Getting the security on the Android phones is a necessity, and Symantec works well on that. The latest service of its, the Norton Safety Minder not only keeps the young users safe but also the parents keep a track of what their kids are browsing or doing on their Android smartphone, to make the usage better and monitor each and every activity of the child which instead helps in making the parent prevent any malware attacks on the phones, and even control what their child can browse and what they cannot.
- The Safety Minder from Norton includes the parental control features which include the web monitoring and blocking of the web pages which the parents don’t want the kids to browse, and feel that it would be inappropriate for their children to open the site.
- Tracking each and every activity of the child, that they perform on the Android phone. Each and every web page which their child is trying to visit, or actually visits is entered as a log with all the information of the time and date when the attempt was made. Not just the internet browsing, but the messaging and the texting in any form through the phone is kept recorded with all the logs, and the search history is also logged.
- The premium version of the service even includes an option for you to choose whom your child can text message, and even check what the child is messaging at what time.
The Norton Online Family Safety Minder app is available as a free download through the Android market, and once you download and install the app you need to open it so that it asks you for the registration, or if you were a member of the online family security website of Norton already, you may just login using the same details. You need to accept to the terms and conditions to run the Safety Minder app. Once you create the account, you need to add children to the family so that you can select which child’s activity needs to be monitored and protected, when you have multiple children using a phone.
While adding the children, you need to enter the Child’s name and the gender, age and select an avatar for the child so that it makes identifying of the child’s profile easier later on.
You need to set a screen name for yourself apart from the child’s name, and have an avatar set for your profile, after the Child’s registration is done. It is helpful when multiple parents are added later on, if you couldn’t find time to monitor the child’s activity and wanted to invite other parents to monitor your child during your absence.
Once the registration of both the parent and child is done, you need to register your Android device with the Norton Safety Minder so that it keeps a track of the activities of that particular phone.
After the registration is done, you need to activate the device administrator in the device so that it controls the usage of the various applications and the usage, and apart from that you need to set which child is going to use the device, so that you can set the options for that particular child.
Once the child or user opens the notification panel, you would see the house rules that are set by the application. This is to let the user know what actions are being taken on the usage – They would say – “Websites that I visit can be monitored” and “Some categories of Web sites are prohibited”. If you have set to prevent the child from opening any social network, it would block the website and let the child know that the site is blocked.
The website of Norton Safety Minder shows the recent alerts about the child activity, all listed in accordance to the time.
The website shows the summary of all the activities that were done on the Android phone by the child. It also shows the websites visited, the time spent and the most visited stuff on the phone.
The web history shows the entire browsing history, whether the page is allowed by the Norton Safety Minder or not, and which website was browsed, along with the date and time details.
Web settings for particular child, where you can select whether to block any particular websites or categories in which all the websites of the category are blocked.
Download Norton Safety Minder app for Android from the Android market from here.
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