Under User Controls, ensure “Password – Use password to restrict purchases” is checked.Go to the Google Play store on your phone and open the Settings menu.Make sure your child can’t go on a virtual shopping spree: Native features Disable paid app purchases without a password If you’ve got any suggestions on how to make smartphones easier and safer for little hands, we’d love to hear them! Hit the comments that follow this article.īelow, we list some of our favorite ways to protect the kidlets. Or, if they have their own smartphone and you’re looking to make it kid-friendly, we can help with that too. Here are a few tips on locking your device down so kids can play without the risk of warping their fragile little mind… and without the risk of them accidentally emailing your boss. K9 Web Protection Browser is free and runs pretty smoothly, but a truly concerned parent can spend an extra $20 a year for a much more powerful, fully-configurable parental control app.If you have young children (or really, even if you don’t) you might have noticed that they’re drawn to smartphones and tablets like moths to a flame. Furthermore until Samsung fixes a redirect function in Android 4.x devices, K9 can't block alternate browsers, or YouTube, and Google Play within the browser. You Get What You Pay For K9 Web Protection Browser (for Android) lacks many standard parental-control features elsewhere, namely the ability to customize a filter per user, or whitelist and blacklist URLs. None of these terms would have would have gotten past McAfee Family Protection Android Edition or Net Nanny 2.0 for Android. Moving one level up, phrases like "abortion methods" and "suicide" yielded normal Google results, and "teabagging” served, well, some explicit images. On the other hand "p0rn" and "b00bs" showed plenty. Search terms like "porn," "poker," and "boobs" turned up 0 search results, while "penis" only served medical links that didn’t contain images. My colleagues and I got a little creative when testing out the filter’s capabilities. It also removes links to "parent-child discussion" topics like abortion, sexuality, and dating. Every time a child tries to load a website, the URL is instantly scanned against K9’s database of blacklisted sites that contain pornography, hate speech, violence, gambling and more than 55 other categories. Inflexible Filter How does the K9 Browser know what to block? According to a product manager, the Android browser is hooked up to the same intelligent, cloud-based filter that powers the K9 Web Protection Browser for desktop users-that’s more than 70 million data points. Loading pages isn’t as smooth or fast as Chrome or Opera, but it does the job. It looks and feels just like Firefox, including tabbing, plug-in support, and bookmarking, but replaces the orange color scheme with Bluecoat's blue. To do this, you have to temporarily disable a native setting that blocks non-Play downloads-the most common channel for Android malware.Ī Foxy Browser K9 is built on top of the full-featured Firefox Mobile browser. The biggest problem I saw during setup was that in order to install an additional "Install Helper," which prevents K9 from being killed by the task manager, you have to download a file outside Google Play. Simply download, sign up, and allow K9 to be a Device Admin so your child can't uninstall the app. Simple Setup-Except One ProblemPractically no user effort is required by this app. I tested this on a Samsung Galaxy S II running Android 2.3.5. This isn't K9's fault, but it'd benefit potential users to include a warning in the app's description. However a K9 spokesman assured that Samsung is fixing this in their next update. Samsung apparently broke the redirection functionality in later flavors of Android, so you can't block other browsers, the YouTube app, or Google Play app on the device. While testing the app on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus I learned that Android devices running Android 4.X couldn't support key features: blocking other browsers, YouTube, and Google Play. It doesn't perform up to par on newer devices, though this is an issue with the Android operating system rather than K9.
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