The Internet is a wonderful place, at this point it is no surprise to make such a statement, but the Web also includes content and gives access to tools that are not suitable for all ages.
The little ones already they grow up with technology in their hands and children and young people even control devices more and better than their own parents. His journey in the "digital life" is increasingly soon, whether through a smartphone, a tablet or a computer. As with adults, children can spend many hours, too many, in front of those screens, and parents are not in control of what they do with the devices.
To make the use of technology more productive, less dangerous and more fun, born Qustodio, a platform that helps parents to create healthy habits in their children when using tools such as smartphone or tablet. Are you looking for an all-in-one parental control solution? We have been thoroughly testing Qustodio and we tell you our experience with the wide variety of options it offers.
Creating a secure digital environment with Qustodio
Qustodio was born in 2012 in Barcelona with the idea of creating a digital security and welfare platform for families, a tool for protect children in the digital world, not only of inappropriate content, but also as a utility to detect complicated situations such as bullying or online predators. Currently, Qustodio already has more than 2 million users in countries around the world.
As parents, what do we need to use this tool? The experience of starting up Qustodio in our family is tremendously quick and easy. First of all we need to create an account, it can be obtained in less than 1 minute and it is free. Then we are ready to create the profile of our son, in which it is enough to indicate his name, age, sex and avatar; all to identify minors quickly in case we have a large family.
How do we control what happens on our child's device? Installing the Qustodio application on it. The application is available for the main operating systems, both mobile and desktop. We can find it in Android, iOS, Windows, Mac and even for devices Kindle from Amazon.
When installing the application, we log in with the previously created account and indicate if that device is ours (so that the parental control panel is activated) or that of our child. In the latter case, Qustodio asks us for access to the device, something fundamental so that he can monitor what children do with he and we can monitor it from our mobile or from the Qustodio website.
It's that simple: create an account and install the application in the child's terminal. From that moment the supervision is automatically activated and from the parents' devices you can see the activity of the children in real time.
Parental control with Qustodio, what can we do?
These are the characteristics of parental control found in Qustodio:
- It allows block inappropriate content, for example websites with adult content, bets and other sites not suitable for children.
- Application lock and games: we can select which applications we do not want minors to use, or limit their use time each day.
- Control of calls and SMS of smartphones, also being able to block unwanted contacts.
- Social media tracking: we will be able to spend time on the most common social networks, such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and more.
- Geolocation in real time to see the location of the children.
- Function of "panic button" that children can activate to notify us in case of an emergency.
All these functions will be available to us both from the application of Qustodio on the parents' devices, and from their website. In it, as you can see in the images that accompany these lines, we have a activity panel for each of the children.
Through tabbed browsing we have all the activity details, the applications used, the time they have been in them, the browsing history, the social activity, the searches made on Google – even in private browsing -, one click away of its actions, its location…
Absolutely everything is clearly arranged, and of course from our control panel we can establish the “Rules”To limit or control what minors can access.
This is useful, for example, for restrict access to certain websites, as is the case with those with pornographic content, bets, weapons, drugs, etc. What happens when the child accesses them? Simply a message will appear on the screen of your mobile or tablet telling you that the content is blocked, so the page will not load at any time.
An interesting point is that, in addition to this blockage, parents also they will receive an email alert when one of these pages with inappropriate content is detected, and it will also highlight searches with important keywords, such as “bullying”, in order to act on time. Of course, the Qustodio options also allow us to monitor specific websites, both to allow access (and thus avoid false positives), and to block it.
In general, we find that the Qustodio integration is very deep and complete, allowing advanced supervision of children's digital life. In addition, it is appreciated that the interfaces and options are so clear: it is not necessary to have advanced computer skills to use Qustodio.
As I said at the beginning, creating an account in Qustodio has no cost and in its free version it allows us to protect 1 device with limited functions, however we can opt for one of the Premium plans that unlock all functions and start at € 42.95 for a whole year of service to protect up to 5 devices. Ideal for small families and thus be able to cover smartphones, tablets and computers.
Unfortunately, the digital world is not rosy. There are dangers such as online predators, cyberbullying or sexting, and Qustodio is a total solution to create a secure digital environment and instill good habits for children, something fundamental when they are taking their first steps on the Internet.
