Adding More Parental Control To Mobile Phones
from the don't-call-that-person! dept
Whenever conversations come up about giving kids mobile phones, someone (inevitably) has a story about a kid with a mobile phone who spent all their waking hours yakking or texting away, and when the bill finally showed up, it was thousands of dollars. Whether or not those stories really are true, one company is trying to solve this problem by offering much more customizable control for parents whose children have mobile phones. The service would let the parent log into a special website, where they could monitor their child’s mobile phone use. It also gives them a ton of power over how the phone can be used. They can set limited minutes (even to the point where the system will alert the kids 10 or 20 minutes before they run out of time by SMS, email or voice mail), they can limit the times when the phone can be used (no phone use between 8am and 3pm when the kid should be in school, for example) and they can even create a whitelist (family) and blacklist (bad influence, loser ex-significant other) of phone numbers the kids can or cannot call or receive calls from. It will even allow parents to set a special code, so if they have the phone set to only accept calls from whitelisted numbers, and they want to call from a non-whitelisted number they can. It sounds like they put a lot of thought into this service – though, knowing most kids, they’ll figure out how to hack it. As you might imagine, the company is also considering offering the service to corporate finance managers who want to monitor how employees are using their mobile phones.
