for cyber predators or pedophiles to target young inexperienced kids.

We as parents have the responsibility to guard and protect our kids from these online predators and find out what they are doing on the web before is too late, I’m not insinuating to police our kids or encage them from their freedom but to know what they are doing on the web and advice or tutor them when we sense possible danger. So, how to monitor them on the computer? Follow these recommendations;

The first line of defense should be to have the computer on an open place like the living room where people is always around, there you can glimpse what you kids are doing once in awhile and participate with them on whatever activity they might be doing, like playing with Google earth etc. I think this is the most effective strategy to build up trust and to teach our children while everyone enjoys the Internet.

What to do when the children want to have the PC on their own room? It’s fine if the kids want to have the pc on their own room probably they just need more privacy to do what they normally do on the computer, but I would take this as a sign that there is something they want to hide from me, so I would take an extra step to investigate that, a key logger records everything a person does on a computer, from programs they use like, Microsoft word, chats, messenger, websites they visit, emails programs like Gmail, yahoo, MSN etc. it takes a screenshot of whatever that person is doing every 1 second if you like to.

Kidlogger (http://www.rohos.com/kid-logger/) is a free program that takes screenshots of the computer screen every 15 minutes, another simple program that records every keyboard stroke is simple python http://sourceforge.net/projects/pykeylogger/ you configure it as you like, there are hundreds of key loggers out there, search the word “keylogger” in Google and you find a lot of info about these programs.

Another thing you can do is to check the history on the browser, internet explorer and Firefox have these features, on internet Explorer is under View>Explorer bar>History and in Firefox is under history>show in sidebar, from there you can check the history of websites entered on that browser.

Knowing as much about computers and the Internet will enable you as a parent to stay a step ahead of dangers your kids might confront online. Knowing the technology and every aspect of it like, most popular social sites, e-mail programs, chat rooms, and search engines will help you to educate and guide your children to better use the Internet. be safe.