Children browsing the web on their own can quickly run into inappropriate content, but the best way to approach this remains a big debate.
When they’re young, do you sit next to them as they browse? Turn on any internet-filtering controls offered by your home broadband provider? Or try to find web browsing software that has similar features?
And then what do you do for any mobile devices that your children are using? Internet safety company Metacert is hoping to help here with a new app called Olly. Well, its full name is Olly Safe Browser with Parental Controls.
It’s aimed at home and school usage alike, although we’re not sure how many children are browsing on iPhones at school.
“You decide on the level of blocking. Perfect for families and schools looking for a safe browser that’s fast, reliable and feature-rich, with NO in-app advertising,” promises its App Store listing.
The app aims to block adult content, adding new sites and pages to its blocklist as it finds them. Metacert suggests that parents disable Safari – the browser that comes with the iPhone – to ensure Olly is the only browser available to use.
As parents, we’re still genuinely unsure where we stand on this kind of software – our own children are still young enough that if they’re surfing the web, we’re there beside them. Also it’s more likely to be on a tablet than a smartphone.
By the time they’re old enough to have their own phones, we’d hope to have had the necessary talks with them about appropriate internet usage. Maybe there’s an in-between stage where they might be browsing a bit on our iPhones in idle minutes, but…
Well, what do you think? Does Olly and technology like it appeal? Let us know your views by posting a comment. And if you want to try it, Olly Safe Browser with Parental Controls is a free download for iPhone on Apple’s App Store.
Strangely, the only sort-of competitor that we’ve written about was the work of cleaning-products brand Cif (yes, the stuff you squirt on your surfaces). Its Cif the Web iPad browser promised to have “removed all traces of grime, muck and dirt from the web, leaving a cleaner, safer internet”.
Buy Apps Playground’s 100 Best iPad Apps of 2013 e-book – £1.99 from Apple’s iBooks Store