GetParentalControls.org

I recently watched a panel discussion entitled, “Kids & The Wide Open Wireless World,” presented at the Family Online Safety Institute conference in Washington, D.C.  On the panel were executives from the CTIA, the GSM Association, Sprint and Verizon.   I was impressed by the rapid progress that’s being made in developing parental controls for mobile phones.  Verizon has a number of parental control features, including content filtering for the web, usage controls, and a really cool web-based GPS locator called Chaperone.  Using a web-based interface, Chaperone lets you see where your child is, and can be set to send you alerts if your child’s phone moves outside pre-defined “safe zones.”   What I’d really like to see is automatic web-archiving of all your kid’s text messages for parents to review.

Here’s a story from Good Morning America this week about the trend in mobile parental controls: 

Now new software called Web Safety gives parents unprecedented control over their teens’ cell phones.  ”Parents can have control of being notified when certain words show up in a text message,” Andy Kahan, crime victims director for Houston told “Good Morning America.”  The software can alert parents to suggestive language such as “hook up” or “meet up.”  GPS technology in cell phones can also allow parents to keep track of a teen’s whereabouts and to create “dead zones” where texting can be disabled.  Some phones also allow texting to be disabled in a moving car and alerts parents whenever the cell phone is traveling faster than a certain speed.