We want to applaud Apple for making the iPhone and iPod touch more family-friendly by introducing their parental controls in the 3.0 update. The new settings allow parents to restrict movie, TV show, music, podcast and application access by user age.

The only thing lacking in the parental controls is a way to control what kids see on the Internet, which is of course a much more troublesome source of material inappropriate for kids.

 

 

“Apple has gone a long way toward child-proofing the iPhone with the new parental controls in the iPhone 3.0 software, but those controls apply only to content that Apple itself distributes through iTunes and the App Store. They don’t address the #1 source of objectionable material: the Internet,” said Forrest Collier, CEO of InternetSafety.com.

Child protection on the iPhone can be extended to Internet content by installing a third-party browser that automatically blocks websites in select categories. Safe Eyes Mobile checks requested websites against a massive blacklist of potentially objectionable Web addresses that is updated on a daily basis. It prevents access to pages in the pornography, nudity, sex and tasteless/gross categories by default, but can be customized like all of our solutions.

“If you combine Apple’s parental controls with a browser that blocks pornography and other offensive websites, however, you can completely protect your child from harmful content both online and off,” said Collier.

Filed under: Internet Safety Solutions